The Four Constraints on SME Leaders

There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from running a business that depends entirely on you standing in the middle of it, and it doesn't announce itself as exhaustion, it just feels like Tuesday. Twelve hours a day, five or six days a week, and the honest answer to what all those hours bought you is: standing still. Not falling over. Standing still. When someone paying attention to my world mentioned a leadership programme, four months, compressed, twenty hours a week on top of everything else, I laughed, because I couldn't find twenty hours to save my life. The answer I got back has stuck with me since: if you can't find the twenty hours, you're exactly the person who needs to.

Five years into running the business by then, I'd been through some difficult years and come out the other side of them, and for a while I let myself believe that surviving counted as progress. It didn't. What I'd actually done was rebuild the same business: the same antiquated processes, the same underinvestment, the same people doing the same jobs the same way they'd always done them, because nobody had ever shown them another way of doing them. There's a particular kind of humility required to look at a business you've run for five years and admit its only real asset was you, still standing, still propping it up. No differentiation from anyone else doing the same work. No structural margin to speak of. Nothing on the balance sheet you could point to and call an asset. Just the same wheel, turning, because I was the one turning it.

I've since come to think of what was actually wrong with the business, and with most owner-managed businesses I meet, as some combination of four things the leader controls:

Time, Execution, Mindset & Structure

Time constrained is what I've just described, too busy doing everything for everyone to think beyond the day in front of you.

Execution constrained sits underneath it. This is operating craft. The discipline, delegation, and people-development competence that lets you run well what you've already got.

Mindset constrained is the quieter one, the belief that you don't have to be the only one holding it all together, that debt doesn't have to be a voyage into the unknown, that the way you've always done isn't the only way available to you. The understanding that a bigger, more profitable, more impactful version of what you know is open to you.

And Structure is the hardest to see from inside your own business, and the hardest to fix from inside it too. It isn't just that the business itself, the market it's in, its margins, its differentiation, its assets, isn't built for growth. It's that seeing that clearly, and knowing what to build instead, is a different capability entirely from the operating craft that runs the business well day to day. You can be excellent at execution and still have no real judgement about whether your position is defensible or your assets are the right ones to be holding. No amount of willpower closes that gap. You need to start again and build it brick by brick, and you usually need someone who already knows what a differentiated, dynamic, protectable position looks like to help you see what yours should be.

None of this, worth saying plainly, protects a business from a market being reshaped underneath it by competitors adopting new technology or by forces entirely outside anyone's control. That's real, and it's a different piece.

Despite initially laughing at the idea, I complete the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business programme in 2018. The programme forces you through every function that drives commercial performance, one at a time, and distils all of it down to a handful of deliverables you actually commit to doing.

What it did for me wasn't teach me anything I couldn't have worked out for myself given enough time. It removed the time. Four months away forced delegation I'd never have chosen to make voluntarily, which closed the execution gap by necessity rather than instruction, and closed the mindset gap the same way, because once you've handed the wheel to someone else and the business hasn't fallen over, the belief that only you can hold it together doesn't survive the experience. I came out with a single deliverable that mattered more than the rest: hire an operations manager who actually knew what scaling a manufacturing business looked like, and use that hire as the lever for everything else.

The leaders I've since found I work best with, and best understand, share a particular character, and I don't think it's an accident that it's the same character I saw in the other leaders on that programme.

Humble, in the sense of being grounded rather than status-seeking, but competitive and driven underneath that humility, with a relentless quality that has nothing to do with ego. Capable at the actual work, not exploring or dabbling. Willing to evolve, to be told a hard truth about their own business without getting defensive about it. Usually underfunded or under-resourced relative to what they're actually capable of, which is not the same as being incapable. That combination, humble enough to hear it, driven enough to still want more once they have, is what gives someone a real chance of making this move. It isn't universal. Plenty of capable people never get there, not for lack of ability but for lack of that particular mix.

Structure was the piece none of that touched. Time, skills and mindset stopped being the constraint, and for a while I believed, the way most owner-managers believe, that once the leadership piece was sorted the rest would follow, that capital would find me once I'd proven I could lead. It didn't work like that, and understanding why took me a lot longer than the four months did. That's a different problem, and a different piece.