The logic that made you bring in the numbers person applies to every critical function in your business. Including the one most founders leave empty longest.
The core question: “You knew you needed an accountant, the gap was obvious. The cost of getting it wrong was clear. Now tell me: who’s your commercial number two?”
The ceiling I didn’t see coming
When I joined RWA, I was doing everything. The websites, the CRM, the platform builds, the marketing, the design, the product development. I told myself that was efficiency.
What it actually was, was a bottleneck with good intentions. There are only so many hours in a day, and I was filling every single one, all while raising a young family, running a high street gallery, sitting on charity boards, and supporting businesses in the town.
Life was full. High energy. And the business still had no mechanism to function without me at the centre of it. Something had to give.
What actually changed
The shift came when I stopped pretending that doing everything myself was a strategy. We started recruiting talent. Outsourcing key functions. Actually letting go, not delegating in name while hovering in practice.
Every founder knows the voice: no one does it quite like I do. It might even be true. But it’s also the thing that keeps you trapped.
Because here’s what I discovered on the other side: the business started expanding in ways I could never have achieved alone. Not because I’d worked harder, because I’d finally stopped being the only system the business ran on.
The first person I truly trusted
Fifteen years ago, I appointed my first proper number two. Not a commercial director. Not a sales lead. An accountant.
He attended our board meetings. Produced the reports. Was there through the hard years as well as the good ones. Fifteen years later, he’s one of my closest friends, and he’ll still sit across the table and tell me when he thinks I’m wrong.
The people you benefit most from aren’t the yes people. They’re the ones with the courage to tell you the truth, and the track record to make it land.
The structural gap: “Every founder instinctively hires an accountant first. Yet those same founders will run their commercial operation entirely on instinct for years.”
The board seat nobody thinks to fill
You don’t need to love tax to know you need help with it. You don’t need to be bad at sales to know the commercial side deserves its own number two.
The best boards aren’t filled with mates. They’re filled with the skills and experience the business actually needs, in the right seats, at the right time.
Three things worth sitting with:
- Where in your business are you still the system, not because no one else could do it, but because you haven’t let go?
- The logic you applied to hiring your accountant applies equally to your commercial function. Have you applied it?
- Structure doesn’t slow a business down. Being the only system it runs on does.
