You built it, and every hard call still stops at your desk. Not because the work is difficult, but because there is nobody else who can make those calls the way you would. BuildStrong is the work of building somebody who can.
Everything that still reaches you is a judgement call. The client threatening to leave. The two bad options. The quote that does not fit the price list. None of it can be documented, because it was never the same situation twice.
That is the part a system cannot hold. It has to be built in a person, by exposure and correction, over time.
Different names, different years, the same role. One you did not offer to. One turned you down. One came and left within a year. The conclusion each time was about the market, that the good ones are expensive and stay where they are.
Every one of them was fine at week six. Something happens around month three, which is when a senior person stops learning how things are done here and starts deciding things.
Hiring is a way of buying somebody who already knows how you decide. That is not on a CV and it does not arrive during a probation period.
Being excellent at something makes you worse at teaching it, not better. When you have done a thing ten thousand times you stop seeing the steps, you see the answer. So watching somebody work it out slowly is genuinely difficult, and you step in, every time with good intentions.
Developing people is a specialism with its own techniques and its own discipline. Nobody ever taught it to you. You were taught the work, you got good at the work, and one day you had staff.
That is a gap rather than a flaw, and gaps close.
Two halves, and they run together rather than in sequence.
What the successor needs to be able to do, and what he cannot do yet. Then what gets handed over and in what order, what you keep deliberately rather than by habit, and what happens the first time he gets one wrong. That last one is the step everybody skips and it decides whether the rest holds.
Exposure, correction, proof. Live decisions worked through at the board, scenario testing, off stage practice for on stage performance, and the work of merging his own values with the role so that what comes out is his rather than an imitation of you.
We start with assessments that make each of you legible to the other, and there are regular check ins with you throughout, because the hardest part of this is usually not his development.
Holding the place means the business runs for a fortnight without you and nothing needs deciding twice. That takes eighteen months to two years, and it is the part most owners actually want.
What comes after that is a different conversation, and it is one worth having deliberately rather than drifting into.
If nothing has ever been written down and you are answering the same question forty times a week, a person will not fix that. If the work is repeatable with clear rules, that should be a system rather than somebody's judgement. And if there is nobody in the business who could plausibly hold the place, this is a hiring conversation rather than this one.
I would rather say so in the first hour than six months in.
What can I say about the work John has done with us today at Arrow Planning. He's just delivered a fantastic coaching session with the team. We've been working through some genuinely difficult subjects, and he's presented them in a way that's allowed everybody to engage properly with these difficult matters.
It takes a real weight off my shoulders. The pressure and expectation isn't solely on me. I'm not standing there having to find a way through these problems alone. John leads me through them, then comes in and helps me actually activate them within the team, creating solutions that set the standard for the future.
Thanks, John.
I just wish I'd met John years ago. The frameworks he uses would have saved me from expensive mistakes in two previous businesses.
Two weeks away without the phone going.
Not stepping back entirely. Most owners do not want that and it is not the goal. Being able to leave, and having proof that the business is not entirely load bearing on one person.
The fastest way to know whether BuildStrong fits is to be at the board for an hour.
You'll know whether the practice is for you. The hour is enough.
Book an hour at the boardWondering what this looks like when the relationship deepens? Read about going further →