There comes a point in the growth of many businesses when something doesn’t quite add up.
When you started out, you did everything. You won the work, kept the customers happy, worried about the cash, sorted out the staff and probably changed the printer toner when it ran out. You worked ridiculous hours because the inner entrepreneur drove you to. And there simply wasn’t anybody else.
But that was years ago.
Today, your business might have fifty people, a hundred people or considerably more. You’ve got managers. Maybe even more directors. You’ve invested in systems, software, reporting and processes. You know far more about what is happening in the business than you did ten years ago and, in most areas, you’ve got better people running it.
So why are you still so bloody busy?
More to the point, why does it sometimes feel as though the bigger the business gets, the harder you have to work to keep it all moving?
Of course a bigger business will be more complex. More people, more customers and more money inevitably create more things that can go wrong. But growth is also supposed to buy capability. Every manager you recruit, every system you introduce and every process you improve should, in theory at least, make the business a little less dependent on you.
And yet, for a lot of owners, it doesn’t seem to work like that.
You Keep Making the Business Better
Perhaps Operations has been struggling, so you recruit a really good Operations Manager. Six months later, things are demonstrably better. Performance improves, the department is better managed and you congratulate yourself on a good appointment.
Finance needs strengthening, so you bring in someone better. The numbers arrive earlier, credit control improves and suddenly you have information you’ve spent years wishing you had.
Sales gets a CRM. HR gets a new system. You introduce KPIs. Dashboards. Better meetings. More structure. Maybe another layer of management.
And none of those decisions was necessarily wrong.
In fact, each may have done exactly what you wanted it to do.
The strange thing is that your own life still hasn’t become noticeably easier.
You’re still being pulled into problems. Still resolving disagreements. Still getting copied into emails you don’t particularly want to receive. Still finding yourself in conversations that begin with, “Can I just get your view on something?”
Perhaps that’s because we’ve become very good at improving the individual parts of businesses, but we spend rather less time thinking about what happens between them.
You can make Sales better at selling and Operations better at operating without making Sales and Operations any better at working together. Finance can introduce perfectly sensible controls that make complete sense from a financial perspective but create problems somewhere else. Customer Service can be doing a perfectly good job dealing with customers while repeatedly having to explain promises made earlier in the journey that the business is struggling to deliver.
Nobody has necessarily done anything wrong and that’s what makes these problems so difficult to spot. Each part of the business can be performing reasonably well while the business itself still feels much harder to run than it should.
The problem is in the gaps.
Who’s Holding the Couplings Together?
Imagine your business as a train.
Over the years you’ve spent a lot of money improving the locomotive and the carriages. One has better people. Another has better systems. The machinery has been uprated and another has better information. Like any good train, it’s all travelling in roughly the same direction and, viewed individually, each unit is in pretty good shape.
But the couplings between those individual carriages are weak and prone to failure.
So somebody has to hold them together. And very often, that somebody is the owner.
You know enough about Sales to understand why they made the promise. You know enough about Operations to understand why they can’t deliver it quite as promised. You understand why Finance is saying no, but you also know why Commercial needs a yes. You know the history, the personalities, the customers and the compromises that have been made along the journey.
So when two perfectly reasonable parts of the business diverge, you’re uniquely equipped to sort it out. And you do. Again. And again. And after a while, you become incredibly good at it.
That’s where the real trap begins, because firefighting can feel remarkably like effective management. A problem lands on your desk at nine o’clock and by lunchtime you’ve sorted it. Everyone gets back to work, the customer is happy and another minor disaster has been avoided.
Job done.
Except the coupling is still broken.
You’ve solved the problem that appeared in the gap. You haven’t fixed the gap itself.
Tomorrow it might be a different customer, a different manager or a slightly different set of circumstances, but sooner or later another problem will emerge from exactly the same place. And because everyone knows you’re exceptionally good at sorting these things out, there’s very little pressure on the business to learn how to resolve them without you.
