The Owner Conversation
Every business problem I have ever been shown had an owner standing behind it.
The cash problem is usually a pricing problem. The pricing problem is usually a confidence problem. And the confidence problem was there long before the business was. The jobs you put off, the prices you will not raise, the people you will not confront, the hours you cannot stop working: none of that started with the business, and none of it will change by fixing the business alone.
I noticed this long before I had a name for it. In every business I have worked inside, from a start-up with three people to operations with hundreds, the team ran the way the person above them ran the place. Fix the process and it drifts back inside a quarter, because the person who let it drift is still there. Fix the person and the process holds.
The Owner Conversation is ninety minutes, one to one, on how you actually operate. It always comes after the Business Health Check, never before, because the numbers earn the right to ask the harder questions. It is not therapy and it is not mindset. It is business questions, asked properly, that go to where the real decision is being made.
How it runs
Ninety minutes, one to one, starting from your own Health Check numbers rather than a blank page. The numbers earn the right to ask harder questions than a first meeting normally allows, and we follow them to wherever the real decision in your business is being made, which is rarely where the problem shows up. Then we put a figure on it: what the pattern is costing in euro, in hours, and in people who left or stayed and stopped trying.
I am not going to list the questions here. They only work in the room, and they are different for every owner. What I can tell you is that most owners know the answers before I ask, and have never said them out loud.
What you leave with
One page, in your own words, called the Owner Page. What you now see about how you run the place, what it is costing, and one thing that changes on Monday. It is the shortest document I produce and the one owners keep. If you go on to work with me it becomes the first page of the plan.
What I am not
I am not a therapist, and if something comes up in the room that needs one, I will say so and help you find the right person. What I am is someone who has sat in your chair, run the numbers and the people at the same time, and learned to read both.