The Question Nobody Answers Out Loud

I ask it in every room. In the last five years, did your business have a model, and did you follow it? The room goes quiet. Not an awkward quiet, more a thoughtful one, as if everyone is checking a memory. A few people look at the table. Nobody answers out loud, and after a moment I move on, because the silence has done the work the question was for.

The silence is interesting because of who is in the room. These are not people who are short of opinions. They run businesses, they hire and fire, they make decisions all day that affect other people's livelihoods. Ask them about their market and they will talk for an hour. Ask them about their customers and they will tell you stories. Ask them whether the business had a model and followed it, and the same confident people say nothing, because the honest answer is that there was a plan once, early on, possibly for a bank or an investor, and it was never looked at again. Or there was no plan at all, and the business got here on instinct and effort, and nobody has had the nerve to say that out loud either.

What the silence tells me is that the owner already knows. This is the part that took me years to understand. The owner of a roof-first business is not unaware that the floor is missing. She has known for a long time. She knows it in the week before payroll, in the meeting where the accountant asks a question she cannot answer, in the moment a competitor raises prices and she realises she has no idea whether she could. She knows, and she has decided, without ever quite deciding, that it is easier to keep working than to look.

I recognise this because I did it myself, not with a business but with a body. On my fortieth birthday I was in a hospital bed with high blood sugar and chronic stress, and I had been too busy to look at either. The looking took three months and I have not needed the medication since. The not looking had taken years and could have cost a great deal more. The pattern is identical. The information is available. The owner is capable of reading it. What is missing is the decision to stop and look.

The response to the question is not a long one, and I would rather you gave it to yourself than to me.

Did the business have a model? If yes, when was it last opened, and did the real numbers get compared to it even once? If no, then you now know what the next thirty days are for. Did you follow it? If the model existed and the business did something else, that is useful too, because it tells you the model was built for someone other than you, a bank, an investor, a former partner, and you need one that is yours.

Then ask the question that sits behind the first one. If nothing changes, what does the business look like on the same date next year? Most owners can answer this immediately, and the answer is usually the same clients, the same price, the same hours, the same number. That is a model too, the default one, and the year will follow it whether or not you write it down.

There is one more version of the question worth asking, and it is the uncomfortable one. If you had followed a model for the last five years, what would be different now? Most owners, when they sit with that, name the same two or three things: a price that would have gone up two years ago, a hire that would have been made or not made, a client that would have been let go. Those are the decisions a floor makes possible, and their absence is the cost of not having one.

The reason I ask the question in rooms rather than in private is that the silence is shared. Every person at the table discovers that the others are in the same position, and the shame goes out of it. The floor being missing is not a personal failing. It is the normal condition of a business built in the normal order. The only question that matters is whether you put it in this year or leave it another five. Tomorrow I want to look at why the normal order is the normal order, and who benefits from it staying that way.

Continue reading: Why Nearly Everyone Builds This Way →

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