What I set out to do with Secret Sauce was to create the world's first on-demand strategy product. It's a physical hot sauce that you as a customer buy, it offers you access to me as and when you need it. But like any good product, it's got an expiry date: you've got three months to use it or it's gone.

The sauce is an exceptional hot sauce. It's intentionally designed as a hot sauce because it promotes the release of dopamine and endorphins. The price tag is premium. It's the most expensive hot sauce you'll buy.

I don't believe that people intentionally abuse your time. But I can't stop myself, I want to know the idea. So I have to find a way to marry my personal attributes with my business in a way that we both move forward together.

The person who's buying the service needs to understand that the problem they're paying that person to solve has a monetary value to their business. We should be pricing the work based on solving the problem, not the time it takes to get there.

Authenticity is a word that gets bandied around quite a lot, but it really is important and I do stand by it, being true to your intentions is critical and people understand that. People respect it when you are. 

I start by understanding the values set of the leaders or the founder because their values are going to be brought into that business, whether they like it or not. Being real about your behaviours is critical because otherwise values are just aspirations.

Once someone's had a positive experience, the likelihood of them transferring that to someone else is actually quite high. If you're building products, brands, communications, whatever that ecosystem looks like, finding ways to ensure that you are reflecting optimism in everything that you do, will enable you to stand out.

The first step is to do an audit. I'd really encourage entrepreneurs, business leaders, to get their teams together and spend some time asking some questions, doing some preparation. That really sits across three core areas and it's a question of where optimism lives in these three areas.

The audit needs to be looked at in the context of the business's performance, by understanding the end-to-end journey, we're able to pinpoint where there might be breakages, and what optimisations or simplifications we can make that can yield bigger impacts.

We are architects of the futures that we want to create. Optimism is our means to doing that. Optimism will provide us the tools to achieve those futures and certainly respond to challenges that will no doubt present themselves along the way.