The closer you are to your business, the harder it can be to see it

I went to a networking meeting last week and found myself sitting there with my marketing head firmly switched on.

As people talked about their businesses and some of the challenges they were facing, I could see ideas almost immediately. For probably 80 or 90 per cent of the people in that room, something popped into my head: You could try this. There’s a gap there. Have you thought about doing that differently?

I shared one or two where it felt natural, but I kept most of them to myself. There’s a fine line between being helpful and becoming the know-it-all in the room.

But it did make me think about how much easier it can be to spot opportunities in somebody else’s business than it is in your own.

When you’re inside a business, you know all the reasons things are done a particular way. There’s history behind it. There are budgets to consider, customers to keep happy and existing commitments to honour. There are systems you’ve become accustomed to and jobs you keep doing because, at some point, that was the most sensible way to do them.

It’s what I think of as Cheryl syndrome: a process exists because Cheryl used to do it that way, and over time, “Cheryl’s way” simply became the way. Nobody has stopped to ask whether Cheryl still does it, whether the original reason still exists or whether there’s now a quicker and easier way of getting the same result.

That doesn’t mean the original decision was wrong. It probably made perfect sense at the time. But businesses change, technology moves on and the workaround that once solved a problem can eventually become a problem of its own.

I’m guilty of it too. I can listen to someone else describe a problem and immediately start joining the dots, but in my own business, I know why I’ve made each decision. I know which ideas I’ve dismissed because of cost, time or something that happened three years ago.

I’m simply too close to it. And sometimes an outside view is exactly what’s needed.

A recent example

I had a conversation with a client recently who wanted to look at the year ahead. On the surface, it could have been treated as a marketing conversation: how do we promote the business, reach more people and help it grow?

But before we could talk properly about marketing, we needed to understand what “growth” actually meant to them.

Did they want more bookings, or did they want to become better known? How much did the business need to earn each month? Which parts generated a reliable income? Which parts mattered personally but weren’t particularly profitable? How much time did they want to spend travelling? How often did they want to be at home? And which areas of the business felt as though they were no longer completely under control?

Once we started breaking it down, it became clear that the answer wasn’t simply “do more marketing.”

There were gaps around the diary, communications, administration, income planning and the balance between the work that paid the bills and the work that fulfilled the wider purpose of the business.

None of those things meant the business was failing. Far from it. It had grown, and some of the processes surrounding it hadn’t quite caught up.

Where technology fits

Technology can help us organise bookings, improve communications, collect registrations, plan content and make information easier to find. I love finding practical systems that take pressure away from people.

But technology can’t tell us what the real problem is.

If we don’t understand what feels difficult, disorganised or out of control, we risk building a solution to the wrong problem. We’re effectively sticking a finger in the air, choosing a piece of software or launching another campaign and hoping it somehow makes everything better.

Sometimes it will help. Sometimes it will just give you another thing to manage.

Getting close, but not too close

The more I understand how a business operates, what matters to its owner, where the money comes from and what keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list, the more useful I can be.

It means I can see when the apparent marketing problem is actually a process problem. Or when the answer isn’t more activity, but making better use of what is already there. Often, it doesn’t require a huge budget or a dramatic overhaul. A few sensible tweaks can make an enormous difference.

There’s a balance to it. You need to get close enough to understand the business properly, but retain enough distance to see the things that have become normal to the person running it.

Sometimes the answer is an advert, a new system, a website change or a better content plan. Sometimes it’s asking the right questions and helping someone untangle all the thoughts that have been circling in their head.

Because before we start trying to fix something, we need to understand what actually needs sorting out.

If something in your business feels harder than it should—or you know it needs sorting but can’t quite see where to begin—I’d be happy to take a fresh look.