Most service companies start the same way: a great practitioner opens shop and sells their own time—hairdressers, trainers, dentists, therapists, lawyers. That works… until it doesn’t. Quality depends on the founder; hiring “clones” leads to uneven results and micromanagement; SOPs multiply; and the business becomes a mini-bureaucracy. In this episode, I explain why the “be the best and do it all yourself” approach traps you—and how to scale without wrecking your brand.

We walk through the five most common growth models (rent-a-chair, senior-junior-novice ladders, HQ services platform, affiliate/license, and “big fish + aux team”)—what they do well and where they stall. Then I lay out a practical move from practice to platform: productize outcomes (not just services), define roles and tiers, keep marketing/sales centralized, and build continuity revenue (memberships, cohorts, retail) while letting intrapreneurs grow under your brand. Finally, we add leverage backstage with AI—intake, plan drafting, comms, QA—so your team spends more time on human moments and outcomes.

If you’re stuck between being the best in town and working 70-hour weeks, this is your path out: a platform where good people can do great work—and your brand gets stronger every time they do.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Canada’s tax problem isn’t just slow phones at the CRA—it’s a century of bolt-on rules that made filing confusing, subjective, and expensive to administer.

A new review found CRA contact centres gave accurate answers only 17% of the time during the 2025 tax season window, echoing long-standing issues flagged by earlier audits (including millions of dropped and blocked calls).

This complicated tax system creates unnecessary bureaucracy, wasted money, unpaid taxes, and a subjective audit process that means you can pay more (or less) taxes depending on how well your auditor slept the night before.

Hiring more agents won’t fix a tax law that’s impossible to interpret. Simpler rules will.

In this episode, I sketch a path to simpler, fairer, faster taxes. First, a quick history lesson on why we have income taxes, and how they became a Frankenstein's monster of laws that no one can understand. This will show us that the problem is getting worse, and will keep getting worse until we have a major system overhaul. Then I'll get into solutions.

I explore proven options from abroad:

Pre-populated / return-free filing (pioneered by Denmark; now used in most OECD countries) to slash time, phone calls, and errors—already being piloted in Quebec for simple returns.

Flatter, broader bases with minimal carve-outs (think Estonia’s ultra-simple system) and NZ’s broad-base/low-rate GST—models that raise revenue with less friction.

Withholding-as-final for straightforward T4 earners, so most people don’t file at all unless their situation is complex—borrowing design cues from the Nordics.

Look, nobody wants to talk about tax until they have to. But when they do - and they have to every year - they hate everything about our tax system. It creates unnecessary frustration and anger. Nobody wants to deal with the CRA, and nobody wants to work for the CRA either. Why would they?

Many people who don't pay taxes do it out of frustration - they just give up. They're not evil; they're just overwhelmed. Tax filings have become a game.

I’m not anti-tax; I’m anti-waste. My companies happily pay millions of dollars in corporate taxes annually. Its employees add another 1M in income taxes to our society, and you can add HST on top of all of it.

What I want is less money burned collecting taxes and more money spent on services. If Canadians want better healthcare, safer streets, and a clearer deal with citizens, we should push for tax simplification, not just bigger call centres.

Sources:

CRA call centres: 17% accuracy (Feb–May 2025); prior audits on access/accuracy. Investment Executive+1

Canada’s income tax history (1917 “temporary” tax). The Canadian Encyclopedia

Provincial/territorial corporate tax—CRA administers most; exceptions Quebec & Alberta. Canada.ca

Pre-populated returns (Denmark origin; 28 OECD countries). Tax Policy Center

Quebec simplified / pre-filled return pilot (2025 filing for 2024 year).

Our schools were built to make dependable factory workers: bells, compliance, one right answer. That model made sense in 1900—but the factory is gone and the incentives that shaped “industrial education” are still with us. In this episode, I argue for bringing back a liberal education—not as nostalgia, but as the most practical toolkit for the Augmentation Age.

We trace how mass urbanization and child labor concerns led to school as factory—rewarding smart conformists while sidelining creativity, judgment, and inquiry. Then we rebuild the core: logic and critical thinking (to separate signal from noise), rhetoric and communication (to persuade with clarity), the scientific method and basic statistics (to test claims), plus philosophy/ethics, history/civics, literature/art, languages, media literacy, and durable numeracy. The aim isn’t more facts—AI holds those—it’s better questions, better decisions, and better action.

I share why curricula can’t keep up with tool stacks, how AI shifts value from memorization to judgment, and where entrepreneurs can step in—micro-schools, cohort courses, and company “finishing schools” that teach by doing. We’ll also talk about the difference between “your truth” and “the truth,” why long-term thinking matters more than ever, and how to start a DIY liberal education at home or at work with simple practices that produce public, real-world artifacts.

Bottom line: the Industrial Age is over. To thrive now, we need thinkers who can reason, communicate, and lead—and that’s exactly what a liberal education builds.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Your business grows to the level of your leadership and shrinks to the level of your systems. That gap—between your ceiling and your floor—is the roller coaster. The highs feel amazing; the lows can be lethal. In this episode, I show you how to smooth the ride and tilt the whole line up and to the right.

First, we raise the ceiling. You’ll learn how to focus your effort where it matters most: buying back your time from low-value tasks, concentrating on high-leverage work like offers, sales, and partnerships, and practicing consistent self-leadership. I’ll walk through using The Golden Hour—a protected daily block to move one meaningful growth task forward—plus simple ways to partner smarter and make better decisions faster.