That’s how firefighting becomes learned behaviour. Not just for the owner, but for everyone around them. The business doesn’t stop working because its internal connections are weak. It keeps moving because somebody has become extraordinarily good at holding them together.
No wonder they’re tired.
Is This Just an Owner-Operator Thing?
No.
For ease, I’m using an owner who has built a business which has seen solid growth success as a prime example.
But I have seen exactly this problem played out in £100m+ businesses, led by an MD/CEO who reports to shareholders. Focusing on building great departments whilst neglecting to attend to the friction and operational gaps between them is a leadership omission familiar to all kinds of businesses.
Stop Fixing the Problem
So what do you do about it?
I’d start with something incredibly simple.
For a couple of weeks, keep a note of every occasion when something reaches you that you don’t think should really have needed your involvement.
Don’t change anything yet. Don’t launch a transformation programme. Don’t buy another piece of software and, for God’s sake, don’t create another dashboard.
Just write it down.
A disagreement between two managers. A customer problem that’s somehow travelled through three departments before arriving with you. A decision nobody seems comfortable making. Something that hasn’t been done because everyone thought somebody else was doing it.
Then, when you’ve got a reasonable list, don’t ask:
“Who screwed up?”
Ask:
“Why did this need me?”
That question takes you somewhere much more useful.
Perhaps you’ve identified that nobody genuinely owns a particular outcome. Perhaps authority exists on an organisation chart but the person supposedly holding it doesn’t believe they’re allowed to use it. Perhaps two managers have targets that make perfect sense individually but pull the business in opposite directions. Perhaps vital information simply doesn’t cross from one part of the business to another.
Then look in the mirror. Perhaps everyone has simply become used to the owner sorting it out. Or, the owner has deliberately maintained control over an area which is slowing the business down; forcing staff to stop and break ranks, when they could perfectly well have resolved it themselves.
There’s another question worth asking too.
What would have happened if I hadn’t intervened?
That’s potentially uncomfortable, because occasionally the answer will be that nothing catastrophic would have happened at all. It might have taken longer. Or not. Somebody might have made a different decision to the one you would have made. Or not. Two managers might even have had to sit down together and resolve something themselves. Which may just have made them both better colleagues.
Owners can become so accustomed to stepping in that they sometimes rescue the business before it actually needs rescuing.
The final question is the one that turns diagnosis into improvement:
What needs to change so this doesn’t need me next time?
Notice the wording.
Not, “How can I stop this happening again?”
The people on either side of the gap need to understand why it exists and take responsibility for closing it.
Follow the Job
If the same kind of problem keeps appearing, pick a real example and follow it through the business from beginning to end.
Don’t ask each department whether its processes work. They’ll probably tell you they do, and they may well be right. Follow the actual job.
What did the customer ask for? What did Sales understand? What did they promise? What information moved across to the next person? What did that person think they were supposed to do? Where did somebody have to chase, clarify, interpret, correct, authorise or rescue something?
Those little moments are incredibly revealing.
They’re also where dashboards and departmental KPIs often tell you very little. The numbers may tell you that Sales is performing and Operations is performing. They don’t necessarily tell you how much effort is being expended in the gap between them and what damage that might be causing to your margin.
Because if you’re the person constantly filling that gap, your business may have become dependent on something you never consciously intended to provide.
You. And the gaps aren’t just exhausting. They’re often expensive.
You’ve spent years adding people, systems and capability to make your business better. Most of those investments probably worked.
Perhaps it’s time to spend a little less time looking at the carriages and a little more time looking at what connects them.
Because if you’re still running alongside the train holding everything together, another shiny new carriage probably isn’t the answer.
Fix the coupling.
About Gerald Price
Gerald Price is a business change consultant and interim managing director specialising in business turnarounds, operational improvement and commercial performance, especially within the waste and recycling industry.
Having worked with operators across the sector, he regularly writes about leadership, strategy, waste policy and the commercial realities facing UK waste businesses.
More articles and insights can be found at www.gpcp.co.uk and https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraldprice/
