About
Who built this, and why
I spent twenty years building a tax consultancy, from a few thousand in turnover to a seven-figure turnover, and then I stepped back from it, which turned out to be harder than any of the growing. Before that I answered a tax helpline. If you want to learn what people actually need, sit on the end of a phone all day while they tell you what they think they need. The question they ask is almost never the one they have.
That stayed with me. Most unsolved problems I have met since, in my own business and on the boards and senior teams I work with now, were not hard problems. They were good answers to the wrong question, or the right question asked with half the facts. The expensive part of strategy is working out which tool, in what order, and what you would need to know before you bothered.
So I built the shelf I wish I had had. Ninety-two frameworks, each traced back to whoever first put it on paper, each honest about when it will waste your afternoon, with a worked example you could recognise and the critiques the textbooks skip. Playbooks that put them in order for the decisions that come round every year, written the way I actually run them in the room. Patterns that name the shape a business is in before anyone reaches for a tool. All of it free to read, and the blank sheets free to use.
What I do now
Beyond Amazing is my coaching and governance practice. I work with owners, boards and senior teams on the decisions that do not fit in a spreadsheet: who decides what, how a business passes from one pair of hands to the next, what a planning day is actually for. I sit on one board as a non-executive, which keeps me honest about how advice lands when it is your name on the accounts.
My first book, The Leader with Resolve, came out in October 2026. It is about the discipline that pressure reveals. This library is the practical shelf beside it: the thinking tools, with my notes on when each one earns its keep.
I work from Devon, and I answer my own email.
What to do with this
Start with whatever is in front of you. If it is one of the decisions on the home page, the playbook will tell you which frameworks to reach for and in what order. If it is not, tell the site what is in front of you, in a sentence or two, and it will point you at the three tools worth reading first and the homework to do before you run any of them. Or go to the shelves and read the two lines at the top of any entry before you read the rest: what it is for, and when to leave it alone. If an entry has you wrong, or the shelf is missing something you reach for, tell me.
Peter Gladdish