400 five-star reviews. Here is what they taught me about why startups fail
Last week, my business, Leadership Communication Group, became the UK’s most reviewed communication training company. Four hundred five-star Google reviews. More than any other provider in the country, including firms that have been operating for over a decade.
I am not telling you that to impress you. I’m telling you because the pattern behind those reviews is the same pattern I see destroying promising startups every single year, and almost nobody is talking about it.
The pattern is this. The idea is brilliant, the product works, the founder is smart, driven, and genuinely believes in what they are building.
But they cannot get the room.
I have been in enough pitch rooms, boardrooms, and training sessions over the past three years to say this with confidence. The founders who lose are rarely losing on product. They are losing on communication. And they do not know it, because nobody has ever told them that clearly.
Arriving in London from Milan at twelve years old with no English, I had to figure out very quickly how to make people understand me, trust me, and take me seriously. That experience shaped everything I have built since.
Before any of this, I was a delivery driver. Before that, a sprinter. Two-time national champion. The discipline that sport gave me, the ability to perform under pressure and recover fast, is the same discipline I now teach to founders, executives, and leadership teams across the UK and internationally.
I didn’t set out to build a training company – I set out to solve a problem I kept seeing in the rooms I sat in. Brilliant people shrinking at the moment it mattered most. A founder in front of an investor who built something extraordinary but couldn’t seem to transfer the belief they had in it. A senior manager who knew more than anyone in the room but let someone louder take the credit. A team leader trying to inspire people through a restructure and coming across as uncertain when they needed to project calm.
These are not confidence problems in the way most people understand confidence. They are communication problems. And they are costing companies money, deals, and people every single day.
Over 20,000 people have come through our programmes. The clients include NatWest, Coutts, Shell, the Financial Times, King’s College London, and the London School of Economics. One client used what we built with them to support a three-hundred-million-pound fundraiser. This is what happens when communication is treated as a strategic priority rather than an afterthought.
The startup world has a specific version of this problem. Most founders are told to focus on product, on traction, on the numbers. Communication gets treated as the thing you sort out when everything else is working. A pitch coach here. A presentation skills workshop there.
That is the wrong order.
The founders who consistently close rounds are not always the ones with the best products. They are the ones who can walk into a room and make you feel the problem before they describe the solution.
They can hold an investor’s attention through the hard questions, speak about uncertainty without sounding uncertain and leave a meeting making the person they spoke to feel genuinely understood rather than sold to.
That is presence. And presence is not something you are born with. It is something you build.
I wrote a book about this called Unmute Yourself. I appeared on The Apprentice in 2025. But the four hundred reviews matter more to me than either of those things, because they represent four hundred separate moments where someone walked into a room, and it went differently than it had before.
Four hundred people who pitched and closed. That presented and got the promotion. Who stood on a stage and meant it. Who stopped shrinking at the moment it mattered most.
The average business takes five years to get one hundred Google reviews. We have four hundred. Not because we are the loudest or the most visible. Because the outcome is consistently real.
So here’s my message to founders: if you are building something and the room keeps falling away from you, stop assuming it’s only the product. Stop assuming it is the timing, the investor, or the market. Start asking whether the person delivering the message is as good as the message itself.
The startup that wins is not always the one with the best idea. It is the one where the founder makes you feel, in the room, on a call, in thirty seconds at a networking event, that this is the one that matters.
That is a skill and like 99% of skills, it can be built. And if you are serious about what you are building, it might be the most important investment you make this year.
