Three Years, Then Three Months

I was in a boardroom a couple of weeks ago with a client and his team. Good business, people I like, and a plate of biscuits I shouldn't eat, but can't help myself.

I did the strategy work with them three years ago.

The conversation got round to AI, the way it does now. They'd all been using it in client work — different tools, different jobs, all of them using it remarkably well. One of them was getting through a day's work by 11.

Then someone said the thing that changed the meeting. "The problem is none of our systems are actually built for this."

True. And it sounded like a technology problem.

It wasn't just a technology problem

We kept pulling at it. Half an hour later we weren't talking about software at all.

The owner and his team had completely different pictures of where the business was heading. Not slightly different. Different customers mattered. Different work was the future. Different view of what the place was even for.

Nobody was hiding anything. Nobody was being difficult. They'd drifted, and not one of them had noticed it happening.

Three years ago I had that same group in a room and we got them properly clear. They left aligned, they kicked into it, and it worked.

And then one of his staff said: "It feels like we have to have this conversation every three months now."

Which is either a damning review of my strategy work or the best business development news I've had all year. Probably both.

And, she's right!

Why nobody noticed

Here's the thing about being the owner. You're out in it. Talking to customers, watching what your competitors are doing, noticing what's quietly stopped working. Your picture of the business updates constantly — a bit at a time, in your head, with no announcement.

That's not a flaw. That's the job.

But everybody else's picture only updates when somebody tells them. And you don't tell them, because you haven't noticed yours has moved. You just get faintly irritated that nobody's keeping up. I've done it. Probably did it last month.

And they're not being slow. Every person in that room is doing exactly what you're doing — building a picture out of whatever reaches them. They're doing what people do.

This used to be fine. Things moved slowly enough that one good alignment lasted years.

They don't move that slowly now.

And it isn't just your people

Your systems have the same problem, and they're worse, because a system only changes when somebody deliberately changes it.

Your process. Your price list. The way you scope and quote work. All of it holds whatever was true the day it was written down. And nothing announces when it stops being true — a document that's gone quietly wrong looks exactly like one that's still right.

A fence post rots from the ground up. Looks fine at eye level for years. Then one day it just isn't there.

Which brings me back to that boardroom. A lot of owners are loading the last few years of the business into AI right now. I'm not going to try to talk anyone out of it. It's useful.

But have a think about what you're loading. Three years of documents. The old price list. The process that made sense when you had different customers. The strategy pack from that alignment session, now twelve three-month cycles out of date.

You haven't captured your business. You've automated the version of it that existed before you moved.

The old business, running faster.

So what actually changes?

The rhythm.

The annual strategy day was built for a world where one alignment held for three years. If the picture drifts in three months, an annual rhythm is going to be wrong nine months out of twelve.

The good news — and it is good news — is that recalibrating is nothing like starting again. The strategy usually isn't wrong (although it can be). What needs work is the gap between the plan as everyone agreed it and the plan as it actually feels now people are living inside it. That's a shorter conversation than the first one. It just has to happen more often.

People say the business lives in the owner's head. It does. But getting it out of your head was never the hard part — the hard part is that everyone else has their own version in theirs, and nobody's checked whether the versions still line up.

And a bigger question... are we heading for a staffless recovery (if there is one)

It has felt like the private sector in this country has been in recession for three years. Whatever the official numbers say, that's what it's felt like on the ground.

And owners are now asking me something I didn't hear two years ago: when things pick up, do I actually need to hire those people back on? Some of them are half-joking. Some aren't joking at all.

Get back in the room

If you did the strategy work two or three years ago and it's gone quiet since — that isn't a failure of the plan, and it isn't your team letting you down. You moved. The gap opened up again. Nobody said so out loud.

I'm doing a lot of this at the moment — sitting down with owners and their teams and getting everyone back onto the same picture of where they're going. I'm getting more calls about it than I have in years, which probably tells you something about the pace we're all working at.

If that sounds like your business, send me a message and I'll set up a call.

Good luck out there. And don't forget to have fun!