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You’re working 60+ hours a week. But is your business growing the way you want? No?
You might have heard this phrase before :
You need to work on the business, not in the business.
If you’ve heard it and you understand it fully and completely, there’s no need to read this post. But, I’ll leave you with one observation I’ve made before you bounce out—distancing yourself from what’s going on inside your business removes much of your direct influence from the culture and makes it more likely that it will drift from your vision.
For a mature organization that’s already built and exists in a holding pattern, maybe that’s fine. But for an entrepreneur or a builder who’s still sculpting what will be, you might find yourself in an unrecognizable place and not realize how you got there.
For the folks who haven’t heard the phrase before, let’s talk about the difference between them.
Working in the Business
You’re involved in the day-to-day of the business, or your team, or your product, or the thing which you’re responsible for nurturing and growing. Maybe you have a style of leadership which rests on delegation… maybe you have a servant-leader style which rests on rolling up your sleeves and working alongside others.
Both styles can work, both have their pros and cons. I’ve always favoured leadership styles which place you at the action centres of the business. After all, if you’re going to ask others to devote themselves to your cause and ask them to make sacrifices, shouldn’t you do the same? There’s immense value in showing up, being present, and putting what’s good for the group ahead of what’s only good for you (as the leader).
But, I digress. Working in the business means being in the thick of the details and the nitty gritty. Paul Graham of Y Combinator labelled this “Founder Mode” in the fall of 2024 and predictably, it made waves in Silicon Valley culture as the newest new thing, with many in the bubble proclaiming it revolutionary and lamenting that they wished they’d known about it long before—as if there had never been senior organizational leaders who preferred to be in the thick of the details for the right reasons.
Working in the business is good. But, it can also block your peripheral vision and your view of the horizon.
There’s another saying that’s relevant on this point :
Can’t see the forest for the trees.
Or, you become so focused on the details that you have trouble seeing the bigger picture.
Popular opinion and the trailing thought leadership exist on a pendulum—they swing back and forth, and Founder Mode is just one swing in the opposite direction of where popular opinion had once been. You don’t need to follow along, just because.
Working on the Business
Working on the business means that you spend your time and efforts building up the capacity of your organization or team to serve customers / do great work / make an impact. Treating your business as if it’s a product to be iterated on and improved is at the core of this concept.
What does that mean in practice?
Regularly stepping back to get a wider view of your operations and the market which you’re serving. You need to be able to take the same approach to serving your customers and the market as you do to building the capacity of the business. It can be helpful to apply similar terminology to the inside of your business as you do to the world outside of your business.
For instance, you have customers—they buy things from you. You also have employees—they contribute time, expertise, and effort to produce what your customers buy. So, what if you thought of your employees as customers too?
Let’s harmonize that concept :
Your customers need things from you (products/services at a particular price).
Your employees also need things from you (a living wage and incentives, support, empowerment, technology/equipment, and a sense of purpose).
Since both groups need things from you, think of them both as customers. Does that change your mental relationship between you and employees, as you think about how you behave with respect to them? Start managing both groups with the same intention : solving real problems.
Now that we’re thinking of employees as customers, what changes? What do your employees-as-customers need in order to be more effective at serving their customers? If you don’t know, ask them. Determine what’s reasonable (and practical to implement), and in what time you can make change..
Ta-dah! You’re working on the business.
Estimating the value that you could add to the business by enacting change also helps to ground your decisions in reality—we all like a prize to work towards, after all. The same thought process can apply to every part of your business—technology, operations, production, strategy, and the connecting layers in between.
When working on the business, there are a few guiding questions that are worth their weight in gold :
How do we make this simpler?
How do we make this more effective?
How do we build our capacity to create happy customers?
Working in the Business AND on the Business
Like much of the commentary around the topic will suggest to you, this isn’t a binary choice. It’s not a matter of choosing one or the other—though it’s harder to do, you need to focus on both at different points in time.
Why?
Working in the business makes the process of understanding how to work on the business more natural to you. When you see firsthand the bottlenecks and pain points your internal customers (employees) encounter, you begin to instinctively think about how to address them.
Working in the business is also a very effective way to build bridges and trust with internal customers and other stakeholders who you might otherwise not have a lot of interaction with. That in turn makes it easier to implement change when the time comes.
Is there enough time in the day to do both?
Yes. But, it’s a harder path to walk than choosing just in or just on. What I’ve found effective for me is aggressively segmenting my time. This can be as simple as spending three weeks of every month working in the business, and one week of every month removing yourself from the day-to-day and working on the business.
And, treat the working on the business part of your work the same you would any other project. Document it, organize it, write down a plan, and set SMARTER goals (goals should be Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, Timely, and be regularly Evaluated, Revised based on real outcomes from your work).
What are SMARTER goals, and how can the framework be applied to what you’re building? More on this in a future post.
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