Why successful business owners choose outside challenge to make better decisions, avoid expensive mistakes and improve faster.
Over the years, I’ve worked with businesses ranging from relatively small owner-managed companies to organisations turning over £100 million.
Some of the business owners I work with are running companies turning over £1 million, £3 million, £5 million or more.
They’ve built teams, won customers, dealt with difficult situations, made tough decisions and created businesses that are genuinely successful.
And here’s something I think is important.
Many of them were already successful before they started working with me.
They’d already demonstrated that they knew how to run a business.
They weren’t necessarily looking for someone to teach them how to do it.
And they certainly weren’t all looking to build a bigger business.
Some wanted to grow. Some wanted to become more profitable. Others wanted to make the business easier to run, avoid expensive mistakes or stop being dragged into every problem.
Some wanted to build a management team they could trust.
And some simply wanted to get to the point where they could take a holiday without worrying about what was happening back at work.
Different objectives, but something important in common.
They wanted to make things better, and they recognised that having the right person alongside them could help them get there faster.
Success doesn’t necessarily make running a business easier
There’s an assumption that as a business becomes more successful, life gets easier for the owner.
Sometimes it does.
But I’ve worked with plenty of successful owners whose businesses have become increasingly dependent on them as they’ve grown.
They’ve got more employees, more customers, more turnover and more responsibility.
And somehow, they’ve ended up working harder than ever.
Every important decision comes back to them.
Managers who should be managing keep asking for answers.
Problems that should be dealt with elsewhere in the business end up on their desk.
They struggle to find the right people, or they’ve got people in place who aren’t taking the responsibility they should.
And although they know they ought to delegate more, they find themselves getting involved because they’re worried things won’t be done properly.
It’s exhausting.
And it can be particularly frustrating when you’ve spent years building a successful business, only to discover that you’ve created something you can’t easily step away from.
So the objective isn’t necessarily to double the turnover.
Sometimes it’s to make the business you’ve already built considerably easier to run.
The question isn’t whether you can do it yourself
Most successful business owners are pretty resourceful people.
They’ve had to be.
When you’re building a business, nobody hands you a set of instructions explaining how to deal with every situation you’ll encounter.
You learn, experiment, make mistakes, work things out and gradually become better at what you do.
And there’s every reason to believe you can continue doing that.
But there’s a question worth asking.
How long is it going to take?
Let’s say you’re constantly being dragged back into operational problems.
You know you need to develop your managers, improve accountability and change the way decisions are made.
Could you work that out yourself?
Of course.
But you might spend years trying different approaches, making mistakes, getting frustrated and occasionally finding yourself right back where you started.
What if you could make those changes in eighteen months instead?
What if having someone challenge your thinking helped you recognise what was actually keeping you stuck?
And what if a decision that might otherwise take you years to reach became obvious after a few good conversations?
I’m not suggesting that every business can transform itself in eighteen months.
But I am suggesting that the right outside perspective can significantly accelerate the process.
And when you’re running a business, time matters.
Sometimes it’s about avoiding the wrong decisions
There’s another side to this that I think gets overlooked.
Improving a business isn’t just about the things you do.
It’s also about the things you avoid doing.
Taking on the wrong person.
Promoting somebody who isn’t ready.
Investing in equipment or software that won’t solve the problem.
Pursuing customers who aren’t profitable.
Expanding before you’ve got the management structure to support it.
Or simply continuing to do something because it’s the way you’ve always done it.
Business owners make decisions like these all the time.
And some of those decisions can be extremely expensive.
Sometimes the most valuable thing someone can do for you is challenge a decision before you make it.
Ask a question you haven’t considered.
Point out a risk you haven’t seen.
Or help you recognise that you’re trying to solve the wrong problem.
Preventing one expensive mistake can be worth considerably more than the cost of having someone alongside you.
Why do successful business owners work with someone for years?
Something that might surprise people is how long some of my clients work with me.
I’ve worked with business owners for five, six and seven years.
Others have achieved what they wanted in eighteen months or a couple of years.
