Quick thought experiment.
Pretend somebody just bought your business and the deal just closed. On Monday morning the new owner walks in, and they don't know any on the team. They don't know that Dave's been your most loyal employee, they don't know which of your products mom designed, and they've got no idea which client was your first. All they've got is your P&L and your org chart. And now they're sitting down to figure out what they're going to change to fix and scale the business.
What's on their list?
I bet you already have a pretty damn good idea. I started running this with owners thinking it might shake something loose. Instead, it just tells me how long they've been chewing on it for.
One owner got maybe four seconds in and went, well obviously they'd shut the second location.
Obviously!
That place had been burning money for two years, and she clearly knew the math, but she had an emotional attachment to it because it was in her dream location.
So, the list was never the problem. She knew what she needed to do for two years. It’s like she was just waiting for permission to do it.
This thought experiment isn't something I made up, by the way. Andy Grove did it for real at Intel. In the mid-eighties, they were getting destroyed by Japanese manufacturers in memory chips, which at the time was basically what Intel was. So he asks Gordon Moore, if the board fired us both and brought in some new guy, what's he doing? And Moore goes, he gets us out of memory. And Grove says, okay so why don't we walk out the door, come back in, and do it ourselves. It's in the book titled, “Only the Paranoid Survive”.
Two of the sharpest operators in the industry, and what they needed wasn't better information. They had the best data in the business. They needed a way to give themselves permission to act on what they already knew.
Why is knowing not enough?
Because everything on that list is attached to something.
You can't look at the underperforming line without seeing the year you spent building it. You can't look at that role without seeing the person in it who moved cities for you. You can't look at the client eating a third of your time without remembering they were the first to say yes when nobody else would.
Every single item on your list has a person or a promise sitting on top of it. But the new owners simply don’t have to deal with the same emotional baggage.
They're not smarter than you. They just walked in empty-handed.
What would a new owner change first?
They'd most likely change how much of this business relies on you first. Then worry about things like pricing and product lines.
Frankly they'd have no choice but to do that. Being new to the company means they can't be the final call on every quote or hire or vacation approval. And three weeks in they'd probably be building the processes you've been meaning to build for three years simply because they'd drown otherwise.
And that's why a business can be perfectly healthy and still be almost impossible to hand to anybody.
The new owner test
So, the new owner test is just this: you look at your business as if you bought it that morning, with zero attachment to any historic decision. Grove's version was about a market. Yours is probably about structure, and the responsibilities you are managing.
Here's how I'd run it.
Take an hour this week, and write the first ninety days memo, but not as you. Pretend you are the one who walked in Monday morning to take over the business.
- What do they stop doing in month one? What's on the P&L they look at once and kill?
- Who are they hiring immediately, and what's the role? Be specific about what accountabilities that new person is taking over.
- What do they fix that's been broken and you’ve been ignoring?
- And what do they do about the fact that every real decision currently goes through one person who isn't them?
Then go back through the list, and commit to solving the most important, of the most important, of the most important problem. You know what you need to do and now you have the permission to do it.
One last thing
You don't need somebody to come tell you what's wrong. You'd be paying good money to hear your own list read back to you, and I've watched people do exactly that.
What moves the needle is somebody whose job it is to actually do the work. Someone who shuts down the second location, has the conversation with Dave, rebuilds how decisions get made, and doesn't have ten years of history weighing them down.
That's most of what we do at Switch.
So, what's on your list?
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