How to make your business run without you

Most owners reading this already know the problem. You cannot take a fortnight off without the phone going. You are the only person who can say why a number looks wrong. The business is fine, and it is fine because you are in it every day.

What follows is not a case for buying software. Roughly half of what keeps an owner in the middle of the business is a people problem, and no system fixes that. The useful thing is telling the halves apart, because they cost very different amounts to solve.

The scale of it, in hours

UK small business owners spend around 11 hours a week on administrative and finance work. That is about six working days a month, against roughly 3.6 days a month spent on sales and business development. More than half say paperwork gets in the way of running the business.

The figure worth sitting with is a different one. Around 36 per cent of owners name their own lack of capacity as the single biggest barrier to growing the business. Not demand, not funding, not staff. Their own available hours.

Why the delegation advice does not work yet

Handing a task over assumes the task can be described. In an owner-run business three things usually prevent that, and they are worth separating because only one of them is about software.

• The knowledge is undocumented. You know which customers get the other price, which suppliers need chasing twice, and which jobs are worth taking. None of it is written anywhere, so handing over the task hands over about 60 per cent of it.
• The information is not visible to anyone else. Somebody can make the decision, in principle, but they cannot see what they would need to make it, because it lives in your inbox, your head, or a workbook only you open.
• The person is not there yet. Sometimes the honest answer is that nobody in the business is ready, and the fix is hiring or training rather than anything technical.

The third one is a management problem and it is out of scope here. The first two are what people are describing when they say the business runs on them.

Four questions that locate the dependency

Answer these honestly and in writing. They take ten minutes and they tell you which of the three you have.

1. 1If you went away for two weeks with no phone, what is the first thing that would go wrong? Not the worst thing. The first thing. That is where the dependency actually sits, and it is rarely where owners expect.
2. 2Who else can produce the monthly numbers? If the answer is nobody, ask why. Usually it is not skill. It is that the numbers get assembled by hand from several places and only one person knows which places.
3. 3When somebody rings to ask where an order is, who do they ring? If the answer is you, the information exists but is not reachable by the people who need it.
4. 4What would you have to write down before you could hand this over? Whatever you just listed is the actual job. It is also, almost always, the specification for fixing it.

Which problem you have, and what it costs to fix

Start with the free thing, for a fortnight

Before commissioning anything, keep a note for two weeks of every question somebody asks you that only you can answer. One line each. Do not tidy it up.

At the end you will have a list, and the list sorts into three piles almost by itself. Things that only need writing down once. Things somebody could answer if they could see a screen you can see. Things that genuinely need your judgement. The middle pile is the one worth spending money on, and it is usually the largest.

This costs nothing, it takes about a minute a day, and it is the closest thing to a free specification for the work. It also occasionally kills the project, because the list turns out to be short and the honest answer is that you are fine.

What it looks like when it works

An owner of four convenience stores could tell you monthly revenue to the pound and could not tell you which products made money. A regional wholesaler coordinated deliveries across eleven group chats and a magnetic wall map, so the only way to answer any question was to ring somebody.

In both cases the measure that mattered was never the one in the brief. Neither owner was chasing a percentage. They wanted to stop being the person who knew where everything was, because being that person meant never having a day off. A three-office accountancy practice had the same problem in a different shape: deadlines chased from personal inboxes, so nobody could say what had been asked for.

When it is worth building something

When the same question gets asked of you every week, the answer is a fact rather than a judgement, and the fact already exists somewhere in a system you pay for. Those three conditions together are a strong case. Miss any one of them and a cheaper answer usually exists.

For what that costs, the bands are published rather than held back for a second call. Where the problem is that two systems never speak to each other, that has a guide of its own.