How to Stop Firefighting and Get Control of a Growing Business

There’s a point in a growing business where being busy stops feeling like momentum and starts feeling like survival.

Customers are chasing. The team is working flat out. Problems are being solved all day long. You go home exhausted, come back the next morning and do it all over again.

That was the position Harvey Leach found himself in earlier in his career. He was managing the supply of parts into a car assembly plant during a difficult model launch and, by his own description, spending every day chasing problems rather than making anything fundamentally better. What changed things was not a huge transformation project. It was learning to create visibility, establish simple routines and focus on the work that would improve the system rather than simply quieten the latest problem.

That experience has shaped the work Harvey has done with growing businesses ever since. Here are some of the most useful lessons from our conversation.

Being busy is not the same as being in control

When things get chaotic, the instinct is usually to work harder.

Answer the phone more quickly. Chase the missing order. Help the team clear the backlog. Solve whatever problem is shouting the loudest.

It can feel productive because you are constantly doing something. But Harvey described that period of his career as simply surviving another day. Plenty happened, but very little moved forward.

That distinction is important because a busy team can still be stuck. In fact, constant activity can disguise the fact that nobody has enough space to ask why the same problems keep appearing.

The first practical step is surprisingly small. Harvey’s boss challenged him to walk away from his desk for 15 minutes and ask one question: what could we do differently that would start making this better?

Just pick one thing to improve.

Create visibility before you try to fix everything

One of Harvey’s strongest recommendations is to make the work visible.

What are we trying to achieve today? How are we doing against that? If we missed it, what got in the way?

In his own example, the team started each morning with a simple view of which parts were likely to cause problems. That meant they could act before the customer rang rather than waiting for an angry phone call and then scrambling for an answer.

The same principle can be applied almost anywhere.

A production team might need to see the jobs that must be completed today. A customer service team might need visibility of response times or unresolved tickets. A finance team might need to know exactly which deadlines are a priority this week.

The point is not to create more reporting for the sake of it. It is to give people enough information to know what success looks like and whether they are getting there.

Harvey’s suggested starting point is simple: make the goal visible, compare what happened with what you planned, and use the difference to learn.

Urgent and important are not the same thing

This is probably one of the hardest lessons to apply when you are already under pressure.

Urgent work demands attention. A ringing phone, an unhappy customer or a problem on the shop floor is difficult to ignore.

Important work never feels urgent, because it’s the things you do for the future of the business. Such as improving a process, getting better information, removing a recurring bottleneck or making tomorrow easier.

Harvey learned to separate the two. Answering the customer’s latest question felt important because it was immediate, but it did nothing to fix the system creating those questions in the first place.

That doesn’t mean ignoring customers or leaving genuine emergencies untouched. It means recognising that if every hour is consumed by today’s problems, nobody is working on the things that could prevent them tomorrow.

A useful question is: which piece of work will make the biggest difference, not just which one is making the most noise?

Stop putting plasters over the same problem

As businesses grow, they often solve problems one at a time.

There is too much purchasing work, so you hire someone in purchasing. The warehouse needs managing, so you create a warehouse role. Production gets more complicated, so you add another manager.

Each decision makes perfect sense on its own. The problem comes when nobody steps back and looks at how those pieces fit together.

Harvey compared it to repeatedly putting sticking plasters over injuries without ever asking why you keep getting hurt.

A business can end up with capable people doing sensible work in separate areas while the overall system still doesn’t function particularly well.

Which is why Harvey encourages businesses to look at the complete journey. How does a customer order move through the company? Which teams touch it? What information has to move with it? Where are the handovers? And what does each part of the business need from the others?

Sometimes the problem isn’t that one department is performing badly. It is that everyone is doing their own job without enough understanding of how their work affects the next person.

Don’t try to change everything at once

Once you can see the problems, there is another temptation: fix all of them.

Harvey’s advice is almost the opposite.

Start small. Test something. See whether it works. Then build on it.

When his team introduced a new morning routine, they didn’t just impose it on everyone straight away. They tried it with one person first. It made his day calmer and meant he was better prepared when customers called, so they extended the approach.

Small experiments reduce the risk of making the whole business more chaotic in the name of improvement.

They also make change much easier for the people involved. Instead of announcing a completely new way of working, you can test one sensible adjustment and ask: did this help?

If it did, keep it. If it didn’t, learn from it and try something else.

Growing businesses need different leaders

Another important part of the conversation was what happens to people as a business grows.

Someone can be excellent technically and still find management difficult. And not necessarily because they are the wrong person. They may simply have moved into a role that requires a completely different set of skills.

The person who was brilliant at bookkeeping, engineering, purchasing or production is suddenly expected to lead people, manage performance, improve processes and understand how their team fits into the wider business.

Hayley raised the question of whether businesses do enough to support people through that transition, rather than simply promoting them because they were good at their previous job.

As the owner steps further away from the day-to-day, managers need to be able to create visibility, solve problems and improve their own areas without everything coming back to the top. But that requires development, not just a new job title.

Get slightly better, then do it again

Harvey’s approach is simple, but highly effective.

Create a little space. Make the work visible. Work out what’s important, not just urgent. Try one small improvement. See what happens. Learn from it. Repeat.

Over time, those small changes add up to significant improvements and a more sustainable growth trajectory.  

Harvey describes it as moving from a downward spiral into a steady upward one. The business does not become perfect overnight, but each improvement makes the next day slightly easier and gives people more control over what happens next.

If your business has grown to the point where everyone is working hard but things no longer feel joined up, the answer may not be to push harder.

It may be to stop for long enough to see what is happening.

Hear the full conversation with Harvey Leach on What One Thing, hosted by Phil Davenport of Affirm IT Services and Hayley Baxter of Corbar Accounting.

Search What One Thing wherever you get your podcasts.

What One Thing is brought to you by Affirm IT Services and Corbar Accounting.