As a business owner, do you ever feel like you’re constantly putting out fires? You solve one issue, only for another to pop up the next day. It’s exhausting, unsustainable, and if you’re thinking about selling your business hugely unattractive to potential buyers.
In this episode of Exit Insights, Kevin Harrington and Darryl Bates-Brownsword dive into why so many businesses end up in firefighting mode and, more importantly, how to break free.
The Problem: A Business Built Around People, Not Functionality
Many business owners structure their company around the people they have rather than the functions their business actually needs. This leads to gaps, inefficiencies, and constant crises that demand their attention.
Think about it like a choir. If you’re missing key voices, the performance doesn’t sound right. In the same way, when key business functions aren’t assigned properly, things start falling apart—leaving you, the owner, to pick up the slack.
The Solution: Flip the Script and Design for Growth
Kevin and Darryl suggest a functionality-first approach to structuring your business:
✅ Map Out Every Function – Identify all the roles your business needs to operate smoothly.
✅ Assign the Right People – Make sure every function has a responsible person.
✅ Fill the Gaps – Identify areas where you’re missing expertise and either hire, outsource, or use technology to cover them.
This approach creates a self-sustaining business—one that doesn’t rely on the owner for day-to-day problem-solving. And when the time comes to sell, buyers will see a well-oiled machine, not a business dependent on you to function.
Key Takeaways:
✔️ Business owners must stop reacting and start designing a structure that works.
✔️ Like a choir, every business needs the right mix of people in the right roles.
✔️ A business that runs without owner dependence is more valuable and attractive to buyers.
If you’re tired of firefighting and want to build a business that works without you, this episode is a must-listen!
Watch the episode here:.
Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners prepare for exit. So, you can then maximise the valuation of your business and exit on your terms. This is the Exit Insights podcast presented by Succession Plus. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword. And as usual, I’m joined by my business partner, Kevin Harrington. Thanks for joining me here today, Kevin.
Hi, Daryl. And it’s good this fun this isn’t it. So, we don’t actually know exactly where this conversation is going to go today, do we? Because we haven’t really talked that much about it so far.
We haven’t, but let’s just flag at what we plan to talk about and hopefully we’ll deliver on this. What we want to explore today is for those business owners out there, like do you feel that you’re forever spitting plates or fighting fires just to keep the business going and that you’re always being dragged from one end to the other and it’s consuming all of your life and you feel like you’re the central person having to solve all of the problems all of the time to keep the business going working from end to end. If that sounds like you, we’re going to discuss some insights, some, some tactics of what you can do to put some structure into your business and solve the problem so that you’re never fighting fires again. That’s what you’ll get from today’s podcast. So without further ado, Kevin, what are we going to call that episode?
I think we’re safest to wait until the end and work out what we’ve talked about. But It’s essentially this is is picking up on some of the things we’ve talked about recently on on our podcasts where we’ve talked about the functions within a business and we’ve talked about the capacity of a business and we’ve talked about the people and I feel this is kind of slightly reversing it around so yeah those are really really important things but actually what are we what are we trying to do and how do we set it up so it works properly and I think there’s a danger sometimes when people look at functionality, they go, oh yeah, well, that’s simplistic, I’ve done that. I’ve worked out what functions there are in my business. And then there still ends up being pain in the organsation afterwards. And really, I think that’s what I’d like us to explore a bit more around today.
Yeah, cool. And how does that happen? You we’re growing our business and we’ve got more than 10 or so people in the business and we start to think, well, we probably need an organisational chart at this stage. What do I know about organisational chance? Well, I used to work for a corporate. We had an organisational chart and we had a HR manager and a marketing manager and a this and a that. Why don’t I just copy that and use something like that as a template for growing my business?
