When you run your own business you get to choose how you structure it.
I think we’re still struggling with how to do this in a post-pandemic world.
I’m a startup person, happiest in a small firm with a few partners.
Life is simple here.
We have two jobs –
- Build stuff that solves problems for clients.
- Talk about what we do so new clients can find us.
The problems start when we try and grow up.
As you grow, you add more people, and as you add more people you create structures and roles and processes and governance and bureaucracy.
This is how you start loving your work and then find yourself ten years later wearing a suit watching others work and wondering why it’s all so boring.
The pandemic changed all that. We found we could work with anyone, anywhere.
What mattered was finding ways to build teams that worked great together.
And you can do this remotely just as well as you can do it in-person. People who say you can’t just don’t know how to do it yet.
And these teams don’t need to be at the same firm.
We can cut across organisations – the team is made up of the client or problem owner and people from multiple firms that bring the expertise together that’s needed to improve the situation.
It’s the network that delivers value, not the hierarchy.
This is, if done well, inherently more efficient, effective and sustainable than the way we did things before the pandemic.
Some people will disagree vehemently. And that’s ok.
The economics are what matter in the long run.
Handcrafted insight 