“Everywhere means nowhere.” – Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, Letter II (trans. Richard M. Gummere, 1917)
A Reasonable Year, and Nothing Left
It’s the first week of November, and the founder of a distribution business is working through the October figures ahead of next week’s budget meeting for the following year. This hasn’t been a bad year – there were a couple of tough months, and one customer cut its orders by more than anyone expected, but the business is still profitable, the team is largely intact and the bank is content. What’s missing is the leadership energy that took the founder into January full of plans. It’s been running thin since about September, and a weekend no longer puts the energy back.
Ask how things are and the answer is usually the same: it’s just this time of year. Everyone’s tired by November, none of us is getting any younger, December is always a scramble, and the holidays will sort it out. There’s some truth in that, and I wouldn’t just dismiss it. It’s been a long year, the days are full, and most of the people the founder deals with would say much the same about themselves.
But a few streets away, someone else runs a business of a similar size, in the same sector, through the same year. The same interest rates, the same customers pushing on price, the same unpredictable suppliers. They’ve worked just as hard and had their share of uncomfortable decisions. Yet they’ve reached this point with something left in the tank: enough to think properly about next year rather than simply getting through this one.
Ask them about the difference and they’d probably put it down to stamina or temperament. I’m not convinced that explains as much as either of them assumes.
The Year Moved On, and the Business Stayed Where It Was
November happens to be when this shows for businesses whose year ends in December, but I see the same thing in the last weeks of Q4 whatever the year-end, when people are being measured against the year’s targets and next year’s budget is being put together. Most businesses start that year with an established way of working. Managers know what they’re responsible for, approval levels are understood, and the monthly management meeting has a familiar shape and length. On paper, the arrangements fit the business as it was planned when the budget was agreed.
Then the year gets going. A major customer changes the way it buys, consolidating its orders and stretching its payment terms. A supplier puts its prices up and starts missing delivery dates. Margins come under pressure in the middle of the year, and the operations manager leaves in July, with the replacement not starting until October. None of it, on its own, seems to call for rethinking how the business is run. The arrangements still look sensible, and in a normal year they probably would be.
Somebody, though, has to make up the difference between what those arrangements were designed to handle and what the business now needs. In an owner-led business, that somebody is nearly always the owner. It’s the same build-up of decisions at the top that happens in any growing business, except that by the last quarter it has had a full year of changed conditions added to it.
You can watch it happen in the monthly management meeting. In January it runs to an hour, and most of the items are for information. By October it runs to two, and item after item ends with the owner deciding, approving or agreeing to “have a word”. Or there’s the owner who stepped into the supplier problem when the operations manager left, fully intending to hand it back once the new person was in place. It’s November, and they’re still the one taking the supplier’s calls.
Each of those extra decisions was perfectly reasonable when it was taken. Nobody would criticise an owner for protecting a key customer or keeping a difficult supplier in line during a rough patch. It’s the accumulation that matters, and over the course of the year it has changed the job. If the business only works because you’re exhausted, that isn’t commitment. That’s the design showing you its price.
Where the Time Has Gone
Go back to the two owners for a moment. Both have worked hard, and both have dealt with difficult circumstances. The difference, more often than not, lies in where their time has gone. The founder has spent a good part of the year on matters that should have been resolved somewhere else, like the supplier calls that never went back. The owner a few streets away has spent most of it on the things that really needed them. When their operations manager left in the spring, the supplier relationship went to the buyer who’d sat in on every supplier meeting, and by August they hadn’t taken a supplier’s call in months.
The founder’s kind of tiredness can come from quite different places. Some owners are still answering questions their managers should be answering, so the day becomes a stream of small decisions that each take two minutes and together fill the week. It’s decision fatigue in its most ordinary form. Others have delegated properly on paper but still check everything before it goes out, so nothing is really finished until they’ve seen it. And some took control back during a hard quarter, for good reasons at the time, and have not yet found the moment to hand it on again.
You’ll probably recognise the manager who brings a routine pricing exception to the owner’s door, despite having the title, the authority and the experience to deal with it. Or the customer proposal that’s been checked by three people and is still waiting for the owner’s final look before it can go. All three owners would say they’re tired from working hard, and they’d be right. But they’re describing different things about how their businesses work.
