The other morning, I was meeting a mate with a logistics business. I arrived at the café and he was sitting there — phone to his ear, pinching the bridge of his nose.
Four minutes, maybe. Then he put it down, said sorry, and we carried on like nothing happened. "What was that?"
"Job down the line. They wanted to know whether to hold the crew there overnight or bring them home." "And?"
"Bring them home." That was it. Ten seconds of actual thinking. He'd known the answer before the foreman on the other end had finished the question.
Ten seconds, and only one place to get them
Here's the bit that stuck with me on the drive back.
It wasn't a hard question. It was a ten-second question. But there were only ten seconds' worth of that particular thinking available anywhere in the country that morning, and he was sitting in the café with me.
And he's not a control freak, before you jump to it. He's got a good ops manager, a site foreman who knows his job, and somewhere in a drawer there's a process manual that was laminated in 2019 and hasn't been opened since.
The manual doesn't have this in it. It couldn't. Because "bring them home" wasn't a rule — it was this client, who's been slow to pay twice and won't wear a surprise; the weather that was coming; what the crew's like on the third night away from home; and something that went wrong on a job a bit like it in 2021 that he's never told anyone about because there was nothing to tell.
None of that is written down anywhere. It never needed to be. He's always been in the room. There to make the decision.
The phrase we all use as a joke
"The business lives in my head."
Every owner I know has said some version of that, usually at a barbecue, usually with a laugh, usually while topping up someone's glass. It's said the way you'd admit to being hopeless at paperwork. A charming flaw.
I've said it. I've said it about businesses I've got money in.
And for twenty years it was, genuinely, mostly a workload problem. Annoying. Tiring. Meant you never quite got a clean holiday. But not much more than that, because there was no alternative on offer — the thinking had to happen in a head, and yours was the head with the goods in it.
That's the bit that just changed.
Where it stops dead
Most owners I talk to now have AI doing real work in their business. Not messing about — real work. Drafting, summarising financials, researching, first-pass analysis, the tidy-up on a proposal.
And then it hits a wall, always in the same place. It'll write the quote. It won't tell you whether to send it.
It'll pull together everything about a client. It won't tell you that this one's worth keeping at a rubbish margin because of who he talks to at the golf club. It'll give you three options, neatly. It has no idea which one you'd never do, and it won't tell you that it doesn't know.
So the work speeds up right until the point where the judgement is needed... and then it stops and waits for you. Same as the crew in Tauranga. Same as it always did.
People assume the fix is more information — plug it into the files, give it the drive, let it read everything. I thought that too. But your files hold what you did. They don't hold why. You can hand it every proposal you've ever sent and it still won't know which three you regret.
The cost nobody's ever counted
AI is repricing execution, and judgement stays yours. That's good news, and I still think it's right.
But there's an uncomfortable follow-up sitting underneath it, and I've been chewing on it for months. Is it actually good news that the judgement is only yours?
Three costs, and the first one's the only one anybody notices.
Your time. The four-minute call on the beach. Fine. Except it's not one call, it's eleven a week, and every one of them lands on the only person who can't be replaced.
Everything that waited. This is the expensive one and it's invisible, because a decision that's sitting in a queue doesn't send you a notification. Nobody logs the two days a quote sat still. It just quietly wasn't won.
What the business is worth without you in it. Ask any decent broker or corporate finance person what happens to the price when the buyer works out that the owner is the operating system. They'll talk about a discount, and the range they'll quote you is wide — I've heard anything from a modest haircut to something that genuinely hurts. Don't take a number off me and don't take one off them either; those figures are advisers' rules of thumb, not gospel, and none of them were measured on your business. But the direction is not in dispute, by anyone, ever. A business that runs without you is worth more than the same business that doesn't. It always has been. AI hasn't changed that — it's just made it possible to see the gap for the first time.
The bit I'd actually do
Not a plan. Just a count. For one week, keep a note every time something in your business stopped and waited for you. And next to it write how long the actual thinking took once it reached you.
Four minutes on the phone. Ten seconds of thinking. That gap is the whole thing.
Most owners have never counted it, and I'd include myself in that until fairly recently. It's not that we're avoiding it. It's that nothing ever made us look — the calls just arrive, you answer them, that's the job, that's been the job since the day you started.
You'll come out the other end of that week with a number. I don't know what you'll want to do about it, and honestly, that's the next problem, not this one. But you'll have stopped guessing.
Right — this is the thing I'm in the middle of with a few clients at the moment. Trying to work out whether any of what's in an owner's head can actually be got out of it, in a way that's worth the bother. No neat answer yet. I'll tell you how it goes.
So here's where you can help. What type of calls do you end up taking — the one that's always the same shape. I want to know what everyone else's ten-second question is, because I suspect there are about six of them in the whole country and we've all got the same ones.
Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!
