It’s my business but do I have to run it?

I recently met a guy, Oliver, running a decent sized – and profitable – business, but not enjoying it. He reminded me of a chap, Max, I met a few years back in a similar situation.

Max had spotted a neat opportunity, developing fire alarm systems for a specific industry. He started a small business working as a one-man band developing and fitting the systems. The projects were quite sizeable and he was greatly in demand so he hired a couple of guys to help him.

Within three years he had a 40 employees, multiple locations, a management team and a job running a business. He hated it.

Max truly loved developing and fitting systems. He didn’t love managing people, he didn’t like setting strategy, and he loathed making business decisions.

What did Max do? He hired a CEO and returned to working in the business.

Max still owned the company (although over time he did give a small portion to the CEO) and kept an eye on the business through his continuing role as a director. He hired a couple of other directors and together with the CEO and the management team Max felt that his asset – the business – was in the best possible hands.

Despite the fact that he had built a successful business, the guy I met recently, Oliver, felt that he was a failure because he didn’t want to run his own business. Oliver isn’t alone. There are many accidental CEOs – people running businesses because they found a good way to leverage a technical skill – and plenty of them don’t actually want to be CEOs. They want to be ‘back on the tools’.

So why don’t they just hire someone to run the business like Max did?

I think it’s because business owners feel obliged to be at the helm, and they take literally the single most popular piece of advice given to small- and medium-sized business owners “work on the business not in the business”.

It’s very good advice. But it doesn’t mean that you have to be the one working on-the-business-not-in-it. It just means that someone needs to be working on-the-business-not-in-it.

The point for all of us is that we should be able to answer in the affirmative the question, “Did I have the opportunity to do my best work today?” If it’s your business and the answer to that is “no”, you owe it to yourself and the business to change you role.

The best way to protect and grow your business is to have everyone in it playing to their strengths and doing their best work. Especially you.

Julia Bickerstaff’s expertise is in helping businesses grow profitably. She runs two businesses:Butterfly Coaching, a small advisory firm with a unique approach to assisting SMEs with profitable growth; and The Business Bakery, which helps kitchen table tycoons build their best businesses. Julia is the author of “How to Bake a Business”  and was previously a partner at Deloitte. She is a chartered accountant and has a degree in economics from The London School of Economics (London University).