Some of it is circumstance, of course. A genuinely hard quarter justifies extraordinary involvement, and an owner who steps in to protect cash or a major customer is usually doing exactly what they should. Pressures at home or with health can account for tiredness in their own right, too. What matters is whether the extra involvement went away once the circumstances did. Approvals that still need you every week, long after the hard quarter has passed, have stopped being circumstances and become part of how the business works.
The Decisions That Shape Next Year
All of this would matter less if the last weeks of the year were simply about getting through. They’re not. Late in Q4 the owner is setting next year’s budget, agreeing priorities, deciding which investments go ahead and which roles get filled. These are the decisions where fresh thinking is most important, together with a willingness to question what has become the norm, and they come at the point when the owner has the least energy left to give them.
The budget meeting is where it shows most clearly. The first draft usually starts with this year’s figures and adds a percentage: so much for sales growth, so much for cost increases, perhaps an allowance for inflation. I’ve sat through a good many of those meetings over the years, and I suspect tiredness is a large part of why so many budgets end up as “this year plus x%” across both revenue and costs.
To be fair, there’s nothing inherently wrong with that approach. Where a business is stable and its assumptions still hold, it’s quick, sensible and easy to defend. It also avoids a round of awkward conversations with managers, and many smaller businesses don’t have a model built on what really drives their numbers anyway. But it’s a very attractive default when everyone is tired and time is short, because it asks nobody to reopen anything.
Zero-based budgeting is the obvious contrast. Building the budget from the ground up forces questions that a simple uplift never asks. Why are we expecting this revenue? Do the margins still make sense? Why are we still spending this? The irony is that it demands the most effort at exactly the point when there’s least available. Whether anyone has the capacity to ask those questions in the last weeks of the year depends less on willpower than on how the business has been set up.
Something similar happens with new investment. A proposal comes forward for an operations manager, or a system that would take a good chunk of routine work off the owner’s desk. Deferring it can be entirely prudent if the business can’t absorb it yet. But when the deciding factor is that the owner can’t face another thing to supervise, that tells you something about how the business is set up. The very thing that might reduce the load gets put off because of the load.
We already know how thinking narrows under sustained load: familiar options start to look safer, and new ones start to look like more work. That doesn’t mean tired owners make bad decisions. Plenty make excellent ones. It means the way the business runs has used up attention the owner needed for the year’s biggest decisions.
Jeff Bezos put it plainly at the Economic Club of Washington in 2018: “As a senior executive, what do you really get paid to do? You get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.” Later in the same conversation, explaining why he wouldn’t trade sleep for more time to decide things, he asked whether that was really worth it “if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you’re tired or grouchy or any number of things”.
It’s tempting to dismiss all this as a luxury of running a very large company. I’d argue the opposite. An owner of a fifty-person business may have a remarkable number of decisions landing on their desk, without anything approaching the structure Bezos had to filter them. And next year will be built on whatever gets decided in those tired weeks.
Nobody Sets the Owner a Duty Limit
Flying treats tiredness very differently from the way most businesses do. The FAA’s guidance on whether a pilot is fit to fly applies the same logic to the pilot as to the aircraft: both need checking regularly, and anything found wrong needs putting right before flying. Private pilots run through a short personal check before every flight, covering things like illness, stress and fatigue. Commercial pilots go much further, with regular simulator checks, line checks and medicals, and they work to hard limits on their hours, just as truck and bus drivers do on the roads.
None of that reflects on anyone’s commitment. It exists because endurance isn’t infinitely reliable, and fatigue can affect performance before the person involved fully recognises its effects.
Running a business isn’t flying an aircraft, of course. But I do wonder why we pay such careful attention to the condition of our equipment, our systems and our cash, and so little to the condition of the person making the most consequential decisions.
Pilots even have a name for the urge to press on to the destination regardless: get-there-itis. Plenty of owners spend the last weeks of the year in much the same state, pushing on towards the break whatever it costs. The difference is that nobody sets an owner a duty limit, and nobody checks whether they’re fit for the next leg.
