Why Do We Still Treat Professional Business Advice As Optional?

Why do founders readily accept specialist accountancy, HR, marketing, legal or technology support as necessary, yet still treat experienced support for the business itself as optional?

I’ve learned, and strongly believe, that scaling an organisation requires its leaders to move from learning how to do, to learning how to enable.

Marshall Goldsmith popularised the phrase “What got you here won’t get you there.” For growing businesses, that means recognising that the knowledge and behaviours which helped the founder build the early organisation are not necessarily the ones required to help it scale. The important point is in understanding that a different kind of learning is now needed.

Stephen Anderson and David McKenzie explored a question that connects very closely to this idea. When a small business lacks capability in areas such as marketing or finance, the natural response is often to train the entrepreneur. The assumption is understandable because if the leader knows more, the business should become more capable. Their research tested that assumption by comparing different ways of closing those capability gaps. Alongside conventional business training and consulting, they looked at what happened when the missing expertise was brought into the business through hiring (insourcing) or outsourcing. The results were interesting.

In their study, insourcing and outsourcing both produced stronger outcomes than training the entrepreneur, and performed at least as well as consulting at lower cost. The importance of the question the research poses is where in an organisation evolving capability needs to exist. Their phrase, the “boundary of the entrepreneur,” I think captures that particularly well. At some point, increasing the capability of the business may depend less on adding more capability to one person and more on allowing capability to exist beyond them.

Other research points in the same direction. A 2023 Journal of Business Venturing study examining businesses preparing to scale found that scaling involves changes to the internal organisation and to the founder’s own role. As other people take on responsibilities previously held by the founder, the role at the centre of the organisation has to evolve.

More recent research into delegation goes further. Growth requires the transfer of decision-making authority, not simply the transfer of tasks. Taken together, this points towards a developmental shift that I think is under-recognised. At one stage, the leader needs to know how to do. At the next, the leader needs to know how to enable. Eventually, the business itself needs to know and ultimately enable. That middle stage is where many organisations appear to get stuck.

There are plenty of people willing to teach leaders how to do more. Learn marketing, learn finance, learn HR, AI, sales, leadership, and learn about new technologies. Much of that learning can be valuable, but the difficulty comes when development continues to be framed around making one person more capable of performing specialist work, long after the organisation needs that capability to exist somewhere else.

There are far fewer people credibly helping leaders learn how to enable others to deliver the work well. And enabling is a different discipline because it requires the leader to understand what good looks like without needing to perform every part of the work themselves.

It means knowing how to choose the right people, how to establish expectations, how to define responsibility, how to give sufficient authority, how to create useful measures, how to maintain oversight, how to challenge constructively, and how to resist taking the work back simply because someone else approaches it differently. That is not withdrawing from the business, it is learning the work of business.

There is a significant difference between the work the business does and the work of business. Marketing is work the business does. Finance is work the business does. HR, technology, sales, operations and customer service are all work the business does. The work of business is bringing those capabilities together so that the organisation can make decisions, allocate responsibility, manage risk, create opportunity and continue to perform without every issue returning to the same person. That is where another distinction becomes important.

Coaching is predominantly concerned with the person. Executive coaching, leadership coaching and other forms of personal development rightly focus on the individual: how they think, behave, communicate, lead, make decisions and develop. Business support at the next stage has a different subject because its subject is the business. The support may be delivered through the founder today, the managing director tomorrow, a commercial director next year or several members of a leadership team over time. The people occupying those roles will change, the organisation remains. That means the recipient of experienced business support is ultimately the business, delivered through the people currently carrying responsibility for it.

We already accept this principle with other professional suppliers. A company does not normally appoint an accountant purely for the personal development of its finance director. The accountant serves the company. The same applies to legal advisers, HR specialists, technology partners and other professional suppliers. Individuals come and go, while the professional relationship can remain because the underlying client is the organisation.

Why should experienced business advisory be fundamentally different?