And the way it often works is that the business owner says, well, who have I got in my business? I’ve got Kevin, I’ve got Darryl, I’ve got Annie, I don’t know, I’ve got John, got Tracy, whoever it is I’ve got in my business. And I go, okay, so what job do they do? And I have a look at the job that they do and I go, right, well, let me create a job description around what Kevin does. And then I have a look at what Darryl does and I create a job description around what I’ve got Darryl doing. Now that’s a a very common practice that we see. And what we end up with is a business where we’ve created job descriptions for everyone in the business based on what we’ve already got them doing. And that’s probably a pretty good thing. But there’s a major flaw in that system when we do it that way. And that is that we end up with gaps because we haven’t designed it from the beginning. We’ve typically just reacted and just assigned your created the job description and the chart, if you like, around, well, the chart is often based on the job descriptions that we’ve written for people. And that’s just a reaction to the work they do and what we’ve asked them to do and what they get involved in and day to day. The problem when we do it that way is that there’s holes in that chart. There’s often things that are missed. And those things that are missed and aren’t assigned to anyone, are the things that create flare ups, if you like, in your business. And they’re the things that aren’t assigned to anyone else. So you as the owner end up going, well, no one else is going to do it. I’ve got to do it myself. So I’ll go and solve that problem. And then next week, something else flares up because there’s another gap and that gets left to you to go and solve it and something else. So, you’re forever fighting fires because the whole tasks, not everything has been assigned.
So, the simple solution is let’s flip things on their side and let’s design the business from scratch. Let’s have a look at all of the things that need to be done. Let’s identify all of the component parts that we need to get that business humming along or running in harmony. And once we’ve identified everything, we may have, then we identify where the gaps are because we go, well, Kevin’s got these, these responsibilities and actually it doesn’t meet all of the gaps. And we’ve got Darryl doing these. And we, once we start assigning everyone on this template where we’ve identified everything that needs to be done, we can see where we haven’t assigned stuff on job descriptions. So, the gaps are now staring out at us. They’re, they’re, yeah, they’ve, they’ve, they’ve become very obvious because we’ve now templated and we’ve got a plan. So, there’s a start. And why do we need to do it this way? Because this is the way that works for a growing business. When we identify and map out everything that needs to be done first, everything that needs to be done doesn’t change as your business grows. What changes is the amount of time and effort that you spend on each of these functions.
So, we call that a functionality approach. You’ve probably heard us mention functionality. That’s what we’re talking about when we’re referring to functionality. So, how do we bring it to life, Kevin? Because what I just explained, I probably bored everyone and they’re asleep now going, what the heck, make it real. How do we bring it to life, Kevin? Because what I just explained, I’ve probably bored everyone and they’re asleep now going, what the heck? Make it real.
Yeah, so for the few listeners that are still with us, let’s take it in a slightly different direction. Darryl, what you’ve been talking about there is taking a pretty kind of business-like, serious planning approach to it. Absolutely perfect. We must always have that NRI site.
but let’s just flip it around a bit and talk a little bit more about the emotional angle to it and a little bit more about what the hell we’re trying to do in the first place. often we end up using sporting analogies, know, how’s your rugby team gonna work and all that stuff? Let’s not do that today. I’m enthused by a BBC radio program I listened to this morning when I was out walking and it was called Key Matters and it’s all about how music sounds different in different keys.
Okay.
And the conductor of big choirs was talking and this program was about the key of B flat. Now, if you don’t understand all this stuff as an audience, it’s fine.
You’re right out of my comfort zone.
Yeah, yeah, good. So, keys do all sound different. And actually, I would also argue that the way you conduct your business makes you behave differently.
