I spend quite a lot of time writing and talking about businesses. Usually other people’s businesses. What they’re doing well, what they’re getting wrong, what I think is changing and, occasionally, why something that everyone seems to accept as perfectly normal makes absolutely no sense to me.
What I don’t talk about very often is what I actually do.
That’s partly deliberate. I’ve never particularly liked the LinkedIn approach where every observation about business eventually turns into a slightly tortured reason why you should hire the person who wrote it. But there’s a problem at the other extreme too. If you never explain how you work with businesses, you can’t really complain if people don’t know.
So, I’ve decided I can explain it in three words.
Fix. Change. Advise.
And the important thing is that getting outside help doesn’t have to mean making a big thing of it.
Fix
Most businesses don’t call somebody like me because they’ve conducted a detailed analysis and identified the root cause of a particular organisational problem.
They call because something hurts.
Maybe margins have taken a dive. Cash is tighter than it should be. Sales have slowed. Productivity has fallen. A department isn’t performing. The management team isn’t working particularly well together. The business has grown quickly and yet everything suddenly seems more chaotic than it used to.
Those things matter. But they’re symptoms, and one of the most expensive mistakes a business can make is assuming that the place where a problem becomes visible must also be the place where the problem originates.
Tell me your sales team isn’t performing and I’ll want to know what “not performing” actually means. Is volume down? Is margin down? Are you losing customers? Are existing customers buying less? Has the market changed? Are your prices wrong? Are your salespeople actually being given something customers want to buy?
Tell me your costs are too high and I’ll probably ask: compared with what? Suggest that a particular service is profitable and I’ll want to know how you’ve worked that out. State that you need another vehicle and there’s a fair chance I’ll be asking what the existing ones are doing all day.
It can be bloody annoying. But questioning until I get to the root cause is probably one of the most valuable things I bring into a business.
Now, experience doesn’t automatically give you answers. If anything, one of the things experience has taught me is to be suspicious of people who arrive with answers too quickly. Experience teaches you which questions need answering before anyone starts prescribing solutions.
Businesses accumulate assumptions. Somebody says something in a meeting. Everyone nods. It gets repeated at the next meeting. Six months later nobody can quite remember where it came from, but it’s become something “we know”.
Sometimes it’s true. Sometimes it stopped being true three years ago. And sometimes it was never true in the first place.
That’s why, when I’m asked to fix something, my first job is usually diagnosis. Spend time in the business. Talk to the people doing the work as well as the people managing it. Look at the numbers. Follow things through. Keep asking questions until what is actually happening starts to become clear.
Because if you diagnose the wrong problem correctly, you can implement the wrong solution extremely efficiently.
Fixing something doesn’t necessarily mean a huge turnaround programme either. Sometimes it might. But sometimes a business has one particular function, process or commercial problem that needs attention. Get in, work out what’s wrong, fix it and get out again.
Change
Change is slightly different because a business doesn’t have to be failing before it needs to change. In fact, some of the businesses most in need of change are successful ones.
A company that has grown from £3 million to £10 million might still be trying to operate with the management structure, systems and habits that worked perfectly well when it was a £3 million company. The owner might want to take the next step but knows that the business, in its current state, isn’t capable of getting there. There might be an acquisition to integrate, a management team to build, costs to take out, systems to improve or an operation that simply needs to become much more efficient.
Sometimes things are broken. Sometimes they just need to become better.
And there’s an important distinction between knowing that something needs to change and having the capacity to change it.
Owners and management teams aren’t stupid. Quite often, they already know what needs doing. The problem is that they’re also trying to run the business. Monday morning arrives, customers start calling, machines break down, people don’t turn up, somebody needs an urgent decision and suddenly that transformation project everyone agreed was the number-one priority is being pushed into next week.
Again.
That’s when my involvement can be completely different. Rather than a short intervention to solve a particular problem, I might work inside the business for six months or a year. Not producing a report explaining what everybody else ought to do, but helping the business actually do it. That could be in a ‘Change Director’ role created to deliver the transformation, or occupying the MD hotseat to devise and lead the changes from the front.
And questioning still matters.
Why are we changing? What are we actually trying to achieve? What assumptions are sitting underneath the business case? What happens if one of those assumptions turns out to be wrong? Are we solving tomorrow’s problem or rebuilding yesterday’s business slightly more efficiently?
