What would stop if you didn’t come to work for a week?

It definitely sounds like a holiday question, and honestly, I’d rather know where you’d go!

But this is actually a really useful way of stepping back and looking at how your business operates.

Stay with me here…

Imagine you disappeared from the business for a week:

• no emails
• no Teams
• no quick calls to check something
• and nobody can ask you a question

What stops?

Maybe invoices don’t go out because you usually approve them. A project can’t move forward because somebody needs you to make a decision. Perhaps a supplier waits because nobody knows whether the spend has been authorised.

Someone in the team knows a client is unhappy, but they have no idea who to turn to. Oh no, a meeting gets postponed because you’re the person who normally drives it.

Absolutely none of this necessarily means you have a bad team or a badly run business. It may simply mean that the business has grown faster than the way it operates.

Being involved isn’t the problem

When a business is small, it makes complete sense for lots of things to come through the founder.

If there are four of you sitting in the same room, shouting over to ask whether you can spend £500 on something is probably quicker than creating an approval process.

You don’t need a policy for everything. You don’t need a 40-page document explaining how to order printer paper. And you definitely don’t need to create process for the sake of having process.

But then the business grows.

There are now 10, 15 or 20 people. More clients. More suppliers. More projects. More money moving around.

And somewhere along the way, the way you operate hasn’t quite caught up.

You are still being asked the same questions. You are still approving the same things. You are still the person who knows how everything works.

That’s when it starts becoming a problem.

Don’t just look at the work you do

This is where I think people often jump straight to delegation.

“I’m too busy, I need to hand some things over.”

Maybe.

But before you start handing out tasks, look at the decisions that rely on you:

• Who decides whether extra client work can go ahead?
• Who can approve an invoice?
• Who decides when a project needs more resource?
• Who can agree a supplier cost?
• Who deals with a client complaint?
• Who decides what happens when two projects both need the same person next week?

If the answer to every one of those questions is you, then you might not have a workload problem.

You might have an ownership problem.

And hiring another pair of hands won’t automatically fix that.

Ask two people how something works

This is one of my favourite ways to find out whether a process actually exists.

Pick something simple. Let’s say invoicing.

Ask the project manager how an invoice gets raised. They might say:

“Finance does that.”

Ask finance. They might say:

“The PM tells us when it’s ready to invoice.”

Ask the MD. They might say:

“We invoice everything at the end of the month.”

Great. We now have three different versions of the same process.

And somehow the invoices probably still go out most of the time. That can make it look like the process works.

But actually, there may be someone in the middle remembering things, chasing people and quietly joining the dots.

If that person disappeared for a week, what happens then?

Then there are the spreadsheets…

You know the ones.

The business has paid for a perfectly good system. Everyone has been told to use it. And then you discover that Sarah has a spreadsheet on her desktop that actually contains the information everyone relies on.

Before deciding Sarah needs to stop using her spreadsheet, ask why she created it.

Maybe:

• the main system doesn’t show what she needs
• nobody trusts the data
• different people are using the system in completely different ways
• reporting was never set up properly
• the spreadsheet has simply existed for so long that nobody remembers why it started

The spreadsheet isn’t necessarily the problem.

It’s a clue.

Meetings can hide the same thing

Meetings are another good place to look.

Why does the meeting exist?

Actually, really, why?

Is it there to make a decision? Share information? Coordinate something? Solve a specific problem?

Or is it the place where everyone turns up once a week because that’s the only time all the missing information finally comes together?

I’ve seen meetings become a workaround for unclear ownership:

• Nobody knows who can make the decision, so everyone waits until Tuesday.
• Nobody knows where the information should be recorded, so everyone brings their version to the meeting.
• Nobody is quite sure who is responsible for following something up, so the founder ends up doing it.

The meeting might look like the problem.

It might not be.

Try it yourself

You don’t actually have to disappear for a week.

Although if you fancy testing this from a beach somewhere, I’m not going to stop you.

Instead, sit down and ask yourself:

If I could not be contacted for five working days, what would become difficult?

Write it all down. Not just the things you physically do.

Look for anything that would stall because somebody needs:

• your approval
• your knowledge
• your judgement
• information that only you seem to have
• your relationship with a client or supplier
• your authority to make a decision

Then look at each one properly.

Some of those things should absolutely stay with you. You are the founder. You are allowed to be important to your own business.

The goal isn’t to build a company that never needs you again. The goal is to make sure the business needs you for the right reasons.

Because there is a big difference between:

“We need the MD to make this decision.”

and

“We need to ask the MD because nobody knows who else is allowed to.”

Please don’t immediately buy another system

This is usually the point where someone starts looking for a solution:

• new software
• another employee
• a new process
• more automation
• an SOP for everything

Hold off.

If invoicing stops when you’re away, we still don’t know why.

Maybe finance doesn’t know when the work is complete. Maybe project managers don’t have the right information. Maybe nobody is clear who can approve an invoice. Maybe your contracts are inconsistent. Maybe the system really is awful. Or maybe you genuinely do need another person.

Until you understand what is actually happening, you’re guessing.

And that’s how businesses end up with more software, more people and more process, while somehow still having exactly the same problem.

So instead of asking:

“How do I get myself out of the business?”

Try asking:

“Why does the business need me here?”

That answer is usually much more interesting.