But some people might want to listen to the Mass in B minor by Bach. Beautiful piece of music, very sombre, it’s in B minor and so on. It’s remarkably difficult for a British choir to deliver. Why is that? Because they really struggle getting the low B note that Bach put into it. Because most British choirs are going to get down to a D. So, how about going our audience, our customers want to hear the mass in B minor. So what are we going to do about it? Just because we don’t have a low B doesn’t mean we always have to go without a low B. They’re out there. So, typically, a choir is made up of sopranos, which is about a third of them, altos about a quarter, tenor is about a fifth and bass is 20, 25%, that sort of thing. And if you get that balance of voices,
First all, if you get the balance wrong, you don’t get enough bass, you don’t get enough of the treble notes coming through and the melody lines and so on. So functionality is about saying we need all these different departments doing things. And the capacity is, know sopranos have got lighter voices, so we might need a few more of them to get it to cut through. But my point here is that just because we’ve got 20 to 25 % bases, in our choir doesn’t mean they’re the right bass voices to deliver the piece of music we need to deliver for the audience we want. So I’m saying let’s, let’s look at this a little bit differently and add into it. So, we’ve talked about functionality and we talk about capacity. Now let’s look at it and say, how does this fit? Because you were saying, Darryl, that we start off by going, we need HR, we need a marketing person, we need a salesperson.
This is getting them with the right breadths and depths of skills for the things we want to do for our marketplace. And if we get this right, and our competitors don’t even think about it, we literally and metaphorically are singing.
So, and it’s getting it right for your stage of business. So what would happen if you didn’t have a soprano in your choir?
Well, you’d lose the higher notes, which most often are the high harmonies and melody voices. And so actually people wouldn’t understand what the song’s about. It would change the feel completely. It’d be a different piece of music.
And I suppose you could borrow one from another choir if you didn’t have your own. Would that work?
Absolutely. And guest sopranos are quite a popular thing. So, you get a guest soprano in because they draw a crowd. They’ve got an exceptionally great voice, but also it might be to recognise that you need to bolster a particular voice range for the particular piece of music you’re doing.
Okay. And so I’m starting to see how I’m piecing together the correlation to business here. I’m a little slow on this one, but that’s okay. That’s why we partner up. So, what if you were to start a choir from scratch are there key elements that you go, hey, look, I need these three or four or five people before I consider I’ve got a choir. Yeah, I’m guessing there’s basic component parts that you need to get started.
And then as you grow, you supplement and add to the various areas and have teams, I guess, of different skills.
So this… guess, different skills. This is good stuff, Daryl, because where do you start from? Well, the obvious way to start is have one soprano, one alto, one tenor, and one bass voice.
Well, you say it’s obvious, but seriously, I’ve got no idea.
Because those are the standard four, and then you might end up sounding… You could do some barbershop stuff quite easily. You could do quite a few things, but…the question then is why are you doing it? This is like the startup of a business. Why are you doing it? Are you doing it for fun? Well, it doesn’t really matter, does it? I’ve done live sound for 32 voice choirs with a band playing as well. And it was absolutely for fun. So, the fact that was only seven, 8 % were bass voices. Well, we just had to work around that. But if we’re going into the big market where we want to satisfy a demand for things that are very popular or challenging, we’ve got to get that balance of our choir right. And to some extent, if you want the choir to sound loud, you have more people. As long as you keep the ratios right, it works. So I’ve been to Guilford Cathedral when they’ve had combined choirs of 200 people. Awesome sound.
Yeah.
But they had the balance dead right. I mean, it was just lashes to listen to. And they delivered each piece beautifully well.
So, you got to have the right balance towards, you know, and forgive me, my basic business. So, that means we need the right number of marketing people to compliment the right. So, we’re going back to capacity now. We need the right number of marketing people in the team. need the right number of salespeople to match the right number of sales, but salespeople and get that balance and ratio right. And then that’s got to match and get the ratio right with the production team and the delivery team. And, there’s a correlation there between the various elements of the choir. And a really important point that I think you made where you said, get clear on why the heck you’re doing it. What’s the outcome you’re trying to achieve? You’re in it for a laugh and having a good time. if you’re missing a couple of gaps, it kind of doesn’t matter so much. But if you’re doing it for a commercial return and to solve a problem or you know, to meet a specific need, then you take it a little more seriously and you’re a bit more focused on making sure that all those holes are plugged and you know what’s missing and you compensate for it. And the thought that came to mind earlier is when you were discussing something I’ve gone, hang on a sec. If you don’t have enough base, can, and here’s a serious question, can you artificially boost that? And that would be a bit similar to using AI in your business.
