The infrastructure every successful business owner needs, and almost nobody builds with intention. 

I hold this truth to be self-evident: that almost nobody builds a genuinely successful business alone. A number of recent conversations have prompted me to reflect on the scaffolding around which every successful business can be built and which,  irrespective of size or industry, can significantly improve the odds of developing a successful operation. By “successful” I mean one that provides useful, clearly articulated value, works well for the owner and the team, delivers a healthy level of profit, is enjoyable to interact with, and is, ultimately, sellable.

Start with the inverse. What would I have to do to ensure that my experience as a business owner is stressful, exhausting and unprofitable? It can be summed up in the phrase: all by myself. 

I can’t think of any high-performance activity outside of business in which so many of the main protagonists have convinced themselves that it is a sign of intelligence and fortitude to do as much as possible on their own, without consistent training, coaching and holistic support around all the factors that determine consistent successful outcomes.

No professional athlete in their right mind imagines they could deliver top-level performance on bad diets, poor sleep, little training and only sporadic professional support. Even at the most fundamental levels of any game, the aspiring competitor has a small team of dedicated people,  often a family member alongside a local coach, to design the training and support them over a sustained period. And here is the part that matters most for an owner whose business has begun to do well: the athlete who refuses coaching at a certain level is not merely leaving performance on the table. They are training for a version of the game that has changed around them. The model that won at one level begins, quietly, to work against them at the next.

The results across the SME landscape speak volumes. The value an entire industry creates turns out to be captured by a remarkably thin slice of its companies: McKinsey’s work on the “power curve of economic profit” finds the top 10% of firms taking roughly 80% of all the economic profit created, while the broad middle hovers near zero and the bottom tier destroys value at much the same rate the top creates it. The same shape is widely thought to hold among smaller businesses, even if robust SME-specific data is scarce. And most companies never last long enough to discover which tier they belong to — around two-thirds of new businesses never reach their tenth anniversary.

What separates the thin top tier from everyone else is not a better process, a smarter strategy or tighter execution. Whatever it is, it is not a methodology you can license, not a framework, a programme or a packaged playbook, and any consultant who sells you one as the answer is selling the wrong thing. The owner who has outgrown the model that built the business does not need another system to run. They need a team of people who understand the business, are vested in its success, and can think alongside them as the nature of ownership itself begins to change.

So here, for what it is worth, is one set of activities I believe every owner, especially one whose business has begun to succeed, should focus on to improve the odds significantly.

Assembling Your Advisory Team

Every owner should have a dedicated support team of trusted professionals, customised to their situation and vested in their success, with whom they build intentional relationships. At a minimum:

An Accountant Who Thinks Like a Profit Coach

At a minimum, the right one keeps you compliant; ideally, they act as a profit coach, giving you the intelligence and documentation to improve the financial performance of the business. The profession is slowly growing into that role, but an enthusiastic profit coach who genuinely fits you and your business still takes real effort to find.

A Commercial Lawyer Who Knows Your Business

The point is less about rates than about timing: have trusted counsel in place before you have an acute problem, so the relationship and the context already exist when something urgent lands on your desk. Getting anything with the faintest whiff of legal trouble out of my own hands — work I am both emotionally and technically ill-equipped for — has done more for my peace of mind than almost anything, and leaves me free to run the business, serve clients and add value.

A Capital Relationship. 

As a business grows more capital-intensive, the terms on which you can raise, structure and refinance money stop being administrative and become strategic. It is worth building a relationship with a banker or lender who understands your business before you need them to,  someone with whom conversations about structure, facilities and optionality can happen ahead of the moment they turn urgent. Much of banking has been hollowed out and handed to call centres, but a personal relationship with someone who can actually approve and shape credit is still worth the effort to find and keep.

A Thinking Partner. 

A few years back a friend of mine, in a previous life a sports professional, set up in a specialised engineering niche. One of the first things he did was join a professional entrepreneurs’ group and hire a coach — second nature from his sporting career. “That’s just how we do things,” he told me.

His first meeting happened to be a summit headlined by Verne Harnish, who opened by asking the 500-odd people in the room to raise a hand if they had engaged a coach to support their growth. My friend’s shot up before he could withdraw it, and he realised only about ten others in the room had done the same. Harnish let the silence hold, made a show of counting, and was unsparing: of all the accomplished people present, only a handful had thought to put a single professional in their corner — and he asked how arrogant you would have to be to think you could perform at the level a successful business demands entirely on your own. Almost nobody can, he said. And certainly nobody he had ever met. By the end of the session my friend had collected more business cards than he could count, mostly from people wanting to know who his coach was.

The story speaks for itself. Get a thinking partner as a key member of your team, someone to act as a sounding board, hold you accountable, train you where you need it, develop you as a leader,  and immerse you in a community facing the same questions you are. But be clear about what this is and is not. A coach who runs you through a programme designed for a room of five hundred is useful for some things; what an owner past the operating stage needs is someone who sits in the specifics of your situation and helps you see what you cannot see alone.

A Marketing Expert. 

In today’s demand-driven environment, the ability to position clearly, define marketing objectives, evaluate channels and set pricing is so critical that I place a defined, top-tier relationship with someone of accredited provenance in marketing on the same footing as a good lawyer or accountant. This is distinct from sales expertise; marketing challenges now demand more technical and specialist knowledge than they did even twenty years ago.

Building the Relationships

Establishing these relationships takes time and requires you to be clear about what you want from each partner. Most owners have an accountant or a lawyer they know, but often with little strategic intention behind the relationship, and they stay too long in mediocre or even counterproductive ones. The trick is to make building the team a priority on a one-year horizon: find, engage and, where necessary, replace.

Once you have engaged the first, ask them to help identify and recommend others. Service professionals relish creating opportunities through referrals, knowing it works both ways — so ask your accountant for two names for a good commercial lawyer, or vice versa. If you are starting from nothing, an entrepreneurs’ association is a good place to ask for personal referrals. Whatever you do, budget time to meet, interview, select and build your team.

Once a few are in place, engage with each individually about once a quarter. Actively bring them business and find out what their ideal client looks like. Tell them when things of note happen, and ask their counsel even on matters outside their core competence. They will know people who can help and resources you may need. Make them enthusiastic advocates for your business — let them know they are part of a team, perhaps by gathering your advisors together once a year for something you host.

Apart from improving the quality of your financial reporting, becoming more financially fluent and training the business to be sustainably profitable, I can think of no better way to improve the odds of winning the Great Game of Business than investing intentional time in building an excellent team of advisors. Every business has a minimum collection of such people; few make the systematic effort to turn them into a team.

Because here is what the numbers point to but never quite explain. The top 10% of businesses in any industry are not running better processes than the rest. The question worth sitting with is what they are doing differently about the nature of ownership itself.

Inspired by on “A System Designed for You to Win” published in  Pitchfork Papers on 24 June 2022