Every company owner feels like it’s all too much at some point, the good ones ask for help.
Business consultancy is something big companies spend billions on every year. Why? Because big companies know that to meet their targets, they need to invest in “the other voice”.
For a lot of small and medium companies, there’s an issue with that first sentence.
- They don’t have billions
- There are no targets
- They have no “other voice”
Let me take those one at a time, because two of them are good news.
You don’t have billions. Good. You don’t need them. Most of what a big company buys with that money is the management of something huge. You’re not huge and that’s great. Unlike them, you can begin the journey out of it feeling too much with one conversation.
You don’t have targets. Not real ones. Not the kind painted on a boardroom wall with twelve people paid to hit them. You have something in your head instead. A number you’d like to see. A life you’d like to get back. Nobody sets it but you, and nobody checks it but you. Some days that feels like freedom. Other days it means the only person holding you to account is the same tired person having to do the work with few staff and little time.
And so, the third one.
The other voice.
This is the thing the billions actually buy. Not cleverness, big companies have plenty and so do you.
What they are paying for is someone whose entire job is to be the other voice in the room. A consultant, like me, brought in not to know more than you, but to see what you can’t, because they aren’t standing where you’re standing.
You can’t do it. Not because you’re amazing, but entirely because you are inside it.
How can you see your own company? You are too close, too invested, too tired. And the people who could hold the mirror up, your team, mostly won’t, because you sign their wages, and nobody offers a hard truth to the person who pays them. The people who love you won’t either, because they love you. All these things lead to you becoming the only voice. And the only voice, however good, ends up talking to itself.
In my experience as a business consultant, this is what “it’s all too much” actually is.
If it’s too much work then it’s too much of you. Every decision routed through one head, tested against nothing but itself, at eleven o’clock at night, again.
So when the good ones ask for help, and they do, it isn’t because they have failed. It’s because one head is one head. It does not matter how good it is.
The other voice doesn’t need billions. It doesn’t need a target on a wall. It needs to be honest, it needs to come from outside the building, and it needs to be on your side, which is not the same as agreeing with you. That’s what I do.
Big companies dress it all up as something magical, I think it’s a lot simpler than that, and costs a lot less money.
