One of the paradoxes of building a business is that the behaviours that make you successful in the early years can eventually become the behaviours that hold the business back as it grows.
When you start a business, being involved in everything is often an advantage. You know every customer. When something goes wrong, you fix it. You check the work because nobody understands the standard you expect quite as well as you do. Entrepreneurs take ownership and are prepared to do whatever is required to make the business succeed.
The problem comes when the business grows, but the entrepreneur’s role doesn’t grow with it.
There may now be 30, 50 or 100 people in the organisation, but important decisions still find their way back to the owner. Customer problems are escalated to them. Team members wait for their approval. Whenever something goes wrong, the entrepreneur steps in to fix it. This is what I call firefighter mode.
When being helpful becomes the problem
I coached an entrepreneur who had built a successful business from very little and was beginning to challenge some established players in his industry. He had built his reputation by providing exceptional service and staying closely involved with his customers.
Even as the business grew, he continued to be copied on virtually all correspondence with clients. When we discussed whether he could step away from this level of involvement, his concern was straightforward: what happens if a client phones me and I don’t know what is going on?
It was an understandable fear. His closeness to customers had helped him build the business. Maintaining a high standard of customer service, however, did not require him to personally oversee that standard.
Things began to change when he recognised that his attention to every detail, which had served the business so well, was now holding it back. Once he had a clearer view of where he wanted to take the business, he could ask a different question: if this is where I want the business to go, what does my role now need to become?
His first transition was to find someone to take responsibility for operations in the original business. That freed him to focus on a new business unit and another opportunity for growth. In time, he found a leader for that business too and once again changed where he spent his time. The same process repeated as the business grew.
South Africa creates more fires. It doesn’t have to create more firefighters.
Firefighter mode is sometimes treated as a particularly South African problem. I am not convinced that it is.
Entrepreneurs everywhere can struggle to let go of businesses they have built. South African business owners, however, are doing so in an environment that presents its own set of pressures.
South Africa ranked 47th out of 49 economies in the 2023/24 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor assessment of the quality of the entrepreneurial environment. All 13 entrepreneurial framework conditions measured were rated as insufficient.
South African entrepreneurs have plenty of genuine fires to deal with. Weak economic growth, infrastructure challenges, skills shortages and failures at different levels of government all make running a business more difficult.
Having more fires, though, does not mean the owner has to remain the firefighter.
A difficult operating environment makes it even more important to build an organisation that can respond to problems without everything finding its way back to the owner. Stronger management capacity also reduces the risk of every external problem becoming the owner’s operational problem.
The hidden cost of firefighter mode
The obvious consequence of firefighter mode is exhaustion. I have worked with entrepreneurs who have not taken a proper holiday in years because they don’t trust the business to operate without them.
The bigger cost is the work that does not get done while the owner is putting out fires.
Every business has work that needs to be done today and work that will determine where the business is going tomorrow. Someone needs to resolve today’s customer complaint or staffing problem. Someone also needs to think about strategy, build the leadership team, develop people and create the capabilities needed for the next stage of growth.
As the business grows, more of that work falls to the entrepreneur.
When the owner spends most of their time dealing with operational issues, nobody is doing enough of the work that prepares the business for what comes next. The entrepreneur then becomes too busy firefighting to build the people and capabilities that would reduce the number of fires requiring their attention.
Being indispensable can feel like evidence of your value to the business. In a growing company, it can be evidence of exactly the opposite.
Moving the bottleneck is not enough
The entrepreneur I mentioned earlier discovered that getting himself out of firefighter mode did not automatically get the business out of it.
As his company grew, an acquisition added two related business lines. Eventually the organisation had a COO and four business unit leaders. Although the founder had freed himself from much of the operational detail, his divisional leaders were now bogged down in it themselves. The bottleneck wasn’t eliminated, it had just moved.
Hiring senior people had solved only part of the problem. The business invested heavily in developing those leaders and the management teams beneath them. As the divisional leaders grew in capability and their management teams became stronger, they too could step further away from the day-to-day, which gave the businesses room to grow.
Scaling requires more than the entrepreneur learning to delegate. Leaders throughout the organisation need to be able to lead through other people rather than personally solving every problem themselves.
From solving problems to building capability
Breaking the cycle starts with understanding where your time is actually going. With this entrepreneur, we asked him to analyse how he was spending his time. That was how we discovered the extent to which he was still overseeing client work.
If you feel trapped in the day-to-day, look at where your time went over the past few weeks and, particularly, which decisions required your involvement. Which genuinely needed you? Which could have been made by somebody else? And why did they come to you in the first place?
Pay attention when the same type of decision keeps returning to your desk, even after you believe you have delegated responsibility for it. That usually tells you something about where authority, accountability or capability is still missing.
Then look at whether you have the right people to take responsibility. You cannot step away and hope somebody fills the vacuum. Escaping firefighter mode may first require strengthening the leadership team.
Give those people clarity about the outcomes they are responsible for and the authority to make decisions within agreed boundaries. Then resist the temptation to step back in whenever something goes wrong. People need space to take responsibility, make decisions and learn.
And this cannot stop with the entrepreneur. If you delegate responsibility to four divisional leaders who then personally solve every problem in their divisions, you haven’t exited firefighter mode, you have multiplied the number of firefighters. Building capability means developing leaders who, in turn, develop capable people beneath them.
Your job has changed
When we started working with the entrepreneur in this story, his business had turnover of approximately R28 million. Today it turns over more than R800 million. Many things contributed to that growth. One lesson from his experience stands out.
The person capable of leading the R28 million business could not keep doing the same job as it became a R100 million, R300 million and eventually R800 million organisation. At each stage, he had to ask what the business now needed from him, find or develop people capable of taking over responsibilities he previously held and move his attention to the next challenge.
In the early days, your value may come from the number of problems you can personally solve. As the business grows, your value comes from building an organisation capable of solving those problems without you. A growing business should need its owner to fight fewer fires.
Graham Mitchell is a Chartered Accountant and the founder of Grow, one of South Africa’s leading business growth coaching firms. He is the author of Compounding Advantage and has spent more than a decade working with South African businesses, helping leadership teams build strategy, sharpen execution and scale sustainably.