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There is a question most business owners have heard but very few have properly answered for themselves.
When do you stop being the person who does everything in the business and start being the person who leads it?
It sounds simple but in practice it's one of the hardest transitions a business owner makes. That's not because the concept is complicated, but because getting out of the day-to-day feels impossible when you are deep inside it.
In this Business Success Conversation, Adam Roy joins Michael Carthy to talk about what this shift actually looks like, when it needs to happen, and what it costs every month it does not.
Most business owners know the phrase. Very few know when to actually make the shift, or what it costs them every month they delay it.
Working in your business is doing the operational work. The jobs, the client delivery, the administration, the tasks that keep the business running today. For most business owners, this is where most of their time goes.
Working on your business is something different. It is stepping back from the day-to-day and thinking about direction, structure, and strategy. Where is the business going? What needs to change to get it there? What should the business look like in twelve months, in three years, in five?
Neither is wrong. Both are necessary. The problem is the ratio.
An hour a month. That is not a dramatic restructuring of how the business operates. It is a single protected conversation about direction. For many business owners that is the starting point, and it is more than most are currently doing.
When a business is new, working in it is not just normal, it is necessary. The founder does everything: the delivery, the sales, the admin, the marketing, the financial management. There is no team to delegate to and no margin to hire one.
The business runs like a job. The owner is the mechanic, the salesperson, the bookkeeper, the marketeer. This is how most businesses begin and there is nothing wrong with it at that stage.
The shift needs to happen when the business grows. When there is a team, when there are processes, when the volume of work is beyond what one person should be managing directly. That is the moment working in the business starts to hold the business back.
Most business owners do not choose to make the shift. The business forces it on them.
The plateau is the signal. Capacity is at its maximum, and things that should be getting done are falling through the cracks. The team is feeling the strain, and the business owner is working harder than ever and the business is not moving forward.
The plateau is not a failure but a signal that the business has grown to a size where the way it has been run up to now is no longer sufficient. The business has not stopped growing because something is wrong. It has stopped growing because the structure has not kept pace with the ambition.
The problem is that most business owners reach this point before they recognise it. They push harder, take on more personally, and exhaust themselves trying to solve a structural problem with individual effort. The plateau is not solved by working more hours but by working differently.
The cost of waiting
Every month a business owner spends buried in the day-to-day when they should be stepping back is a month of lost strategic momentum. Decisions that should be made do not get made. Opportunities that should be spotted are missed. The business runs, but it does not grow.
The shift from working in to working on does not need to wait for the plateau. It can start much earlier. In fact, it can start before the business does. The business plan itself is an act of working on the business. Writing a plan, setting goals, thinking about where the business should be in three years, all of this is strategic thinking and it does not stop being valuable once the business is up and running.
The three to five year view
One of the most consistent differences between a business owner working in their business and one working on it is the time horizon they are thinking about.
Working in the business means thinking about the next three months at most. What is the workload? When are the deadlines? What needs to happen this week? Those are the questions that dominate.
Working on the business means thinking twelve months ahead, three years, five years. Where is this business going? What does it need to look like to get there? Which decisions made today will shape where it ends up?
That shift in time horizon changes everything about how a business is run. It changes the decisions made about hiring, and changes how resources are allocated. It changes the relationship with the numbers, and it changes the conversation with the accountant, which is something we cover in detail in Part 3 of this series.
For many business owners, working on the business sounds abstract. In practice it does not have to be.
It can look like a quarterly review with a business advisor; a monthly session reviewing management accounts with an accountant who asks more than just how much profit did you make this month. It could be a protected hour each week where the phone is off and the only question on the table is where is this business going and what needs to change to get it there.
The key word is 'protected'. Working on the business requires time that is deliberately separated from the operational demands of working in it. That separation is not easy to create. But without it, the strategic thinking never happens and the business stays in the plateau.
The business plan that gets written at the start of the business and then filed away is a symptom of this problem. The plan was an act of working on the business, but the filing of it was a return to working in it. Working on the business is not a one-time event - it's a rhythm.
Part 2 of this series covers what actually holds business owners back from making this shift, including the trust problem, the bottleneck, and the mental shift that unlocks growth. Part 3 covers what a self-running business looks like and how the relationship with your accountant changes when you get there.
The E-Myth by Michael Gerber is excellent further reading on this topic.
The distinction between working in and working on your business is not a productivity hack or a management theory. It is the difference between running a business that consumes you and building one that works for you.
The shift is available to any business at any size. It does not require a large team or a significant restructuring. It requires protected time, the right questions, and someone to have the conversation with.
If you would like to talk about what working on your business could look like in practice, we would love to help.
Get in touch: carthyaccountants.co.uk/contact
