NEW – The ACES System®

The ACES System® is the culmination of reading and summarising over 500 business books (over 25 years), writing over 40 books including 10 best-selling and award-winning Concise Advice titles, and training over 20,000 people.

It’s an unique business skills typology and self-improvement product – for individuals and companies.

You are able to assess challenges in a well-balanced way and work out the simplest, most effective way to proceed.

You care about developing business in a sustainable way and are good at getting done what needs to be done.

You are naturally inclined to communicate effectively and don’t need to be persuaded to do it.

You have a rare combination of being able to invent ideas and see their strategic application.

What We Do

Expert Advice / Sleeping Lion have a suite of training, educational and advisory products to suit all business needs and resources.

B Corp

We are delighted to have become a certified B Corp.

Our most challenging problems cannot be solved by governments and charities alone. By harnessing the power of business, B Corps commit to positively affect all their stakeholders – all the people they interact with and the planet, of course.

For our part, we have changed our company Articles of Association to verify that we commit to having a material positive impact on both society and the environment through our business and operations.

CREATE. EDUCATE. DONATE.

This includes pledging 5% of our revenue every year to charitable causes, as well as a continuing commitment to helping people through education and pro bono work.

Spotlight on The Sustainable Business Book

How are your Sustainability/ESG efforts going?

Everyone we speak to is saying Sustainability (or ESG) is top of their business agenda, but in most cases action appears limited. We appreciate many are struggling to get to grips with how to create an effective action plan, which is why we wrote The Sustainable Business Book and developed The PLANET System®.

The book and system are informed by a large amount of research, reading and consulting over the past six years. We have also been through the complete process of B Corp accreditation ourselves, which has helped to shine a light on our own business and make sure that we practice what we preach.

The PLANET System®

All of The PLANET System® products are designed to help organisations self reflect on their current status and move to action.

PLANET stands for Panic, Learn, Agree, Navigate, Enact, Tell.

  • PLANET Basic is a free 30 question self-audit which generates an instant report.
  • PLANET Learn gives you access to over 60 educational PDFs.
  • PLANET Pro starts with a more comprehensive self-audit and gives you access to the full learning, improvement and communication platform.
  • PLANET Bespoke includes any extra support and training you need.

Our Other Books

The Concise Advice series was invented by Kevin Duncan and his publisher. It now contains over 50 books, 10 of them written by Kevin, Sarah and Rosie. Unlike most business books that are too long and padded out with too much material, these books take the full wisdom of wide-ranging business reading and reduces concepts down to their pithy minimum, typically on one spread. This allows the time-pressed executive to grasp ideas at speed and put them into practice straightaway.

The handy pocketbook format is ideal for training, note-taking and idea generation on the go. With their highly visual format and minimal copy, the books have a wide international appeal and have been translated into over 20 languages. Sales to date are around the 200,000 mark. Grab a hard copy, or a digital one, use them for team sessions, look at the training, or ask for an in-person session.

NEW: Stop, Think, Challenge

Sustainability Employee Engagement Workshop

In conjunction with The Sustainable Business Book + The PLANET System®, we have started running our Stop, Think, Challenge – employee engagement workshops. The interactive workshops encourage and empower employees to think and behave differently – leading to a happier, healthier, and more sustainable company culture. It all starts with a simple mantra: Stop, Think and Challenge – is there a better way of doing this?

Our Other Training Programmes

Each of the 10 business books has its own training programme. Plus there are four more blended workshops that combine the best of two books, in different combinations. A dozen schemes make up the full set.

Every training topic is the full package. All attendees receive the book(s) relevant to the topic, plus a full set of charts and supporting notes. Each book has a supporting blog with videos, podcasts and articles. The topics are available in a range of formats, including in-person, online, all-day and bite-size versions.

Between us, we have run thousands of sessions and trained over 20,000 people, so the formats are proven to work, and the satisfaction scores are always high.

Who We Are

Kevin Duncan

Kevin is a business adviser, marketing expert, motivational speaker and author.

He has written twenty books, which have sold over 250,000 copies. They have been voted Telegraph Business Club Book of the Week, WHSmith Book of the Month, Foyles Book of the Month, nominated for CMI Management Book of the Year, and translated into over a dozen languages. He has been voted Best Speaker at a number of conferences.

After 20 years in advertising and direct marketing, he has spent the last twenty years as an independent troubleshooter, advising companies on how to improve.

Sarah Duncan

Sarah is a business advisor who now specialises in Sustainability (ESG).

She has been in business for over 30 years – starting with luxury hotels, then moving through private club and spa development in Asia, to setting up her own consultancy, Sleeping Lion (now part of Expert Advice), in 2005. 

She wrote The Ethical Business Book in 2019, and co-wrote The Sustainable Business Book in 2013. She has also successfully completed a Business Sustainability Management course at University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and Circular Economy course with Delft University of Technology. 

She provides independent Sustainability advice, consultancy, training and communication support.

Rosie Duncan

With over 13 years of experience across 40 brands, Rosie has worked in all corners of the marketing industry, including creative agencies, media agencies, production companies, digital agencies and media owners. 

She was one half of one of the first female creative pairs in a media agency. She has 19 industry awards to her name, one of which is the world-renowned Young Cannes Lions Award – winning Silver – which was the first time the UK won a place in its 20-year history. 

She has been a non-exec director of a production company, a top biller in creative partnerships at Metro newspaper, and worked in partnership with Google.

Our Business Library

The Expert Advice products represent over 60 years of business experience.

The engine that drives all the thinking is our Business Library: Greatest Hits – probably the world’s biggest free business library, which summarises over 450 books.

This has been a labour of love for 20 years. Over 20 million words read, with all the books summarized on one page. Categories span leadership, behavioural economics, ethical strategy, creativity, innovation and much more.