Yes, well, absolutely you can. Again, it’s what is the output that your market wants? And some people will always go, I want the authentic choir, I the live experience and so on. But today, there are so many ways of creating music or augmenting music that’s being delivered. And yes, you can borrow in things to augment and make that sound fuller or slightly different, make it the way your market wants it. But the point is, it’s about understanding what you need.
Yeah.
Our earlier part of this conversation was saying, functionality normally starts by people saying, we need to behave like a big business. And actually, we should really start off by saying, what do our customers want? What’s our target market? What do they want?
So, how authentic does it need to be or how big or what color, know, etc. it needs to be. And then we go, so we’ve got our bus full of people, 55 people on the coach will, well, actually, is the ratio of those rights are the quality of those voices right to deliver what we need to our customer. And I think there’s a real danger that people sometimes don’t realise that their capability versus the demand is slightly different.
That’s interesting.
And so then two things can happen. One is you miss the market. Or the second thing that happens is that you provide something that where you’re always fighting and it’s that agro field you get that you mentioned earlier, Dara, about it always feeling like friction, having to jump in and fix things all the time. What you want is you want your 55 people to get off the coach deliver what the customers want in such a beautiful way that people come back for more. They get away talking about what they experienced from your company. And so therefore what we should do is we should look to the market rather than just look at with what I’ve got, this is all I can do.
As you were talking then, I had this strange image come to mind. And I had this thought of when you’ve got everything right and it’s lined up in a choir, it just sounds so harmonious and beautiful and natural. And it attracts crowds to come and watch. So, the vision that came to mind is, you see buskers down the street. If you see these flash mobs and what have you.
But if you’ve got a choir, a beautiful choir that’s down the street and singing and they’ve got everything covered and they’re quite skilled, it’ll draw a crowd and the crowd will be attracted and you’ll get quite a big crowd all coming to see what’s going on and wanting to check out what their sound is and why it sounds so good. And it’ll attract people as opposed to some buskers that I’ve seen that aren’t real good.
Yeah, you just get plenty of people walk by. Yeah. You imagine me down there having a crack. Yeah. Yeah. Doing some, yeah, my, my musical talent. Yeah. You’d get, you’d get people throwing money at me just to shut me up and, so you get the two differences. So, it’s the same in the business. If you get everything working in harmony, you get your, sales and marketing, right. Or your marketing and sales, right. And, and your client onboarding experience, right. And people get a good experience about that and then you actually deliver what you promised you would deliver and have great customer service and backup and feedback, you’ll have people talking about you, about your business, and they’ll be telling their friends and your business will continue to grow. And assuming you’ve got it systematic, you’ll attract people and you won’t only attract the right customers to your business, you’ll attract the right suppliers because they’ll want to work with you and staff. You’ll attract people who will want to come and work with you. So, you’ll compliment your bases, your tenants, your sopranos, et cetera, with similar talent and you’ll grow by attracting the right talent because you’ve got that right environment. How does that work as our little scenario? you think, does that pull together for our metaphor?
Yeah, it does. does. You were starting to allude to another major point, which is, I guess, pretty obvious, but let’s make it anyway, is that if you’ve got that choir, or a band if you’re more into contemporary music. And you’ve got all the right people with the right breadth of skills to deliver the material that the audience wants. When they’re playing it well, they lift each other. Great musicians, the ones that play less, sound like they’re playing more. They listen to each other and they enjoy it. And when that happens, their performance levels rise. That happens within businesses as well.
You can tell when people are enjoying what doing what they’re doing, can’t you? Because they do a better job.
Exactly.
Yeah, that’s a really good point. And it does. When you’re performing at a high level, it inspires those around you to also achieve great things and lift their game. If it’s an encouraging, supporting environment. I get that. That works. Well, there we go.
