It Does Not Shout

For three weeks I have written about the floor: the business model, the financial model, the operating plan, and the house that goes up straight when it is built on them. Today I want to go underneath the floor, to the thing that was there before any of it and that decided, quietly, how the house got built in the first place. It is fear, and the reason it is so hard to see is that it does not shout. It whispers, and what it whispers sounds like good sense.

Here are four things I hear from owners every week, and I want you to notice how reasonable each one is. Keep the price where it is until the new client has settled. Post it next week, when it is properly ready. Do the proposal yourself, it is quicker than explaining it. Hire once things calm down. Each of these is a sentence a sensible person might say. None of them sounds like fear. Together they are last year's number again, because the price did not go up, the thing did not go out, the owner did the work herself, and the hire did not happen, and a year in which none of those four things changes is a year that ends where it started.

This is why the floor matters so much and why it is not enough on its own. The model can tell you that the price should rise and the hire should happen. It cannot make you do either, and the thing that stops you is not a gap in the arithmetic. It is a feeling, dressed as a reason, that arrives at the moment of decision and sounds exactly like prudence. The owner who has built the floor and still ends the year on the same number has usually been talked out of her own plan, one reasonable sentence at a time, by a voice that never raised itself.

I spent thirty years in rooms where fear was priced. An IPO that might not get away. A raise that might not close. A board that might not back the plan. In those rooms fear was discussed openly, because the stakes made it impossible to ignore. In an owner-led business it is rarely named, because nobody is there to name it, and so it runs the business unopposed.

The response begins with recognising the whisper for what it is, and the test is not whether the sentence is reasonable. It is whether it keeps the number where it was.

Take the four sentences and ask of each one what it protects. Keeping the price protects the owner from a no. Postponing the post protects her from being seen. Doing the proposal herself protects her from the discomfort of asking, and from the possibility that someone else does it differently. Not hiring protects her from the commitment and from the fear that the work will dry up and the salary will not. Each is a fear with a reasonable sentence in front of it, and the model, which has no fear, says all four should happen.

Then look at the decision you brought into this year and did not make. Most owners have one. A hire, a price rise, a step back from the day-to-day, a new offer. It has been carried for longer than a quarter, often for longer than a year, and every month there has been a reasonable sentence for why not now. That decision is where the fear lives, and it is the decision that would most change the number.

Tomorrow evening I am running a session on this. It is called The Nine Fears, and the floor underneath your business, and it is about which of the nine fears is running yours, what to do in the ninety seconds after it shows up, and which line the business is on for 2027. It is free, it is about an hour, and it is at five in the afternoon UK time. The essays this month have built the floor. The session is about the thing underneath it that decides whether you stand on it. Tomorrow morning's essay is about those ninety seconds, because they are the most practical thing I know about fear.

Continue reading: Ninety Seconds →

The session: The Nine Fears, and the floor underneath your business. Wednesday 2 December, 5pm UK, free →

Or start the diagnosis: Take the free 10-minute Entrepreneur Gap scan →

The book: The Science of Getting Rich and How to Apply It →