The Product You Can Sell Is Whatever You Can Still Do Yourself

Most people who leave corporate to start a business do it in the industry they know. That makes sense. You know the customers, the suppliers, the margins and where things usually go wrong. What far fewer people check is whether they can still do the work themselves.

I got lucky here, and I didn't plan it. For most of my career in agency leadership, including my time as chief strategy officer, I never enjoyed delegating the strategy work. Briefing someone, waiting, then reworking their thinking often took longer than doing it myself, so I usually did it myself. At the time that probably looked like a management weakness. Looking back, it kept me close to the work. Now that I also sell brand strategy directly as a consultant, the thing I can sell is the thing I never stopped doing.

That is the argument of this piece. If you are in a mainly managerial role and planning to start a business close to the one you work in now, the product you can sell in year one is whatever you can still do yourself. Seniority quietly erodes that ability, and you should find out how much before you resign.

The numbers

• CEOs of large companies spent 72% of their work time in meetings, in a study that tracked 27 CEOs for 13 weeks each (Porter and Nohria, Harvard Business Review, 2018).
• The same CEOs spent 3% of their meeting time with customers (Porter and Nohria, Harvard Business Review, 2018).
• Among the fastest-growing US start-ups, founders with three or more years in the same industry succeeded at twice the rate of founders with none (Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda, NBER Working Paper 24489, 2018).
• Skill loss after more than a year of disuse is substantial, and cognitive, accuracy-based tasks lose more than physical ones (Arthur and colleagues, Human Performance, 1998, meta-analysis of 53 studies).
• In Q1 2021, 9.6% of employed South Africans worked for themselves without employing anyone, against 5.7% who employed others (Seda SMME Quarterly Update, Q1 2021).

The higher you go, the less of the work you do

CEOs of large companies spend 72% of their working time in meetings, according to a 2018 Harvard Business Review study by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria that tracked 27 CEOs around the clock for 13 weeks. Only 3% of their meeting time went to customers.

That is the job working as designed. A CEO's output is decisions, and the people who carry them out. You don't need to be a CEO for the pattern to apply, though. Every step up the ladder swaps some doing for some managing. A junior designer designs. A studio head reviews designs, allocates work and fights over budgets. A creative director can go months without opening the software.

None of this is a failing while you're employed. It becomes a problem when you leave, because your new business needs someone to do the work, and for the first while that someone is you.

Industry experience helps, but check which kind you have

Founders with three or more years of experience in their start-up's industry reached the top 0.1% of growth at twice the rate of founders with no industry experience, according to a study of 2.7 million US founders by Pierre Azoulay, Benjamin Jones, J. Daniel Kim and Javier Miranda, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2018.

This is good news for a corporate manager starting a business in their own sector, and I don't want to undersell it. You know how customers buy, what suppliers charge, where margin leaks and who signs off. That knowledge is hard to get any other way.

The study, though, measures years in an industry. It doesn't separate the person who ran the kitchen from the person who ran the region's kitchens, and those are different kinds of knowledge. A regional operations manager for a restaurant group knows the economics of forty sites. The kitchen manager knows how long prep takes before a Saturday rush, which supplier's chicken shrinks in the pan and what a new cook gets wrong in the first week. If the regional manager leaves to open one café in Umhlanga with four staff and no head office, they need both kinds. The second kind is the one they've been losing for years.

What fades, and what it costs in year one

Skill loss after long periods of disuse is substantial, according to a 1998 meta-analysis of 53 studies by Winfred Arthur and colleagues in the journal Human Performance, and it is worst for cognitive tasks that depend on accuracy. Physical, speed-based skills held up better.

That matters because the skills a new owner leans on most are the cognitive, accuracy-dependent ones: estimating, quoting and judging whether a piece of work is good enough to hand over. Your feel for physical work may come back after a few shifts. Your ability to price a job accurately usually won't come back on its own.

Pricing is where most former managers get caught first. If you haven't estimated a job yourself in eight years, you'll price from memory and old rates, and you'll find out you were wrong halfway through delivering it. An engineering director who starts a small consultancy in Joburg may know what the market charges but no longer know how many hours a design review really takes. Quote low and you work for free. Quote high and you don't win the work.

Judging quality is the second problem. When you do take on staff or subcontractors, you need your own standard to measure them against. If you've lost it, you end up taking their word for what good looks like, and your clients will notice before you do.

This hits harder in South Africa, where most business owners have nobody to delegate to. In the first quarter of 2021, 9.6% of employed South Africans worked for themselves without employing anyone, compared with 5.7% who employed others, according to Seda's SMME Quarterly Update. Those figures include informal businesses, but in my experience the pattern holds for formal start-ups too: the first hire comes later than the business plan says, and until then the owner does the work.

This is not an argument against delegating

My reluctance to delegate was luck, and I wouldn't recommend it as a management style. Owners who can't let go limit the business to their own hours, and plenty of small firms stall exactly there.

You need both. You should delegate, and you should stay good enough at the work to judge it and step in when it goes wrong. What you want to keep is competence. Control is a separate question, and most owners hold on to too much of it.

The argument also has limits. If you're buying a franchise that comes with an operations manual and a trained manager, or starting something in a field you've never worked in, it applies less. It is aimed at the person planning a business that looks like a smaller version of the one they run now.

Reconnect before you resign

If you plan to start a business in your current industry, the cheapest time to rebuild hands-on skills is while you still earn a salary. Once you've resigned, every week you spend relearning is a week without income.

Start with an honest audit. List the tasks you'll personally do in the first three months, then answer two questions for each: when did you last do it yourself, and could you do it today to the standard a paying customer expects? Here's what that might look like for the regional manager planning a café:

The gaps tell you where to spend your remaining months in employment. A few ways to close them:

• Take on a hands-on project inside your current job. Choose one where you do the work, even if it's below your grade.
• Spend real time at the operational end of the business. Work shifts, sit beside your best operator for a week, and do one job from start to finish.
• Price a live job from scratch before you see your team's quote, then compare the two. The difference shows you how far your estimating has drifted.
• Do a small paid job on the side, if your employment contract allows it. Check it first for moonlighting, conflict-of-interest and restraint-of-trade clauses, because these can bite in a business that competes with your employer.

None of this is glamorous, and at a senior level it can feel like a step backwards. It is still far cheaper than finding out in month four, with your savings running down, that you can no longer do the thing your business sells.

Frequently asked questions

Does industry experience help you start a successful business?

Yes. A 2018 study of 2.7 million US founders by Azoulay, Jones, Kim and Miranda, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found that founders with three or more years in their start-up's industry reached the top 0.1% of growth at twice the rate of founders with no industry experience.

How quickly do work skills fade if you stop using them?

Skill loss grows with time. A 1998 meta-analysis of 53 studies by Winfred Arthur and colleagues, published in Human Performance, found substantial loss after more than a year of disuse. Cognitive, accuracy-based tasks such as estimating and quality judgement declined more than physical, speed-based skills.

How much time do senior executives spend in meetings?

A 2018 Harvard Business Review study by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracked 27 CEOs of large companies for 13 weeks each. They spent 72% of their work time in meetings, averaging 37 meetings a week, and only 3% of that meeting time with customers.