Etc. File #002 — The Most Expensive Words in Business: "We Really Need To..."

Every business owner has some version of this list, usually kept in their head instead of anywhere useful:

• We really need to update the website.

• We should probably document this process.

• We really need someone to run our social media.

• We should launch that new service we keep talking about.

• We really need a CRM instead of a spreadsheet and a memory.

 The list isn't the interesting part. Almost everyone has one. The interesting part is why it never gets done. The honest answer isn't that the owner doesn't care, or is disorganized, or is somehow bad at their job. It's much simpler and more structural than that: every item on that list is important, but almost none of it is urgent, and it's competing for the same hours as things that are both.

 An angry customer is urgent. A scheduling conflict is urgent. An invoice due today is urgent. Updating the website is not — right up until a prospective client can't find current pricing and quietly goes elsewhere, at which point it's suddenly very urgent and already too late to have prevented the loss.

 This isn't a personal failing; it's math.

 Research (1) consistently shows owners spend most of their time running today's business rather than improving tomorrow's. Urgent work wins because it has a deadline. Important work usually doesn't, until the day ignoring it costs you a customer, employee, or opportunity.

 This is where many owners land on the wrong solution. They look at the list and conclude they need to hire a marketing person, an ops person, and someone to run social. That's not wrong exactly; it's premature. Three part-time problems rarely require three full-time employees.

 They need someone who can own the list. Someone who wakes up every morning thinking about the things everyone else keeps pushing to next week.

 That's a different kind of decision than "post a job for a Marketing Manager," and it's closer to buying back time on the specific things that keep losing the urgency fight, without taking on the overhead, management, and cost of building out a department the business isn't at the size to support yet.

 The list doesn't get shorter because someone finally feels motivated enough to power through it after hours. It gets shorter because something changes about who has the bandwidth to own it — a fractional or embedded resource who treats "we really need to" as the actual job, not as the thing squeezed in after everything urgent is handled. Until that changes, the list just keeps growing, one "we should probably" at a time.

 If your "we really need to" list has been the same five items for the last year, that's not a motivation problem. That's a bandwidth problem. It's not a discipline problem; it's a capacity problem. And until someone owns that work, the list isn't going anywhere.

Most businesses don't stop growing because they run out of ideas. They stop growing because the ideas never become projects, and the projects never become outcomes.

Let’s talk about it.

Etc. Takeaway: Urgent work keeps the lights on. Important work moves the business forward. Both need an owner.

1 The Alternative Board, Pulse Survey: Business Leaders’ Productivity