Work on the business, not in the business
"In a growing business you end up with the responsibility for it all and you risk burn out trying to do both. Doing long days/nights and being less efficient at both working ‘on’ and ‘in’ the business."
Suzanne Linton | Co-founder | Freestyle
Questions:
> How would you explain what “work on the business, not in the business” means?
> What do you think about this ‘advice’?
> Would you give this advice to other people?
> If not, what alternative advice would you give to agency leaders?
> What was Suzanne Linton's end goal at the beginning of building her business and how has it changed since?
How would you explain what “work on the business, not in the business” means?
Simply put, I have always thought that this means you should stop yourself getting pulled into the day to day operations of the business and instead take time to plan for the bigger picture and the future direction of the business.
Thinking deeper, it made me question what the original message was when this was first coined in 1986 by Michael Gerber in The E-Myth. It turns out it’s more nuanced than that!
The E-Myth perspective is that most businesses are grown from an individual's skill. Agency startups are often created by highly talented specialists; a writer, coder, designer who loves what they do. As the success rolls in and the work increases you add more practitioners and everyone gets busy doing the do. The danger is that you never move away from the day to day tasks, doing the thing you love, and you fail to create a business that can scale and exist without you.
In Gerber’s view a true entrepreneur starts off with a plan to build a scalable company with processes and procedures that don’t rely on their own effort and ability to produce results - right from the start.
So what he is really saying is that you should codify your ‘magic sauce’ into management systems and processes for others to replicate, so that your business can operate without you and can truly scale your business. And that you need to do this as early as possible on your growth journey. The good news is that it’s never too late to start.
What do you think about this ‘advice’?
I think it is important to work out what you really want from your business. Do you want to stay small and create/deliver for your clients yourself, or do you want to grow? If you want to grow, then you need to start planning!
I’ve met many people who want to deliver amazing work, their craft is their passion and as an artisan, having to organise and manage the business (and people!) is soul destroying stuff - this drives resentment that they end up doing all the crap.
I’ve met a couple of folk who have a passion for building a business from the get go, those who are happier working on the business in the first place, where the business itself becomes the product and they’ve imagined up front every system their team needs to create an exceptional client experience - without them as part of the delivery.
I’ve met a few who have successfully transitioned from the artisan into the scalable business when they realised they want something different from what they originally set out to do.
For many of us we’re caught in the middle of these options. We love what we do and really enjoy solving our clients’ problems, we want to grow and step away from some of the day to day but the demands of running a business - the people stuff, the bank, office leases, how the various management software packages best integrates etc. - pull us away from doing the things we want to be doing.
In a growing business you end up with the responsibility for it all and you risk burn out trying to do both, meaning long days and nights, and being less efficient at both working ‘on’ and ‘in’ the business.
Would you give this advice to other people?
You can run yourself ragged and end up with very little at the end of the journey unless you plan with intent for a bigger future.
That does mean taking time to plan for your bright and shiny future and to keep updating those plans when tested against reality. It does mean codifying the thing that makes you special, the things that make your clients want more and refer you to others.
If not, what alternative advice would you give to agency leaders?
It comes down to what you choose as your end goal. You can stay small and niche - I can honestly say we made a lot more money as a small business with a lot fewer headaches - but you need to squirrel away those profits for your pension because you’ll not be able to maximise on a future sale if you are so embedded in the delivery of work.
You can also derive huge satisfaction from only ever doing the work you love; so you might never need to grow much - or at all - as long as your eyes are open from the start, and recognise that yours isn’t an agency that will increase in value or be attractive to buyers.
However, I have to honestly say I can’t imagine ever planning to stay small, even if it was more profitable - it would have just been so frustrating and felt limiting. So I’d advise any agency leader to think about the end game early on in the agency’s life. It will make decisions on recruitment, proposition, culture much easier if you know why you’re doing it. And it can change along the way, don’t be afraid of that.
What was Suzanne Linton's end goal at the beginning of building her business and how has it changed since?
We didn't have an end goal when we started (see above for advice!). We set up Freestyle to get away from big company politics and constraints, to have a better balance between work and personal life and to promote a better way of working as a team - primarily around our experience of how well a sports team can work together.
At the start we just wanted to change the world, without much thought for how that might look in 5, 10, 25 years time. There’s still a big part of that desire in us, but after all this time it’s mostly about having a good business. We work with people, both clients and team, so choose the best of them and enjoy adult relationships. Make a profit, enjoy the experience of working, create great work, and make a business that has saleable value in the next few years!
We learnt a lot over the years - that you do need to put processes in place (even when it goes against the grain), especially as you get beyond around 20 people. Once you have more stuff going on than can be realistically held in your head, you need to structure and school the rest of the business to step up and replicate what you do, without you. Then you can accelerate past 30 people with less pain.
The most valuable time for us was when we had sufficient process in the business for us to be able to step away for 3 months to travel - we realised on returning that we had a much clearer insight into the direction we needed to take.
By being out of the business, we had stopped thinking about all the problems we might face on daily decisions, and just got on and made the best decisions for the whole business, to allow it to thrive. The clarity on the future direction of the business that 3 months out of the business gave us was exhilarating. But beware, this gets eroded very quickly without a plan to keep your head a little bit ‘outside looking in’!
Suzanne Linton's bio
Suzanne is the co-founder of digital transformation agency Freestyle.
Freestyle has morphed over 26 years from video production, digital marketing and web design and build to the digital transformation agency we are today. Throughout we’ve been technology evangelists and honed our skills in understanding how complex businesses work, in advising and delivering on the best technical approaches, in finding and plugging the technology gaps between what drives the customer and a client’s drivers. We deliver pragmatic strategies and technical solutions to keep clients in the best shape for their customers and most efficient for their employees.
Having led Freestyle for 25 years, Suzanne Linton has now handed over the MD reins to Emma Simkiss (and she is an awesome horsewoman so good with reins) which means Suzanne will now be focussing on Freestyle’s next phase of growth, on partnering with other agencies and talking more about how and what Freestyle does to anyone that will listen.
Aside from Freestyle, Suzanne represents SME’s on the CBI WM Council, she holds a couple of swimming Masters European records (hence the name of the company) – and was recently named Business Woman of the Year 2022.
Humble promo of Suzanne Linton and Freestyle
Suzanne's curiosity makes her what I call an "infinite learner" and someone you can always rely on to have a well considered answer to a question. How she went about answering the questions above proves my point. We rush through life at a ferocious pace these days, forgetting to stop and dig a little deeper, missing the true meaning behind things people say. Not Suzanne! She'll be on it wanting to understand every angle. It's an incredible trait, one that clearly has helped her build a fantastic agency. I'm not surprised she's won business women of the year!
Cheers,
Daniel
Explore other perspectives
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