Delphos

11/06/2026

All you need to be remarkable is for someone to tell someone else about you.

What does remarkable look like for a five-person firm? Not flashy. Not expensive. Usually just unusually quick to respond. Genuinely interested in getting it right. The kind of business where you speak to the same person twice.

Think about the last time a supplier genuinely surprised you. Not with a discount. With something personal. A call to check in. A fix offered before you’d noticed the problem. A note that made it clear they actually remembered who you were.

That’s the stuff people describe at dinner. That’s what gets you recommended without asking.

Big businesses spend enormous sums trying to replicate it. Small businesses can do it. The advantage is right there.

The question isn’t whether you can afford to be remarkable. It’s whether you can afford not to be.

When did a supplier last genuinely delight you?

10/06/2026

I’m behind on my plan. Properly behind. Not in an 'I’ll pull an all-nighter to catch up' kind of way. I mean weeks behind where I said I’d be by now.

Here’s why.

Two client projects on Bubble have run long. They’re good projects. We’ve been doing genuinely interesting things, including integrating Google’s route optimisation API, which used to live exclusively on expensive logistics platforms and now sits inside a NoCode build. I’ve also been working alongside a brilliant designer on another job. And not forgetting and rebuilding an app that was nearly finished from the ground up.

I’ve learned more in those few months than I’d learned in the year before.

None of that was in the plan. All of it was worth it in the long run.

The funny thing is, the time off from DelphosWorks has made DelphosWorks even better. New ideas. Sharper thinking on the UI, which is now bloody good. The version that ships will be better than the version I’d have shipped on time.

If you run a small consultancy and you’re juggling more tools than jobs, the beta is still open. There’s a form on the website if you fancy a look.

Sometimes the detour is the path.

An easy way to quote and work with your clients.

09/06/2026

When people talk about my home city, Stoke-on-Trent, it's a city stuck in sepia.

The bottle ovens. Smokey scenes of men in waistcoats and flat caps, and older women standing, arms folded, on their front doorstep. The glory days. Honestly? I love all of that. You need to know where you came from.

But for people outside the city, it is a passing interest. After all, every post-industrial city has its own story, and why should we be any different?

A piece in Daily Focus (link in the comments) makes a genuinely interesting argument. The ceramics sector isn't a heritage exhibit. It's an industry that produces components for fuel cells, hydrogen systems, aerospace, armoured vehicles, medical imaging, and implants. The SpaceX Starship is riddled with ceramics and wouldn’t get off the ground with it.

It’s the stuff that the UK's future green economy cannot be built without.

I’ve heard references linking the city to Silicon Valley before. If you look at the history of that particular part of California, there are parallels in the years before the tech boom.

But as the author says, it is the wrong way of framing it. Silicon Valley is all about moving fast, breaking things, and out-of-this-world valuations for companies that have yet to make a dime.

That's got nothing to do with a sector built on generational craft, massive physical infrastructure, and multi-decade investment.

What about the recent £120 million government support package that's now on the table? Is there reason to hope?

Forgive my scepticism: we've been promised things before. Governments have a habit of discovering Stoke when it's politically convenient and forgetting us shortly after. To be brutally honest, it’s down to us and nobody else.

Regardless of the money, everything we need is here, along with a generation that chose to stay and build something. We need to focus more on the future rather than the past.

What's your idea for turning Stoke into a tech powerhouse?

08/06/2026

Most small business owners are already paying for Copilot. They just don't know it.

If you're on a Microsoft 365 subscription, Copilot is either already there or one toggle away. Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams. It sits inside the tools you're probably using every day and quietly makes them considerably more useful.

Where it earns its keep: summarising long email threads, drafting replies, turning a set of bullet points into a Word document, pulling insights from an Excel spreadsheet without having to remember which formula does what. For businesses already living in the Microsoft ecosystem, it's the easiest AI win available.

Where it falls short: anything outside that ecosystem. It runs on the same technology as ChatGPT, just pointed directly at your working day. Brilliant inside Microsoft tools. Less useful the moment you step outside them. Ask it to do something creative or deeply analytical outside of a document context, and it's not the strongest in the room. It's built for productivity, not for thinking.

