Jackson Howell is the founder of Riselabs. He worked with Underpin Consultants on the positioning of his relaunch, and this month he wrote me the most generous testimonial I have ever received. The story is one of a builder in transition. I wanted people to hear it in his words, so the questions are mine, asked after the fact, and every quoted word is exactly as he wrote it.
By Lewis English
Jackson used to build things. It was the first thing you learned about him, and it was what made him good at what he did.
“I have pulled my business in more directions than I would comfortably admit to,” he told me, “Not a string of different companies, but one business, yanked left and right over the years.”
He told me how an idea would excite him and the machinery would follow: the website, the copy, the LinkedIn page, all the materials. “Then I would stand back and wait for people to arrive. No one did. So I would move on to the next idea and do it all again.”
That is not a lack of ability and the issue is far more common in talented founders than anyone admits. What Jackson needed was a good idea, of which he had lots, and then someone to ensure he built the rebuild properly.
Standing in the desert
I described this idea of building with no long-term plan as standing next to a billboard in the desert and waiting for the train to arrive. Jackson took this idea and used it harder than I ever have. “I was productive,” he said, “But I was almost never proactive. I kept building things nobody had told me they wanted.”
So as part of Underpin’s Business Consultancy work, Jackson began his new journey with me, through a mix of questions, planning, back-and-forths, and guidance I helped Jackson help himself. How? Through focus on productivity over activity, because active work moves you towards a paying customer. “Once he had said it,” Jackson wrote, “I could not unsee it.”
Believing what you can do.
I told Jackson after the event that he was ready before he believed he was. By starting at the beginning, and learning to make quicker decisions that compounded, mainly by focusing on the customer and not on what he thought was good.
When we met he told me he could not move forward until he found the perfect sentence to describe what he does, one flawless line after which everything would click.
“You are looking for a golden sentence that does not exist,” I told him. So we worked on small steps that built to something with real foundations, positive momentum and gave him a driving force.
What he did next is the part that matters, and it was all his: he believed it, and he moved step-by-step. “Lewis was right. The perfectionism was just a nicer-looking way of not acting.”
The homework, as Jackson termed it, was conversations. Go and talk to people, ask open questions, listen for what they struggle with. It is the simplest homework in the world and the bravest, and he went. “That felt deeply uncomfortable, which is exactly why I needed to do it. Those conversations taught me more in an hour than a month of building ever had.”
His enthusiasm, the engine of the whole enterprise, sometimes ran ahead of the delivery, so we gave that a name too. Ice picks on flat ground: the right tool, in the wrong place, but just waiting for its moment.
We kept the vision broad; kept the first thing Jackson sold narrow enough to hand over. “That discipline has saved me from my own enthusiasm more times than I can count.”
Then there is the part he says he valued most, which I will let him say whole: “I have ADHD. I turn up to sessions foggy sometimes, especially if a client has thrown something at me an hour before. Lewis never treated that as a failure. He treated the way my mind works as something to understand and use, not something to apologise for. That made me honest with him in a way I am rarely honest with myself.”
How someone’s mind works is information. Jackson builds with his, and it shows in everything Riselabs is becoming. As a consultant, I don’t wish for what could be, I collaborate with what exists, and deliver what’s possible.
Beyond the transition
And where has the transition left him? Exactly where he took himself: “I stopped waiting by the billboard. I got out and had the conversations. I found plain language for what I do that the right people understood straight away, and I won real proposals from real referrals before I had built any of the marketing machinery I used to hide behind. When I notice I am producing something that looks like progress but has no next action and nobody to take it, I hear Lewis in my head: is this activity, or is this theatre?”
Jackson did the frightening part, every time. My job was to make sure he could see what he already had.
He put the ending better than I could, so it’s his.
“Certainty, it turns out, comes after you act, not before. I would have told you the opposite a year ago. Lewis is the reason I know the difference.”
