Be, Do, Have

Listen for the sentence and you will hear it everywhere. When I have the right people, I will step back, and then I will be the sort of owner who is not in everything. When we have a better year, I will take the time off, and then I will be less exhausted.

It sounds like sensible sequencing. It is actually a waiting instruction, and the wait is open-ended, because the condition at the front is the thing you have least control over.

What the model is

Three levels. Have is results and resources: money, staff, systems, time. Do is behaviour: what you actually do in a week. Be is identity: how you operate, what you consider your job, what you would never let slide.

Most owners run the sequence backwards, starting with Have. That order puts the only element you fully control, your behaviour, in the middle, and makes it conditional on something largely outside your control. Reverse it and the order becomes usable.

None of this is mystical. Behaviour follows from how you see your job. Somebody who considers themselves the best technician in the building behaves like a technician, and gets the results of a technician, whatever the plan says. Change what you consider your job to be and the weekly behaviour changes with it, and the results follow the behaviour with a lag.

Why it matters to an owner

The Have-first order is not just slow, it is usually factually wrong about how businesses work. The resources arrive because of the behaviour, not before it.

Take delegation. "When I have someone good enough, I will delegate." But good people will not stay with an owner who does not delegate, and you cannot assess whether someone is good enough at something you have never let them do. The resource you are waiting for is produced by the behaviour you are withholding.

Or price. "When we are better known, we will charge properly." Reputation in most markets is built partly by pricing like a firm that is worth it, and by the sort of client that price attracts. Waiting for permission from the market is waiting for something the market has no way of giving you.

There is a lag, and the lag is real. Behaving like the owner of a bigger business will not produce a bigger business by Friday. But the sequence only runs one way, and there is no version where the results turn up first and then you become the person who could have produced them.

A worked example

Illustrative. Take an owner of a £1.1m business who says he will stop being the bottleneck once he has a proper management team. He has two capable people, neither of whom is a manager, and no budget for a third.

Run Have first and nothing moves. There is no management team, so decisions come to him, so the two capable people stay operators, so there is still no management team. Two years later the sentence is identical, with a bigger turnover in front of it.

Run Be first and you start with a decision he can make this month: from now, he operates as the owner of a business with a management team, whether or not one exists yet. Then the behaviour follows, and it is unglamorous. He comes off the copy list for routine client email. He holds a proper leadership meeting every Monday with the two people he already has, with an agenda and numbers. He gives them a spend limit of, say, £500 without asking. He answers "what do you think we should do" instead of solving it in ninety seconds, which is the hardest part and takes him about six months to do consistently.

Nine months on he has two people behaving like managers, because they have been treated as managers and given decisions to make. The management team he was waiting to be able to afford was mostly a set of behaviours he could have started without spending anything. The third hire, when it comes, joins a structure instead of arriving to invent one.

How to apply it this week

1. Finish the sentence honestly. "When I have _____, I will _____." Write the three or four versions of it you actually say. They are the map of where you are waiting.
2. Name the Be at the end of each. Strip out the resource and the activity and identify who you are trying to become. Usually it is something like: an owner who leads rather than does, or one who is trusted with bigger work.
3. Ask what that person does weekly, at your current size. Not at £5m. At your turnover, this month, with the people and money you actually have. There is always a version, and it is usually smaller than you expect.
4. Pick one behaviour and start it on Monday. One. The leadership meeting, the numbers review, the two hours out of delivery. Behaviour is the only one of the three levels available on demand.
5. Delete the permission clause. Take the "when I have" off the front of the sentence and see whether what remains is genuinely impossible or merely uncomfortable. Most of the time it is the second one.
6. Review it at 30 days, not 30 weeks. Ask what has changed in how people treat you, not what has changed in the results. Results lag. The way the team behaves towards you moves first, and it is the earliest signal that the sequence is running.

The mistake most owners make

The first mistake is reading this as positive thinking. It is not about telling yourself you are a millionaire in the mirror. Be is not a feeling, it is a standard of operating that someone else could observe: what is in your diary, what you refuse to touch, what you insist on knowing every month. If nobody could tell from watching you for a fortnight, you have not changed the Be, you have changed the vocabulary.

The second is skipping the Do. Identity without behaviour is a costume, and everybody in the business can see it, usually faster than you can. An owner who announces he is now strategic and still approves every purchase order has changed nothing except the language.

The third is subtler. Most owners have an unexamined Be already installed, usually "the person who makes sure everything is done properly", which was probably true and necessary in year one. It quietly sets every behaviour afterwards. Until you decide what to be, you are still being whatever you decided by accident a decade ago.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how much of your current behaviour would change if the resources you are waiting for arrived tomorrow? A low score means the resources were never the constraint.
• What have you been waiting to be able to afford, that you could start behaving like today, at a smaller scale?
• If someone shadowed you for two weeks, what would they say you consider your actual job to be?
• Which identity did you take on in the early years that is now the thing holding the business at its current size?

This one sits at the start of Owner Foundations because it decides how everything else gets used. Owners who wait for the Have spend years collecting reasons. Owners who start with the Be spend the same years building something, and generally end up with the resources as well.