Are You Running The Business Or Is The Business Running You?
The Long Run Mindset - For Entrepreneurs #6
Every Easter, I did the stocktake alone.
It wasn’t a decision I made once and revisited. It just became the thing. Catherine would have a few days that looked something like a normal holiday — catching up on the house, seeing family, breathing — and I’d be in the warehouse with a clipboard and a cold coffee, counting stock.
It took most of the long weekend. And I’ll be honest with you: I didn’t entirely hate it.
There was something satisfying about getting a proper handle on the numbers. Easter stocktake meant we went into our year end — end of May — with clean data, fewer surprises, a business that felt briefly under control. I knew where we stood. That mattered.
But there was always a moment, usually sometime on the Saturday afternoon, when the other feeling arrived.
We shouldn’t need to do it like this.
Twelve months in and we were still catching up with ourselves at Easter. Then thirteen months. Then further down the line than I’d care to admit. The satisfaction of getting on top of it and the quiet embarrassment of still needing to — those two things coexisted every single year.
That tension, I’ve come to think, is one of the most honest feelings in business.
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The operating model, for most of those thirteen years, was simple enough.
I worked weekends. Catherine did the admin in the evenings, in front of the TV. That was the rhythm — not a crisis, not a temporary arrangement, just the shape of the thing. It’s what building a business on your own terms actually looks like from the inside, and I’m not going to dress it up as something more glamorous than it was.
We got better over time. Found our version of flow. The systems improved, the team grew, the Easter stocktake got less painful. What had taken a full long weekend in year two took a day and a half in year eight. That’s not nothing — that’s compounding, applied to operations rather than money.
But here’s the thing I’d want you to sit with.
The one week we properly switched off — fully, completely, without the business needing something — was Christmas. Because the business was closed. Not because we’d built something that ran without us. Because the doors were physically shut.
Every other break had an asterisk.