The pro tip here is simple: if you're on Microsoft 365, check what you already have access to before subscribing to anything else.

Are you using Copilot yet, or is it just sitting there gathering digital dust?

05/06/2026

ChatGPT is the Swiss Army knife of AI tools.

Writing, brainstorming, coding, building study guides, and generating marketing copy. It handles a remarkable range of tasks. The multimodal stuff, text, images, and file uploads, is genuinely useful for small business owners juggling a lot.

Where it earns its keep: creative work, first drafts, automating repetitive writing tasks. If you need something on the page quickly, this is your tool.

Where it falls short: it's not connected to real-time information by default, so anything time-sensitive needs a pinch of salt. It can also be a bit agreeable. Ask it a leading question, and it'll often tell you what you want to hear rather than what's actually true. Worth knowing.

In a nutshell? Use it to automate and to speed things up, not just answer questions.

Do you use ChatGPT for work or just for the odd experiment?

04/06/2026

Claude is the quiet one who reads everything properly before answering.

Long documents. Detailed contracts. Complex technical drafts. Nuanced writing that actually sounds like a human wrote it. If the task involves a lot of text and genuine reasoning, Claude is where you start.

Where it earns its keep: deep reading, long-form work, anything where tone and accuracy genuinely matter. It handles up to 200k tokens in a single go, so you can hand it an entire report and it'll read it.

Where it falls short: real-time information. Claude's knowledge has a cutoff, so it's not the tool for "what's happening right now." It's also less strong on quick creative sparks and viral content.

Think of it as the careful, thorough colleague who also happens to be able to run your computer while you make a brew.

There is something else worth mentioning. Claude Code and Cowork bring Claude out of the browser and onto your actual computer. It navigates your screen, clicks, types, opens apps, and runs tools directly on your machine without a complicated setup. Cowork runs as a desktop app with file system access, scheduled recurring tasks, and a plugin marketplace. This turns Claude from a chat window into something that quietly gets work done in the background and hands it back when it's finished.

What's the most complex task you'd hand off if you could?

03/06/2026

Grok is the one for people who live on X/Twitter.

Real-time social commentary, tracking what's trending, writing with personality and wit. It's sharp, punchy, and connected to the live internet feed in a way the others aren't. For content creators and marketers who need to react quickly, it's genuinely useful.

Where it earns its keep: viral post ideas, reading the room on current events, and anything that needs a bit of edge and humour. It moves fast.

Where it falls short: depth. Grok is built for quick reactions, not careful analysis. Ask it to review a contract or produce a detailed business plan, and you're probably in the wrong tool. It's also very much in the X ecosystem, so if that's not your world, the value drops off noticeably.

So it’s worth knowing it exists, even if you never use it. Not every tool is for every business.

Do you track trending topics as part of your content strategy?

02/06/2026

Perplexity is the one that shows its working.

Every answer comes with cited sources. Every claim is traceable. If you need to know something is actually true before you act on it, this is where you go.

Where it earns its keep: research, fact-checking, niche topics, anything where accuracy matters more than speed. Brilliant for quick, reliable summaries with references you can actually follow up on.

Where it falls short: creativity and depth of reasoning. Perplexity finds and summarises information well. It doesn't write nuanced copy, think through complex problems, or produce long-form work you'd actually use directly. It's a research assistant, not a writer.

For small business owners doing market research, checking statistics before using them in a proposal, or just wanting to know if something is actually true: Perplexity is quietly one of the most useful tools in the box.

Do you check your AI-generated facts before you publish them?

01/06/2026

Five AI tools. One simple question: which one?

None of them does everything well. All of them do something brilliantly.

ChatGPT for creative work and coding. Grok for real-time social commentary. Gemini, if you live in Google Workspace. Claude for anything long, nuanced, or complex. Perplexity when you need verified facts with sources.

The mistake most small business owners make is picking one and expecting it to cover everything. That's not how this works. Think of them like tradespeople. You wouldn't ask your electrician to tile the bathroom.

Try one this week on a real task. See what happens.

Which one are you actually using?

Over the next five days, I’ll post a bit more about each…