I write for owners and leaders of design, construction and service-based firms. My posts cover strategy, leadership, culture, and where AI actually fits. D4 Concepts is the firm I started with Mike Witt. Subscribe if you want them sent directly to you. A little over 2,000 people already do.
How much of your business still runs on you?
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Over the last few weeks, we’ve talked about the ceiling, why the last fix didn’t stick, and what the other side looks like. Here’s the short version of how you can assess yourself across all of it. Four questions. What this isIt’s called the Clarity Check. Four questions, about ninety seconds. It shows you how much of your business still runs on you. The four questionsAnswer the way things actually are, not the way you’d like them to be. Score each one from 1 to 3: 1 means “absolutely not,” 3 means “absolutely yes.”
If you got uncomfortable somewhere in there, that’s the instrument working. Fair warningMost owners I walk through this land between four and seven out of twelve. That's an accidental result. Almost nobody who built a firm on their own craft or technical skill scores well the first time. (Ref. Gerber's book "The E-Myth") A low number isn’t a verdict on you. It describes a load you’ve carried so long it started to feel normal. The MirrorAn assessment is like a mirror to show you what's going on. It's not an indictment or an assignment of guilt. If you score ten or higher, there’s genuinely nothing for me to sell you because you're already on the right track. If you score lower and want to talk it through, what I can offer is a Clarity Day. That’s a working session with you and your leadership team. If you recognize you want help and can hop on a quick call to talk about your results, I can then get you set up for your Clarity Day. Ready?Reply with the word “clarity” and I’ll walk through your answers and your challenges with you. One question before you go: which of the four did you want to rush past? That’s probably the one worth thinking about a bit more. Micah P.S. If you do only one thing from this series, follow up with Question #2. Ask your three closest leaders, separately, for this year’s top three priorities and compare the answers. It takes twenty minutes and will tell you more about your business than any assessment can. |
Micah Ray
I write for owners and leaders of design, construction and service-based firms. My posts cover strategy, leadership, culture, and where AI actually fits. D4 Concepts is the firm I started with Mike Witt. Subscribe if you want them sent directly to you. A little over 2,000 people already do.
Two weeks of this series have been about the problem. Fair enough. So let's switch gears. What If Tuesday Looked Like This Your leadership team gathers for the weekly meeting, and the entire meeting runs according to the agenda, not against everyone's inbox or escalated, last-minute issues. Somebody submits a decision that will require a hard call. The team hashes out the pros and cons, in front of you, and then decides. Nobody looks at you twice for permission. You find out later in the...
Somewhere in your office there's a binder. A business operating system install... or a facilitated offsite... or a strategy deliverable from a consultant who was genuinely smart. It's got a nice cover on it. Real work went into it. And it has been sitting there long enough that you've stopped noticing it. Last week, I talked about the ceiling. This week, let's think about the thing that makes the ceiling so hard to move. It wasn't the framework's fault That's the part almost everyone gets...
Nothing is necessarily broken. (That's what makes this problem hard to see.) The revenue is there. The work is good. The team is mostly the right team. Yet somewhere in the last two or three years, the business stopped getting easier, and nobody can explain why. The ceiling nobody drew Here's the pattern I see often with owner-led firms: The business plateaus at exactly the size of what one person's head can hold. Not the size of the market. Not the size of the team. The capacity of one...