Your focus needs more focus

24 September 2026

A business owner I know is heading out to visit their key customers. Not sending someone. Going in person. They hold a shareholding in a successful company, and they want to hear what’s happening in the market from the people who are actually doing the buying.

Their reasoning is simple. In a tough market you have to be front and centre, because your competitors are scrapping over the same share of a smaller pie. Whoever’s top of mind when a customer finally decides is the one that wins, with obvious considerations for price. They’ve worked out that the highest value use of their own week is face-to-face conversations with customers.

At the other end of the scale, I get angry with a business that’s just starting to find itself in trouble, and the owner is sitting at their desk with their head down doing busywork. Reconciling something. Rebuilding a spreadsheet. Answering emails that could have waited a fortnight. Anything at all, so long as it’s not the hard thing.

Here’s the ridiculous part. When I ask that owner what they should be doing, they can usually tell me. They’ll give me an answer pretty close to what I was about to suggest. Then they go back to their desk and carry on doing the same old thing. It’s not that they don’t know what to do, they’ve simply decided to bury their head in the sand and do nothing.

Most consultancies don’t take it personally when they fail to fix a problem. We do. Not professionally. Personally. Watching my own team bust their guts to get a company back on track, while the owner and the staff sit on their hands behaving like nothing is wrong, might be the single most frustrating thing that happens in my business.

As my clients read this, plenty of them are going to say, “Matt’s talking about me”. Yes, I am talking about you. I’m also talking about the client I saw before you and the one I’m seeing after you. This isn’t one business and it’s not a handful of awkward files. It’s loads of you, and it has been for twenty years.

Let me put the obvious thing on the table, because most business books walk around it.

You went into business expecting to do better than you would working for someone else. That expectation is fair. What earns it is risk. You carry risk an employee doesn’t, and that is the whole justification for the extra reward.

So whose risk are you actually thinking about? The easy answer is your own. What happens to me, my house, my name? That’s the selfish version, and it’s the wrong one. When a business closes, the greatest damage is done to the people who worked in it. The damage to the owner comes second. One person having the worst year of their life is a hard thing, but it likely doesn’t outweigh an entire team losing their livelihoods on the same afternoon.

You invited those people to come and work with you. That invitation carried an obligation, whether you thought about it at the time or not.

Sitting there hoping that some magical solution will turn up and fix it is idiotic. If you employ people, it’s worse than idiotic. It’s reckless.

It’s their mortgage. Their rent. Their kids' schooling. Think about where that ends. If your company shuts down, some of those families will have to move house. Some will have to sell. Some will end up back living with their parents. That’s what sits on the other side of your bad week.

And then there’s your own family. If this goes bad, and you should assume that it can, it reaches every member of it. Choosing to do nothing with all of that on the table shows a lack of self awareness that’s beyond belief.

Owning a business is not something to be taken lightly. Giving up because you’re having a bad day is reckless and weak.

So next time you decide that today is a good day for busywork while the business quietly falls down around you, get off your arse and go and visit some customers. You’ll learn more in four days on the road than four weeks at your desk.

Let me be clear about why I'm entitled to say any of this. We're not the people who liquidate companies. We're the people who try to stop it happening. When liquidation does come, it's after a long, hard slog to try and keep that day from arriving. We don't get to walk out the day before. We walk out on the day, and it's never a good day.

I’ve stood in front of large groups of people and told them that the company they work for is going into liquidation, and that today is the last day they’ll work there. Saying it takes me less than twenty minutes. What follows takes about an hour. Each person comes up to you one by one and tells you what it actually means for them. Some are here on work visas, and they’re explaining that they and their children will have to go back to their country of origin. Some are at an age and stage where they know, and you know, that they’re not going to get another job.

Twenty minutes to deliver it. An hour to hear it. It’s not until you’ve done that, not once but several times, that you really understand what the end looks like.

If you think any of this sounds harsh, here’s another way to look at it. It’s coming from someone who knows exactly what the end looks like, and who cares enough about your business that they don’t want to watch your people go through it.

Running a business is hard, and when it goes well the rewards can be massive. But with great power comes great responsibility, or at least that’s what someone said in some crazy movie.

I won’t mince my words, because facing up to the difficult issues in front of you is usually the key to solving the problem. My job isn’t to make you feel good about yourself. My job is to fix the problem.