Welcome and why I'm starting again, more deliberately
A short note about why I’ve changed how I show up and why this is the new home for my writing.
I’ve been writing intermittently for years. Blog posts on the Sooth Consulting website, the occasional LinkedIn article, a guest piece here and there. The intermittent part is the problem. I’d write a piece, post it, watch it land, and then six weeks would pass before I wrote the next one. That’s not enough to build any kind of relationship with readers, and it’s not enough to genuinely sharpen my own thinking either.
So I’m starting again, more deliberately. One post a week, give or take. Customer service operations, the strategy and the messy realities, in plain language. No clickbait. No “10 secrets” listicles. No AI-generated filler. Just clear thinking from someone who’s been in the room and sometimes as an in-house director, sometimes as a consultant, increasingly both.
While I was at it, I simplified everything else.
The Sooth Consulting website is gone. The Sooth LinkedIn company page is gone. A diagnostic tool I’d built and that nobody had ever completed is gone. What remains is simpler:
This Substack, where I’ll write
My LinkedIn profile, rewritten to reflect what I actually do
A personal domain (markjadams.co.uk) that points here
The legal entity, Sooth Consulting Ltd, still exists, it’s just the company my work is invoiced through. But the brand people meet, follow, and hire is me.
The lesson, restated for myself as much as anyone: complication is rarely strategy. It’s usually accumulation. When you’re not sure whether something is earning its place, it usually isn’t.
A small irony I’ve been sitting with: I’ve spent twenty-plus years helping businesses simplify their customer service operations. My own setup was quietly the opposite. The decision to fix it has been overdue for at least a year. If you’ve ever recognised the same dynamic in your own business; the proliferation of tools, channels, processes, and brand artefacts that nobody quite remembers approving then that’s the conversation I want to have here.
The first proper piece is the 5-Pillar Service Operations Health Check - a self-assessment for founders, COOs, and service leaders to work through honestly in twenty minutes. Free, ungated, and structured around the five things I most often see going wrong. It’s the natural starting point for what I’ll write here.
If you’d like to follow along, subscribing is free and I’m not going to spam you. Roughly one post a week. Sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.
Onwards.