What Got You Here Really Might Not Get You There
One of the hardest things about growing a business is accepting that the things that made you successful at one stage can become the very things holding you back at the next.
In the early years, being involved in everything can be essential.
You know every client. You make every decision. You solve every problem. You know exactly what’s happening because, frankly, half the time you’re the person doing it.
That works.
Until it doesn’t.
As the business grows, that same hands-on approach can turn the owner into the biggest bottleneck in the place.
Suddenly everybody needs your approval.
Every difficult decision lands on your desk.
You complain that nobody takes enough responsibility, while simultaneously making sure nobody can make a meaningful decision without you.
Have I ever done that?
Of course not.
Moving swiftly on…
The truth is, most of us have.
Letting go sounds terribly sensible when you’re telling somebody else to do it. It becomes slightly less attractive when it involves something you care about, something you built or something you’re convinced nobody else will do quite as well as you.
And perhaps they won’t do it exactly as you would.
Sometimes that’s the point.
The Business Changes, Which Means Your Role Has to Change Too
This is where things get uncomfortable.
Business owners are often quite enthusiastic about the business changing.
We’re slightly less enthusiastic about the possibility that we might need to change with it.
As a business develops, there are usually some fairly predictable warning signs:
- Everything still comes through the owner. You’re desperate to work more strategically, but you’re still involved in decisions that somebody else could, & should, be making.
- People have jobs rather than clear accountabilities. Their roles have evolved organically over years until everybody is doing bits of everything & nobody is entirely sure who owns the outcome.
- You’ve got services, products or processes that exist largely because they’ve always existed. Nobody has stopped to ask whether they still make commercial sense.
- Everyone is incredibly busy. Unfortunately, being busy & moving the business forward are not the same thing. I’ve tested this extensively.
- You keep adding things without removing anything. A new initiative, another priority, another meeting, another project. Eventually the business starts resembling one of those cupboards where you open the door & everything falls on your head.
At some point, you have to look at what the business genuinely needs now.
Not what it needed five years ago.
And not what suits the owner because that’s the bit they happen to enjoy doing.
Letting Go of Things You Created Is Bloody Hard
This was probably one of the bigger lessons for me over the years.
When you’ve created something, invested in it, talked about it, sold it & believed in it, stopping can feel horribly like admitting you were wrong.
But those aren’t the same thing.
Something can have been absolutely right at the time & no longer be right now.
Markets change.
Clients change.
Technology changes.
People change.
You change.
Holding on to something simply because it once worked isn’t loyalty. Sometimes it’s stubbornness dressed up in a nice jacket.
And yes, I’m perfectly capable of stubbornness.
I prefer to call it “commitment to the original strategy”, but apparently other people have different terminology.
The same thing happens with roles.
Somebody may have been brilliant for the business at one stage & then found that the role grew beyond their capability, their interest or their capacity.
That doesn’t make them a bad person.
It doesn’t erase their contribution.
But it does mean there needs to be a conversation.
Avoiding that conversation because you care about somebody rarely improves things.
Usually it just makes the eventual conversation harder.
In Family Businesses, Change Comes with Extra Luggage
This is particularly true in family businesses because you’re rarely dealing with just the business.
You’ve got the family.
You’ve got ownership.
And you’ve got the business itself.
Those three circles overlap, but they don’t always want the same thing.
The business might need a particular person to step into a leadership role.
The family might feel somebody else “deserves a turn”.
The owners might be thinking about succession, dividends or protecting what they’ve built.
And suddenly what should have been a reasonably straightforward business decision comes with 30 years of family history attached.
That’s why clarity matters.
A person’s role in the business is not the same as their value in the family.
Ownership is not the same as employment.
Being Mum’s favourite isn’t technically a job description.
Although I suspect a few family businesses have tested that structure.
As businesses evolve, those distinctions become more important, not less.
Not Every New Idea Deserves to Become a Strategy
Now, before I make change sound like the answer to everything, there’s another trap.
Business owners love new ideas.
Particularly Visionaries.
A new service! A new market! A new opportunity! A new partnership!
Excellent.
Who’s actually going to do it?
Silence.
