One of the weirder things I’ve been saying to my founder clients lately is that sometimes they have to let the fires in their business burn.
It’s one of the parts of being a founder that just sucks. You have to be a builder first and a firefighter second. And every fire you decide to put out yourself is a building project for your business that dies.
The first question I always get is: so what do I do with the fires when they happen? I think you have three real options.
Option one: let it burn
This is often your best option, and it’s the one nobody wants to hear. You’d be surprised how minimal the damage from a fire can be.
Start measuring every fire you put out through the lens of ROI. Is the potential damage of this fire really greater than the return I’d get from investing the same time in a project that moves the business forward? A lot of the time, when you’re honest, it isn’t.
Option two: let it burn and see who steps up
In founder-led businesses, the team keeps looking to the founder as the firefighter. Often somebody on the team has the ability, the talent, and the desire to put that fire out themselves. They just don’t want to step on the toes of the person driving the business forward.
So when you don’t take action, when you can say “I’m actually okay with this burning a little and causing some damage,” you’ll be surprised how people step up. They become the kind of people who can put out fires for you, and they grow into more of their potential in your business while they do it. What a gift that is to you as the founder: creating space that other people fill.
Option three: build a sprinkler system
Instead of putting this fire out, build the process or system that puts it out, and keeps putting out fires like it.
Maybe that’s training somebody shoulder to shoulder with you, so the next time it happens they can be the one to solve it. Maybe it’s a piece of technology, or an SOP, or whatever it is, so that when fires like this inevitably happen again, the business is set up to handle them without you.
Here’s the reality. If you want your business to grow, if you want it to look different three months from now than it does today, you have to accept living with the heat from these fires as a fact of founder life. You have to learn to build in the middle of it.
Becoming a builder doesn’t happen when all the fires are out. It happens in the middle of the one that’s burning right now.
— Craig