Every startup remembers its first hire, but its first resignation can be just as significant.
Earlier this year, the young team in my fifth business experienced its first departure, just as we were preparing to recruit and grow. It was amicable, understandable and completely unexpected.
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?
We’ve all heard the idea that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. The research behind that claim is more interesting than the rule itself. Because 10,000 hours doing something is not the same as 10,000 hours getting better at it.
If you’re running a business you want to scale and the word complexity makes you feel exhausted before you’ve even thought about it properly, this will be worth 15 minutes of your time.
The mature business does not avoid disagreement. It learns how to use it.
The real value in different thinking appears when challenge stays focused on the work, rather than becoming a contest between people.
Most business owners I know track their profit carefully. Fewer have asked what profit actually is; not as a number, but as a phenomenon. What it represents, what produces it, and why managing toward it directly is so often the thing that makes it harder to reach.
Most businesses are built on a single question. How do we get more customers? How do we sell more? How do we grow the top line? And for a long time, that question is exactly the right one. It’s what gets businesses started. It’s what keeps them alive.
Most of the leadership teams I start working with are preparing for investment by focusing on what they’ve built; the track record, the numbers, the story of how they got here.
The investor is asking something else entirely.
The most common way I see capable organisations stall has nothing to do with the quality of their thinking.
The thinking is excellent, the research is thorough, the options are well understood. And the organisation hasn’t moved in six months.
Most leadership teams already see their sustainability thinking as considered, well-formed, and grounded in genuine intent, and over time that thinking has found its way into their strategy, communication, and the way the business presents itself to the outside world.
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