Ask me how I know.
There is a difference between evolving your business & constantly distracting it.
Sometimes something really does need to change.
Sometimes you simply need to execute the plan you already have.
That means asking some fairly blunt questions:
- Is this a genuine opportunity, or am I bored?
- Does this solve a real customer problem?
- Do we have the capability to deliver it properly?
- What are we going to stop doing to make room for it?
- Is this commercially sensible, or have I fallen in love with the idea?
- Have we actually given the current strategy enough time & focus to work?
That last one is particularly annoying.
Because sometimes the answer isn’t a new strategy.
It’s discipline.
Much less exciting.
Your Team Hasn’t Been Inside Your Head for Six Months
Another lesson I definitely mastered immediately & never got wrong…
Communicating change.
As business owners, we can spend months thinking about something.
We’ve considered every angle. We’ve talked it through with people. We’ve changed our minds three times. We’ve finally arrived at a decision.
Then we tell the team on Wednesday morning & wonder why they haven’t completely embraced it by lunchtime.
Well, they’ve had four hours.
You’ve had six months.
When something changes, people want to know:
- What is changing?
- Why are we changing it?
- What does it mean for me?
- What does it mean for my team?
- What are we going to stop doing?
- Who is responsible for what?
- What happens next?
That isn’t resistance.
That’s people trying to understand what the hell is going on.
Clarity creates confidence.
I’ve always believed that, but I’d be lying if I said I’d always delivered the clarity as quickly as I should have.
Sometimes we assume people know more than they do because we’ve been living & breathing the issue ourselves.
They haven’t.
They need context, clarity & the opportunity to ask questions.
Preferably before the rumour mill creates its own version.
You Still Have to Run the Current Business While Changing It
This is probably the least glamorous part of evolution.
While you’re creating the next version of the business, the current version doesn’t politely stop & wait.
Clients still need looking after.
People still need managing.
Cash still needs collecting.
Problems still appear.
The phone still rings.
And apparently suppliers remain stubbornly committed to being paid.
Rude, really.
This is where lots of businesses get themselves into trouble.
They become so excited about the new thing that they neglect the thing currently paying the bills.
Or they expect the team to somehow absorb another major project on top of everything they were already doing.
Something has to give.
Changing a business takes capacity.
It takes decisions.
And it requires being honest about what you’re going to stop, pause, delegate or do differently.
Otherwise, “transformation” becomes a very sophisticated way of exhausting everybody.
Twenty-one Years Taught Me That You Never Actually Finish
If there’s one thing I took from looking back over the past 21 years, it was this:
You never really arrive.
There isn’t a point where you finally create the perfect structure, find the perfect people, develop the perfect service offering & think, “Brilliant. We’ll just keep this exactly the same for the next 20 years.”
Or if there is, I haven’t found it.
Businesses evolve because the world around them evolves.
The people inside them evolve too.
And the owner certainly should.
That doesn’t mean chasing every idea or changing things for the sake of it.
It means staying curious enough to ask whether what worked before is still what you need now.
Today, our journey includes Business Action & Sherwood Foundry.
Twenty-one years ago, I couldn’t have told you that’s where we’d end up.
I’m quite glad I couldn’t.
It would have taken all the fun out of it.
So what are you hanging on to?
As we celebrated 21 years, I found myself thinking less about everything we had done & more about what we had learnt along the way.
And perhaps the most useful question wasn’t:
“What should we do next?”
It was:
“What are we hanging on to that no longer belongs in the next version of the business?”
That might be a:
- role that no longer makes sense
- service that has had its day
- structure you’ve outgrown
- decision you insist on keeping
- person who needs a different seat
- process that everybody hates but nobody has questioned
- or an owner who needs to get the hell out of the way occasionally
Yes. That last one included me too.
Twenty-one years in business didn’t teach me how to get everything right.
Far from it.
It taught me to get more comfortable noticing when something wasn’t right, admitting it & doing something about it.
Eventually.
Sometimes after a little kicking & screaming.
We celebrated 21 years this week, & I’m enormously proud of that.
But we didn’t get here by standing still.
And I have absolutely no intention of starting now.
