I recently spent an hour chatting to a very busy and successful businessman.  He is running a profitable and rapidly growing business.  It is a venture that he started and is very close to his heart.  Not only is it close to his heart but he is very much at the heart of it too.  This is something of a dilemma as the heart can only pump round so much blood and that limits the size of the body.  He is at that point where he needs to switch from being its heart to its head.  It is a very difficult transition.  In order to distance himself from the day-to-day activities he needs to install an infra structure of people and processes that will enable him to stay in touch but no longer be drowned in a detail.  This, as I told him, involves a certain amount of pain.  It is like going to a gym to loose weight.  There is the up front investment in membership and kit, then there is the pain you have to go through before you see any benefit.  It also costs in terms of your time and effort.

It is like that when you are running a small to medium sized business and want to take the next step.  You have to invest in people and systems perhaps before you really need them so that you have the capacity as well as the capability of handling the volume and complexity of taking the next step up without being swamped by it.  It is perfectly natural for a founder to want to be prudent and generate the income before committing to extra outgoings but this often leads to disaster as he becomes more and more overwhelmed trying to be everywhere and do everything.

I suggested a course of action to him and I believe that he saw the wisdom of taking it, but he didn’t commit to it then and there.  There is a second step in this dance and that is if you avoid making a positive decision that is often the same as deciding not to do it, as pretty soon you are once again in overwhelm and too busy to think about it.  It is reminiscent of General Custer who was ‘too busy’ to consider the advantages of the newly invented Gatling gun. Cartoonists later drew Custer, out-numbered 9 to 1 and already hit with several arrows, sending a Gatling gun salesman away because Custer was too busy reloading his single-shot pistol to listen to a sales pitch about a gun that would fire 200+ rounds a minute!

Sometimes putting off decisions can be very, very expensive… (not to say ‘arrowing!)