What the Board Doesn’t See in the Numbers
I know how lonely the CEO’s role can be. The people reporting to you expect answers, and the board expects you to have things under control, so there are very few places where you can think through an unresolved problem without at the same time having to reassure somebody. In all my years doing the job I never had a chair I could simply talk things through with before matters became formal board business, and I’ve often thought how much difference that might have made.
Most of what reaches a board describes what has already happened. The management accounts, the cash position and the debtors’ book are all useful, and all of them look backwards. Even the forecast is largely built on what management already knows and has chosen to put in writing. Boards talk readily enough about key-person risk, but far less often about the key person’s capacity.
I’ve seen board meetings where the figures were perfectly satisfactory, yet the CEO was visibly stretched and nobody asked why. How the CEO is handling the load can tell you what’s coming. A CEO who is being drawn further into routine matters, struggling to find time for anything strategic, or reluctant to take on anything new may be responding to something that hasn’t reached the figures yet. A major customer might be reviewing its suppliers. An important supplier relationship might be going sour. Or there may be a serious personal matter that nobody at the board table knows about.
From the outside, nobody can tell which it is. The value lies in having the kind of relationship where it can be raised early, over a coffee or a phone call between meetings, rather than discovered in next quarter’s numbers. CEOs, in my experience, tend to hold bad news until they have a solution to put alongside it. It’s human rather than evasive, and most of us have done it. But it does mean the board often hears about a problem a month or two after the CEO started losing sleep over it.
Timing matters here, too. Many boards hold the annual CEO review towards the end of the financial year, which often means during the hardest quarter, with the CEO at their most stretched. It’s easy for recent pressures to take over that conversation. Contact through the year gives the context that a single review late in Q4 never can.
In many owner-led businesses the gap is wider still. Some have no independent board at all, and others have one that meets, approves and offers very little real challenge or support. Either way, there may be nobody outside the management team watching how much the business has come to depend on the person running it. We routinely ask whether a business has enough financial and operational capacity for what it’s trying to do. I’m less sure how often anyone asks whether the way it operates is using up more of its leader’s capacity than it should.
Staying Close Without Being Indispensable
An owner can recognise that too much depends on them and still do very little about it. They know their managers could take more decisions, that they ought to have more time to think about where the business is going, and that their own involvement is becoming a constraint. Yet very little changes from one year to the next. I’ve seen this often enough to suspect that something beyond the way the business operates is keeping them involved.
For someone who has built a business through personal effort and close involvement, being needed is a large part of what makes the job worthwhile. It’s reassuring to know that people still bring you the difficult questions, that you can fix what others can’t, and that your involvement makes a visible difference. The difficulty comes when being needed becomes the main measure of your value to the business. At that point, letting go stops being an operational question and becomes a personal one: what is my purpose if the business doesn’t need me for everything? It’s one reason the shift from doing to leading so often waits too long.
It shows in small moments. The owner comes back from a few days away to find that everything was handled perfectly well in their absence. Alongside the relief there’s an uncomfortable thought that perhaps the business didn’t need them quite as much as they’d assumed. Or a manager resolves a difficult customer complaint without involving anyone, and the owner is pleased, but slightly put out that they only heard about it afterwards. Neither reaction is surprising. Much of an owner’s identity can grow up around being the person who knows what to do when everyone else is unsure.
The alternative isn’t to disappear. An experienced owner should stay close enough to sense where risk is building, to challenge an assumption that doesn’t look right, and to step in when stepping in is warranted. What changes is whether that involvement is a choice or a condition of the business working at all. Businesses that perform without someone constantly pushing still have owners who care a great deal about what happens in them. They just aren’t the main thing holding it together every day.
Before the Break
The results for the year are what they are. They may be better than expected, disappointing, or somewhere in between, and some years genuinely do demand an exceptional effort from everyone, owner included.
But alongside the management accounts there’s another piece of information that rarely makes it into any report: how much personal intervention, checking and endurance the year took to produce those results. A holiday may restore the owner’s leadership energy. It won’t necessarily change how the business uses it.
If my energy at this point in the year tells me something about how the business operates, rather than simply how hard I’ve worked, what will next year demand of me if nothing changes?
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