Who Is Sailing The Ship?

The picture is old and slightly unfashionable, and it has survived because owners recognise themselves in it within about four seconds. There is a deck, where somebody decides where the ship is going. And there is below deck, where the rowing happens.

Both jobs are real and both have to be done. The problem is that in most owner-managed businesses the person who is meant to be on deck is below it, rowing harder than anybody, and nobody has been at the wheel for a long time.

Two jobs on the same ship

Rowing is honest work and somebody has to do it. Past a certain size, it stops being your work.

On deck there are four things and they are all yours. Where this business is going and by when. What you are deliberately not doing, which is the half of strategy owners skip. Who is in the boat, meaning who you hire, who you develop and who you part company with. And what is coming over the horizon: a client that has gone quiet, a rate change, a supplier who is now a single point of failure.

Below deck is the work itself. Quoting, fixing, chasing, delivering. It is skilled, it is necessary, and it is almost certainly what you are best at in the building, because it is what you did before you owned anything.

Why owners end up below deck

Not because they are lazy, and not because they do not know better. For four fairly good reasons.

It is where the competence is. You are demonstrably excellent at the rowing. On deck you are an amateur, and nobody enjoys being an amateur in their own business.

It has immediate feedback. Fix a job and somebody thanks you today. Set a three-year direction and nothing happens at all, for months, and possibly ever if you never revisit it.

It is measurable. You can count what you did. On-deck work refuses to produce a tidy list at five o'clock, which for a certain kind of owner is close to unbearable.

And it is a legitimate hiding place. Below-deck work is the only socially acceptable way to avoid the harder questions, because you were busy, and you were, and everybody can see that you were.

Underneath all four sits one structural fact. Below-deck work always has a deadline attached to it. On-deck work never does. Given a diary and no discipline, the work with deadlines wins every single week.

The ship still moves

Here is the part owners underestimate. Nothing dramatic happens when you go below deck. The business does not stop. It carries on, quite successfully, in whatever direction the current happens to be running.

In practice that means the direction gets set by whoever shouts loudest. The biggest customer, because they are the biggest. The busiest department, because they are the busiest. The most recent complaint. The most persistent salesman. None of these people are hostile, and none of them are steering towards anywhere you would have chosen. A business with nobody on deck does not drift into failure. It drifts into a shape its owner never picked and cannot easily sell.

A worked example

The sequence below is illustrative and the pattern is common. A manufacturer turning over £2.1m, owner working sixty hours a week, all of it below deck.

March. A large distributor offers volume work at a margin the owner would normally decline. There is capacity in the factory that month, so he takes it. Reasonable decision, made in ten minutes, between two other things.

May. The volume work needs two extra pairs of hands. He hires them. Also reasonable. Also decided quickly.

August. Two long-standing customers, both on much better margins, start complaining about lead times, because the factory is now organised around the distributor's schedule. Nobody made that decision. It emerged.

October. One of the two leaves. The owner is annoyed but he is also flat out, so it gets logged as bad luck.

December. Turnover is up. Net profit is down, the fixed cost base is higher, and the business is now materially dependent on one distributor who knows it. Nobody chose any of that. Every individual decision was defensible and every one of them was made below deck, at speed, without reference to a destination, because there was not one.

An hour on deck in February would have produced a single sentence, something like: we do not take work below 34 per cent gross margin, and no client goes above 20 per cent of turnover. That one sentence would have made March a two-minute conversation instead of a two-year problem.

How to apply it this week

1. Split last week honestly. Take your diary and mark each block on deck or below deck. Most owners come out somewhere between five and ten per cent on deck, and are genuinely surprised, because it feels like more.
2. Put one deck watch in the diary. Two hours, same slot every week, before the week fills. Not a meeting, not with anybody, out of the inbox. Treat it exactly as you would treat a customer appointment you would be embarrassed to cancel.
3. Write the destination in one sentence. Where this business is in three years, in numbers. If you cannot write it, you have found what the first deck watch is for.
4. Write your say-no list. Three things you will not take on any more: a type of client, a type of job, a margin floor. Put it where the team can see it, because that is what turns a preference into a rule.
5. Name one thing you will stop rowing. Something you do weekly that somebody else could do at eighty per cent of your standard. Hand it over this month, properly, with the standard written down.
6. Do a horizon scan. Fifteen minutes, four questions. What client has gone quiet. What cost is about to move. What single person or supplier would hurt us most if they left. What has a competitor started doing that we have been ignoring.

The mistake most owners make

They agree with all of this, book a strategy day in January, come out with a decent plan, and then row for the following fifty-one weeks. An annual visit to the deck is not governance, it is a ritual. The ship needs somebody watching the weather every week, not an away day and a laminated document.

The second mistake is the condition. "I will get on deck once we have hired an operations manager." It never arrives, because below-deck work expands to fill whatever capacity you create. The hire does not free you up unless you have already decided what you will do with the time and put it in the diary first. Owners who wait for space are still waiting a decade later.

The questions to sit with

• Out of 10, how much of last month did you spend genuinely on deck?
• If you asked three people in your business where it is heading, how similar would the answers be?
• What is the business drifting towards right now that you would not have chosen on purpose?
• What are you rowing that somebody else could row, and what is the honest reason you have not handed it over?

This sits underneath The Leader Programme and the Effective Governance work. Governance sounds like something for larger companies. In a small business it means one simple thing: somebody is on deck, on a schedule, with the authority to change course.