He'd still load a barrow if you asked him

Read time: 4 mins

Morning — here's this week:

— The most down-to-earth bloke I've met this year, and what he does differently

— Why your business has been the same size for four years

— One thing worth doing before Friday

I met Roger Line recently.

If you don't know him: he runs Structural Repairs, an engineering firm that fixes concrete structures — bridges, rail, marine, heritage buildings. He picked up Entrepreneur of the Year at the National Entrepreneurs Convention a couple of years back.

He also left school with a U in maths, which he's entirely relaxed about telling people.

He started out supplying concrete. Small operation. Today the business turns over a figure that would make most people in this email blink, and he's set himself a target that's roughly ten times bigger than that (It would take him to revenue over £1B). Having spent time with him, I wouldn't bet against it.

And here's the thing.

If you met him in a pub, you'd assume he was still delivering a load of concrete in a wheelbarrow fot your shed foundations. No airs, no jargon, no performance. Completely normal bloke.

So I've been trying to work out what he actually does differently. As far as I can tell, it's two things, and neither is complicated.

He knows his numbers. Not roughly — properly, off the top of his head, the ones that matter.

And everything that isn't the thing he's brilliant at, he hands to someone else. Marketing, finance, the lot. So his week is spent on the work only he can do.

That's it. That's the whole method.

Which is worth thinking about, if your business has been roughly the same size for a while.

Nobody says this one out loud very often. It comes out sideways.

"We're doing all right. We've been about the same for three or four years now, if I'm honest."

And it's rarely a demand problem. The enquiries are there. The work is there. It's just that nothing gets bigger.

Here's what I find nearly every time.

The business is exactly the size of what the owner can personally touch.

Every quote goes through them. Every problem lands on them. Every decision waits for them. And that works — it's usually why the business got this far, because the owner is genuinely good and cares more than anyone else does.

But it sets a ceiling. And the ceiling is one person's working week.

The things that would lift it — marketing, systems, someone senior enough to take real work off you — all require time from the person who has none. So they never happen. And the business settles at whatever size one very capable person can hold in their head.

Four years later, it's still that size.

The instinct when you hit that ceiling is to work harder, and it never works, because there isn't a harder available.

The other instinct is to hand things over. Which is right, but it goes wrong more often than it works — and the reason it goes wrong is the bit people skip.

You can hand over the doing. You can't hand over the knowing.

Roger didn't stop understanding his numbers when he stopped doing the work himself. If anything, he got sharper about them, because the numbers became the only way he could tell whether the people doing it were any good.

That's the order it has to happen in. Understand it, then hand it over.

Do it the other way round, and you get the thing I see constantly — someone paying a monthly fee for something they can't evaluate, for two or three years, until they eventually cancel it in frustration without ever having known whether it worked.

That isn't outsourcing. That's just hoping, with an invoice attached.

Ten minutes. Do it before Friday.

Write down the three things in your business that genuinely only you can do. Not the things you're best at — the things that would actually break if you weren't there.

Most people find it's a shorter list than they expected. Usually it's something like: the relationships that matter, the pricing on the big jobs, and deciding where the business goes next.

Now think back over last week, and work out roughly what proportion of your time went on those three.

If it's under a quarter, you've found your ceiling. It isn't demand, and it isn't effort. It's that the person who's meant to be steering has been doing the rowing.

This week's prompt: work out what to hand over first, and what you'd need to know before you could.

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