Then we raise the floor. We’ll stabilize delivery by teaching changes before we make them, documenting the essentials with quick, practical SOPs, and keeping 90% of operations on the proven playbook while reserving 10% for controlled experiments. You’ll also hear how to set a single primary decision-maker for day-to-day operations with clear escalation rules, so the business keeps running when you’re not in the room.

You won’t get off the roller coaster—but you can change the pattern from one step forward/one back to three forward/one back. Manage yourself first, then lead the team. Make your current “best day” the standard, raise it, and repeat.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

You don’t need every skill right now—you need the right skill for the stage you’re in. In this episode, I map the journey from Founder → Farmer → Tinker → Chief and show you the two keystone skills that unlock growth at each step, plus quick drills you can run this week.

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• Founder: It’s you against friction. The superpowers are resilience and work ethic—shipping V1s, selling before perfecting, and turning chaos into cash. I share daily habits that keep you moving when everything feels uphill.
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• Farmer: Consistency beats heroics. Here the wins come from focus and a practice mindset. We install a simple weekly scorecard (traffic → leads → show → close → ARPU → churn), build 10-minute SOPs, and kill “new idea whiplash” with a monthly change window.
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• Tinker: Your machine runs; now you protect attention and capital. The keys are an investor mindset and patience—delegating <$100/hr work, measuring Effective Hourly Rate, testing small, and only scaling what beats baseline.
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• Chief: At scale, outcomes are powered by people. Become a connector who goes first—over-introducing, sharing platform, and compounding goodwill. We’ll add simple rituals like “5-Intro Friday” and a give-first calendar.
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You’ll leave with a field guide to identify your stage, the two skills that matter most right now, and a 30-day plan to practice them. As a bonus, I’ll point you to templates (scorecard, SOP checklist, EHR audit, and intro scripts) so you can start today.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

You can build the best product in your category and still fall behind. Why? Because the market doesn’t reward “best”—it rewards best at business. In this episode, I unpack the pattern I’ve seen in conversations with very smart founders: they perfect the thing, but neglect the system that sells the thing.

We start with the two brains of your business:

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3. Product/Delivery drives retention.
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7. Marketing & Sales drive attention and acquisition.
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9. Being great at #1 is necessary—but insufficient in a noisy, novelty-driven world where people discover the loud before the great.
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Then we dig into three traps that smart people fall into:

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• The Technician’s Curse: When numbers dip, you “improve the product” instead of the pipeline (offer → traffic → show → close). We’ll install a simple weekly scorecard and fix the bottleneck first.
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• The Projection Trap: Assuming customers and staff think like you do. We replace assumptions with customer interviews, plain-English messaging, and clear “definitions of done.”
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• The “I’ll Figure It Out” Fallacy: Brains and hustle aren’t enough without context and reps. Borrow them—via mentors, playbooks, and proven scripts—so you make right moves faster.
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Finally, we make you best at business: choose a focused market, sharpen your promise and proof, show your mechanism, and adopt a weekly operating cadence—one growth action every morning, one bottlenecked metric every week, one small test at a time.

You’ll leave with a playbook to turn smart into scale—and the three actions to run this week so your best product finally wins.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

Ever “improved” your business and watched revenue dip? This episode is about the Tinker phase—when a little success gives you a little freedom…and you accidentally starve the golden goose that got you here. I unpack the three ways owners drag healthy businesses down:

1. Fiddling for “better.” Endless tweaks to offers, pricing, scripts, and schedules without evidence. Fix: install a change discipline—a monthly change window, small A/B tests, a simple decision log, and a weekly dashboard (leads, show/close rate, ARPU, churn, CSAT).
2. Neglect via distraction. A shiny side project steals your best hours while the core engine slows. Fix: a Minimum Care Plan—a daily Owner’s Power Hour (one growth action before anything else), a crisp scorecard cadence, 10-minute SOPs for recurring tasks, and one Primary-in-Command with clear escalation thresholds.
3. Blowing it up. Panic leads to firing staff, scrapping models, or rebranding from scratch. Fix: a 30–60–90 recovery—stabilize, repair what worked, then improve surgically (one test at a time).

You’ll leave with a practical cadence to keep speed, protect consistency, and grow without self-sabotage—plus three quick actions to run this week: schedule a monthly change window, add a daily Power Hour, and pick one metric to protect every Friday.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/

What was the last nonfiction book you read—and what did you do with it the week after? Books are great for ideas and inspiration, but business results come from guided action. In this episode, I trace how business books evolved—from gatekept publishing to self-published “book-as-business-card”—and why AI now lets anyone draft a passable book in hours. As Jim Rohn put it: don’t let your learning lead to knowledge; let your learning lead to action.

Enter bots. AI agents can turn a single idea into a step-by-step plan: bite-size tasks, checklists, quizzes, role-plays, even “office hours” on demand. They follow a proven teaching arc—I do, we do, you do—so you practice, get feedback, and actually ship. Books still win at narrative and worldview; bots win at behavior change.

I’ll show where creators are already selling bots (not just books or courses), when to use each format, and a simple playbook to convert one chapter into a 7-day action bot. Then I’ll invite you to try my Mentor GPT—built on the Simple Six framework—so you can feel the difference between reading and doing.

Connect with Chris Cooper:

Website - https://businessisgood.com/