But they’re generally not coming to me for three months to fix a particular problem and then disappearing.
They’re looking to make lasting improvements to how they run their businesses.
And those improvements often develop over time.
An owner might initially want to stop being involved in every decision.
That leads to developing a stronger management team.
Which leads to clearer responsibilities, better accountability and more effective processes.
Which creates the opportunity for the owner to spend more time working on the business rather than constantly working in it.
And once that starts happening, other possibilities open up.
Perhaps they can grow without increasing their own workload.
Perhaps they can take more time away.
Perhaps they can start thinking seriously about succession or selling the business.
Or perhaps they simply get to enjoy running it again.
The relationship continues because the owner keeps finding value in having someone who understands the business, challenges their thinking and helps them move forward.
Why does having someone else make such a difference?
One of the biggest challenges of running a business is that you’re so close to it.
You’re dealing with customers, employees, finances, suppliers and a constant stream of decisions.
And because you’re involved in so much of what’s happening, you develop certain assumptions about how things work.
You accept things as normal.
You get used to particular problems.
You develop habits.
You find ways around things that aren’t working particularly well.
And over time, some of those workarounds become part of how the business operates.
It’s surprisingly easy to stop questioning them.
That’s where an experienced outside perspective can make an enormous difference.
Someone who asks why.
Someone who challenges your assumptions.
Someone who notices the things you’ve stopped noticing.
Someone who gives you honest feedback rather than simply agreeing with you.
And someone who holds you accountable for the things you’ve decided need to change.
Sometimes the most valuable conversation isn’t about finding a new solution.
It’s about recognising that the problem you’ve been trying to solve isn’t actually the problem.
And once you see that, everything changes.
I don’t build my clients’ businesses for them
This is something I’m very clear about.
I don’t run my clients’ businesses.
I don’t make their decisions for them.
And I certainly don’t take credit for what they’ve achieved.
They’re the people taking the risks, leading their teams, making the changes and doing the work.
My job is to help them think more clearly, see what they might be missing, challenge their decisions where necessary and keep them focused on what matters.
Sometimes that means helping them find a better way of doing something.
Sometimes it means challenging a decision that I think could be a mistake.
Sometimes it means helping them understand why they keep getting dragged back into situations they’ve supposedly delegated.
And sometimes it means asking them why they’re still doing something they told me they wanted to stop doing six months ago.
I help business owners become better at making their businesses better.
And that means the changes they make are their changes, not mine.
What would you actually like to be different?
Here’s a question for anyone running an established business.
If you could change three things about your business over the next couple of years, what would they be?
Would you want to increase profitability?
Find and develop better managers?
Stop being involved in every decision?
Have people take more responsibility?
Reduce the number of problems that keep landing on your desk?
Be able to take time away without worrying?
Or build a business that somebody else would eventually be happy to buy?
There’s no right answer.
And the answer certainly doesn’t have to be more turnover.
Sometimes the best business improvement is simply getting back control of your own time.
The important thing is identifying what you want to be different and working out how to make it happen.
The real value is getting there sooner
I’ve worked with plenty of business owners who were perfectly capable of making the changes they wanted without me.
Given enough time, they could have figured things out themselves.
But time is the one thing none of us can get back.
If something could take ten years to work out on your own, but the right support and challenge helps you achieve it in eighteen months, that’s an enormous difference.
And if having someone question your thinking helps you avoid one expensive mistake, that’s valuable too.
It’s not about needing somebody to tell you how to run your business.
It’s about recognising that even capable, experienced and successful people benefit from having someone who challenges them, gives them another perspective and helps them make better decisions.
That’s why some of my clients work with me for years.
Because the business continues to change, the challenges continue to change, and there’s always an opportunity to make something better.
You might be perfectly capable of getting there on your own.
The real question is how much sooner you could get there with the right conversations.
And perhaps the most important question of all:
How much longer do you want to keep putting up with the things in your business that you already know should be better?
Andy Walter
I help business owners build businesses that are easier to run, with less pressure and less stress.
Join us at the next Your Mastermind Group networking session.
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