Perhaps part of the reason is that we have blurred business advisory with coaching and mentoring to such an extent that the support is positioned around the individual rather than the company. Also true in my experience is that relatively few advisers have actually experienced the transition they are advising others to make. Helping someone become better at marketing, finance or leadership requires knowledge of that particular discipline. Helping an organisation build capability that can carry responsibility and authority beyond one individual requires something else because it requires an understanding of what happens when roles become distinct, when decisions have to move through those roles, when authority needs to follow responsibility, when governance changes, when capable people need space to act, and when the contribution of the person previously at the centre has to evolve. That understanding is difficult to gain purely from theory. It is also difficult to deliver if the adviser’s own commercial model still depends upon continually teaching one person how to do more.

There is an uncomfortable paradox in that. The business-support market can reward providers for continually increasing one individual’s personal capability, even when the next stage of organisational growth depends upon capability moving beyond that individual. The support that helps somebody get here may therefore be poorly suited to helping the organisation get there.

This is also why outsourcing alone does not necessarily solve the problem. A simple example might be marketing. A small business outsources its marketing to an agency. On paper, that looks like a sensible step away from dependence on one person. Someone else is now doing the work. But who decides the priorities? Who approves the campaigns? Who interprets the results? Who decides whether the agency is performing well? Who chooses what should change next? If all of those answers still point back to one person, then the business has outsourced the activity without really transferring responsibility or authority. The work has moved, the capability has not.

That next step is easy to miss because outsourcing creates the appearance of delegation. The hidden transition comes later, when someone else is trusted not only to carry out the work, but to own it within clear boundaries and make appropriate decisions without everything returning to the same individual. For many growing businesses, that transition only becomes visible when the existing arrangement starts to strain. The same pattern can occur with an agency, contractor, fractional specialist or internal manager. Someone else does the work, while one individual still interprets everything, approves everything, resolves everything and retains the authority. The organisation has outsourced execution, it has not necessarily distributed capability.

The more useful question is therefore not simply, “Who can do this work for us?” It is also: Who should own this? What responsibility should they have? What decisions should they be able to make? What information does leadership need in order to maintain proper oversight? What needs to remain with the board? And what needs to stop coming back to one person?

Those are questions about enabling. They are also questions experienced business advisers should be capable of helping an organisation answer.

The UK Government’s 2024 Longitudinal Small Business Survey provides an interesting clue about when businesses begin to recognise that need. Among SME employers that sought external advice, the use of consultants and general business advisers rose with company size: from 31% among micro businesses seeking advice, to 43% among small businesses and 47% among medium-sized organisations. No surprises there that greater size brings greater complexity, but it raises another question.

What might happen if more micro businesses recognised the value of experienced business advice before complexity made the need obvious? I wonder what the result might be if even some of the businesses that become stuck at the transition between person-dependent and organisation-led growth would recognise earlier that their challenge is no longer acquiring more personal knowledge. Perhaps they would begin building capability into the business sooner, perhaps responsibility and authority would spread earlier, perhaps leaders would spend less time learning how to become competent in another specialist discipline and more time learning how to select, trust and oversee people who are already better at it.

That does not reduce the importance of learning, it does however change its direction. The leader still needs to know, they need to know what good looks like, they need to know who to trust, and they need to know what questions to ask. They need to know where authority should be, they need to know when intervention is necessary and when it is simply habit, and they need to know how to build an organisation in which capability survives changes of people. That is a very different kind of knowledge from knowing how to do the work personally.

At the first stage, the leader needs to know how to do. At the next, the leader needs to know how to enable, and how the work is done productively and profitability, not what work is done. And eventually, the business itself needs to know and enable. The challenge of growth may not be learning more, it may be recognising when what you need to learn has changed.

That is why experienced business advice should stop being treated as an optional extra. If accountancy, HR, marketing, legal and technology support are accepted as professional inputs to the organisation, then experienced support for the business itself deserves to be considered in the same way. The value brought to the organisation at this stage must move from helping any one person perform better, to helping the organisation become more capable, more distributed and less dependent on any one individual.

The more useful question may no longer be why a growing business would need that support, but why we have taken so long to recognise it as part of the normal infrastructure of growth.

Mark Jarvis