So, what do we do with that? We’ve got our business and what do we, so, bring it back to what we’re trying to do here. This is the Exit Insights podcast. It’s not the choir insights podcast because that would be a very short series. What are we trying to do? We’re going, one of the things that makes a business more attractive is a business that functions smoothly with all of the right operations side of the functionality being smooth and seamless and in balance. You haven’t got any excess people or excess resources in any of the particular functional areas. You’ve got a performing, everyone knows exactly what’s required of them. They know the scope of their responsibility and what they should be doing and they shouldn’t be doing. They know when they should be doing everything they should be doing in their roles and they know how to do it.
So, they’ve got the knowledge, they’ve got the capability and they’ve got the capacity. You as a business owner don’t have to jump in, like a good conductor of an orchestra. You don’t have to jump in and tell people what’s doing. You’re just a guiding hand if you like. And you’re not fighting fires yourself. You haven’t got someone who doesn’t show up and you have to jump in and do it yourself.
So, everything is ticking along and you’re just like the person just keeping an overview on it. And you’re not fighting fires because absolutely everything is covered. That’s where we want to get. Your business will be humming along a whole lot smoother. It’ll be more productive. It’ll be more efficient. It’ll be more effective. And you’ll only be working the hours you want to work. You won’t be jumping in all hours of the day, micromanaging and solving problems and having to get your hands dirty
Now, who wouldn’t want to buy a business that runs like that? Because it’s a low risk to them. They don’t need you there as the owner to get in and fight all those fires all the time because they keep appearing. You’ve got your management team that’s demonstrating that they’ve got their own fire extinguishers, then that’s a good thing.
Yeah, I think yet again, we’ve solved the world’s problems.
We’re getting good at this.
Yeah, I yeah, the only additional thing I would just repeat on what you just said, Darrell, because that was a beautiful summary is this concept of saying, have we got the right balance in our choir or in our business team to deliver what the market wants rather than what we delivered last year and the year before and 10 years ago. And once once you start playing with this and start to take a bit of a view towards the customer and the demand end, it becomes really easy to work on because you solve so many other problems there as well. it’s a fun exercise. It’s one sometimes you have to get a little bit of external input around to challenge you on it. Because we are all guilty of being stuck in our ways, or not seeing one or two obvious things. So, you do need occasionally a bit of a prod, a bit of a challenge to say, you got that dead right? But yeah, I think all our business reports will on music paper in future, music staves and stuff and then we’ll be looking sharp, not flat.
That all went straight over my head but I heard some terms I’m familiar with but if we get back to sporting analogies I’ll be back in my comfort zone. We can talk teams and Aussie rules and all sorts of good things.
Yeah, well that’s food for thought for next week then.
And alienate half the audience. Okay, Kevin, that’s brilliant. think we’re looking for making sure we’ve got the right people in the right roles with the right skills and we’ll be ticking along harmoniously. There’s our exit insights for this week.
Yeah, thanks Daryl.
Thanks Kevin.
About Kevin Harrington
Kevin Harrington- Succession Plus UK Partner
Having worked in technology, telecoms, consumer electronics, payments, media and publishing, Kevin has enjoyed an interesting career history that embraces product and services businesses at all stages of their journey.
Before joining Succession Plus he was CMO with The Panoply plc, a digitally native technology services company, founded in 2016, with the aim of identifying and acquiring best-of-breed specialist information technology and innovation consulting businesses. He joined The Panoply from Tungsten Network where he was Chief Commercial Officer.
Previous roles have included working with SMEs and large international businesses. Some highlights are Managing Director at the Emerging Payments Awards and the Prepaid Awards; Managing Director of Gx; Director of Sodexo Motivation Solutions; Global Marketing Director at BBC Worldwide; Product Group Marketing Manager with Sony UK.
His career started out in a completely different direction. His first two full-time roles were as a junior in an architect’s office and a civil engineering technician. Some of his drawings and designs were constructed and are still standing.
If you would like to learn more about how to start preparing your business, then you can get more information here: https://page.succession.plus/it-all-begins-with-insights-exit-insights
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