It’s far too easy to become very good at delivering a change that shouldn’t have been made in the first place.
Whose advice?
There is another dimension to my ‘Change’ work which I don’t think gets talked about very much. Translating, sorting and assessing advice.
You see, businesses already have lots of advisers.
They have accountants, lawyers, bankers, planning consultants, technical specialists and any number of other people who know far more about their particular discipline than I ever will. And that’s exactly as it should be.
But somebody still has to make sense of their perspectives and join the pieces together.
A lawyer can tell you about the legal implications of a decision. An accountant can explain its financial or tax implications. A planning specialist can explain what’s possible within the planning system. A regulator or planning authority will quite properly approach an issue from its own perspective.
Somebody still has to ask: what are the trade-offs and what does all of this mean for the business?
I’ve often found myself sitting somewhere in the middle of those relationships, helping an owner or management team understand the different perspectives, making sure the advisers understand the operational and commercial reality of the business, asking questions and eventually helping turn a collection of specialist advice into a practical business decision.
I’m not there to be the accountant, lawyer or planning consultant.
I’m there to help make sure the business gets the best from them.
Advise
And then there are businesses where nothing particularly needs fixing and nobody needs somebody turning up every morning to change everything.
Sometimes what an owner needs is simply another brain around the table.
There are limitations to being the person at the top of a business that don’t get discussed very often, the riskiest being that you can’t necessarily say everything you’re thinking.
You might wonder whether an investment still makes sense. Whether you’ve got the right management team. Whether you should buy a competitor. Sell part of the business. Open another site. Close one. Borrow money. Stop doing something you’ve done for twenty years. Or perhaps start thinking about how, one day, the business might operate without you.
They aren’t necessarily decisions. Sometimes they’re barely even ideas.
But say them to the wrong person inside the business and suddenly you’ve set hares running everywhere.
There is considerable value in having someone with no skin in the game with whom you can think out loud. Someone experienced enough to understand what you’re talking about, independent enough to disagree with you and sufficiently detached from the day-to-day to give you a frank view, even if it isn’t the view you were hoping for.
You don’t have to agree with me. But you should expect me to tell you when I think you’re wrong.
Again, questioning is a huge part of that relationship: Why? How do we know? What happens if that isn’t true anymore? What aren’t we considering? What would we do differently if we were starting this business today?
And occasionally the simplest, most irritating question of all: Why are you still doing this?
Businesses need people focused on the immediate. Your management team will quite rightly be thinking about tomorrow. As the owner or MD, you’re probably spending your days trying to look further ahead. Next month. Next quarter.
But who is thinking about next year? Who is thinking about 2030?
The closer you are to running a business, the harder it can be to get far enough away from it to see where it’s going. That’s not a criticism of management. It’s one of the consequences of management. Operational responsibility has a gravitational pull towards whatever needs dealing with next.
Sometimes an experienced outsider can provide some of that distance.
You can call that person an adviser, a Non-Executive Director, a Chairman or something else entirely. The title is a distant second to what the relationship actually achieves.
And perhaps this is where the grey hair earns its keep.
Age doesn’t automatically make anybody wise. I’ve met enough older idiots to be fairly confident about that. But experience does mean you’ve seen decisions play out before. You’ve seen apparently brilliant ideas fail when executed. You’ve seen businesses worry enormously about things that ultimately don’t matter, while ignoring innocuous little decisions that eventually became extremely expensive.
That doesn’t give me the ability to predict the future. But it does give me rather more questions to ask about it.
Different businesses need different things
So that’s what Fix. Change. Advise. means to me.
Sometimes there’s a specific problem and you need somebody to get underneath it, work out what’s actually happening and help fix it.
Sometimes the business needs to change and you need somebody alongside you or leading your team, for a period, to help make that change happen.
And sometimes things are going pretty well, but you’d value an experienced, independent and occasionally irritating voice around the table to challenge the thinking, ask the questions and help you work out what comes next.
Those are very different relationships, which don’t all need a grand consulting project, a lengthy proposal and an army of people turning up with PowerPoint presentations.
Sometimes you just need somebody to come in, look at the thing that’s been driving you mad for the last six months and ask:
Why are you doing it like that?
Fix. Change. Advise.
Because getting outside help doesn’t have to mean making a big thing of it.
