Working ON the Business
Why the time you spend improving the business is the time you most need to protect.
Notes from Randall Harper. Thirty years working alongside owner-operators, executives and boards — companies of all types and sizes — across entertainment & media, hospitality, service based business, lifestyle businesses, financial services, retail and not-for-profit, in Australia, Asia, the United Kingdom and the United States. What follows is the thinking I keep returning to.
The trap of always being in it
Owner-operators who never come up for air do not lack ambition; they lack a schedule. The work in the business is loud, immediate, and rewarding in the short term. The work on the business is quiet, slow, and rewarding in the long term. Without deliberate structure, the loud work wins every time, and the business stays exactly the shape it is.
The non-negotiable block
Pick a single half-day a week — same day, same time, no exceptions — and protect it. Phone off, email closed, calendar blocked. This is not a luxury; it is the only time the business actually gets improved. Owners who hold this block for a year usually report it as the single highest-leverage change they made.
What to actually do in it
- Review the previous week's numbers honestly.
- Document one process that currently only lives in your head.
- Have one conversation — coach, mentor, peer — that you would not otherwise make time for.
- Make a decision you have been deferring.
- Plan the following week before it plans you.
Resisting the urgency illusion
On the morning of the protected block, something will always appear urgent enough to justify breaking it. It almost never is. The customer can wait two hours. The quote can go tomorrow. The email can sit. The protected block is the one part of the week where short-term sacrifice creates long-term capacity, and the only way it works is to defend it ruthlessly for the first three months until the team and your customers learn not to interrupt it.
Compound returns
An owner who works on the business for half a day a week, for a year, has accumulated roughly 250 hours of deliberate improvement. That is more than most owners do in a decade. The compounding is not in the hours; it is in the decisions those hours allow, made earlier and better than they otherwise would have been.
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The contents of this paper are the opinion of Clear Point Advisory only. Readers should rely on their own judgement and obtain professional advice appropriate to their circumstances.