The business only existed in my head

The second time I hired someone and gave them nothing to work with, I had no excuse. The first time I could put down to inexperience. Twelve months later I did it again.

That second hire was a business development manager. I sent him the product information, told him roughly who we sold to, and left him to get on with it. He was capable. He lasted a few months, left with nothing to show for it, and so did we. What I handed him was raw material. He needed a plan. The plan lived in my head, where it had always lived, and I had never written a word of it down.

I run a branding studio now, and we get paid to fix that problem in other people's companies. We have a line for it: strategy isn't real until it lives in the room without you. I have been selling that idea for two years without saying out loud where I learned it.

Three failures, one failure

Five things went badly wrong at my last company. Three of them were the same thing wearing different clothes.

The first was a marketing manager. I hired her to run marketing and then never gave her a marketing plan. I expected her to work out what the company stood for, who it was for and how it should sound, and to do that while also producing the work. She was good at her job. There was nothing to be good against. Every week she made a decision that should have been made once, at the top, a year earlier. I mistook the absence of a plan for her being slow to find one.

The second was the BDM. Same shape, different department. I gave him product knowledge and assumed that knowing a thing and being able to sell it are the same skill. They are not, and the gap between them is training, which I did not build because building it would have meant writing down how we won work. I knew how we won work. I could do it in my sleep. I had never made it teachable.

The third was keeping the team on too long. This one still sits badly. I knew months before I acted that the business could not carry the wage bill. I told myself I was being loyal. What I was doing was delaying, and delaying made it worse for them, not better.

There is a number attached to this, and I will not pretend I can give you a clean one. Two hires who did not work, the recruitment behind them, the months each of them spent with no traction, and a payroll carried longer than the business could support. Call it a year of runway spent on the same mistake three times, which is what it was.

None of those three people failed. I set them up to fail, and the setting up happened before any of them arrived.

The pattern I could not see

Look at the three side by side and the execution was never the problem.

The marketing plan existed. It was in my head. The sales approach existed. It was in my head. The decision about the team was made in my head, months before anyone heard it. In every case the thinking had already happened. What never happened was making it explicit, putting it somewhere outside my own skull, and handing it to someone who could use it.

That is a founder-shaped business. Not a small business, a founder-shaped one. It runs on one person's judgement, and it works, right up until the point where the founder runs out of hours. Then it stops, and it stops in a way that looks like a hiring problem, a sales problem or a marketing problem. It is none of those. It is the same problem three times.

The tell is that everything moves fast when you are in the room and stalls when you are not. Ask yourself what happens to a decision when you go on holiday. If the answer is that it waits for you, the business is founder-shaped, and hiring more people will make the waiting worse rather than better.

Why none of it got written down

The obvious question is why a person who thinks about this for a living would leave the whole plan in his own head for years.

It was not laziness and it was not lack of time. Writing something down means choosing. As long as the positioning lived in my head it could stay flexible, which felt like an advantage. We could be the studio that did the cheap fast work and the studio that did the considered expensive work, depending on who was asking. Nothing on paper meant nothing to contradict. It also meant nobody else could sell it, describe it or defend it, because there was no version of it that held still long enough to learn.

The second reason is closer to the bone. A written plan can be wrong in front of other people. A plan in your head is never wrong, because it quietly updates itself every time reality disagrees with it. I could have told you at any point that year exactly what the company was for, and my answer would have moved by degrees every month without me noticing. I called it strategy. It was memory with good PR.

Owner-managed businesses run on that arrangement for longer than they should because it works while there are three of you. The founder holds the plan, everyone reads the founder, and the reading is accurate because they see him every day. Add a fourth and fifth person, or put two of them in another office, and the reading gets worse. Nobody says it has got worse. They fill the gap with guesses, and the guesses are what you end up managing.

The version of this I hear most often from other owners is "I know what we do, I just haven't had time to write it down". I said that sentence for two years. The writing is not the work. The choosing is the work, and the writing is what stops you unchoosing it next Tuesday.

What we do differently now

I would rather show the mechanism than talk about the lesson.

Strategy gets written down, and it gets written down with other people in the room. Not a document I produce alone and circulate. A session, with a running order and an end time, that forces the choices I used to make privately and never announce. The output is short enough that someone can repeat it to a stranger. If it needs a slide deck to explain, it will not survive contact with a new hire.

Anyone joining gets the plan, not the atmosphere. That means the positioning, the customer, the reason we charge what we charge and the work we turn down. Written, handed over on day one, and open to argument. The two people I hired badly would both have done well with two pages.

We fixed the isolation on purpose, which is the part I underrate. At the old company I stopped speaking to anyone outside the building. No competitors, no peers, barely any clients beyond the projects in front of me. Now there are thirty target accounts tracked properly, five competitors watched, and LinkedIn used as a conversation rather than a noticeboard. Isolation is the standard condition of an owner-managed business and almost nobody names it as a business risk. It is one.

The workshop we run for clients is the first of those three, done for someone else. Three or four hours, their leadership team in the room, an outsider asking the third question, and a document at the end that somebody who was not there can act on. That is the whole product. We built it because I know what it costs to not have one.

One more thing changed, and it is the least comfortable to admit. I make the call earlier now. The team decision that took me months is the one I would most like back, and the thing that made it slow was not the decision itself. It was that I had no written position on what the business could carry, so every month I could tell myself a slightly different story about the next one. A plan on paper takes that option away, which is the point of it.

The two-week test

Here is the version you can run this afternoon.

Imagine you answer no questions for two weeks. No calls, no messages, nothing. Write down what stops.

That list is the part of your business that exists only in your head. Everything on it is a decision you have already made and never externalised, and every one of them is waiting on you. The list is usually longer than people expect, and the uncomfortable items are near the top.

Do it honestly. The instinct is to write down the operational things, the approvals and the passwords, because those are easy to see. The ones that matter are the judgement calls: which enquiries you take, what you charge, when you say no, what the company is actually for. If those only exist as your instinct, they are not assets. They are a single point of failure with a salary.

Plenty of owners work through that list on their own, and there is a fair test for whether you can: we set it out in can you do your own brand strategy. If you read it and recognise yourself in more than one of the four, that is when it is worth having someone from outside the building in the room.