Gravity isn't the problem

At the beginning of July I wrote the copy for a page explaining how my method works. The metaphor, the five stages, an animation… the lot. I marked it deploy ready, because it was.

On the 25th of July it was still sat in Notion.

Eighteen days. Three websites carrying no explanation of the method at all. Nobody in my team was blocked. Nobody was waiting on a decision. The words were finished and signed off by the only person whose sign-off counts.

It just needed me to move them.

I have spent twenty odd years watching that happen to other people. I could not see it in my own fortnight.

The advice everyone gets

Every founder I work with has been told the same thing, usually by someone charging for it.

Delegate more. Let go. Hire a number two. Trust your team.

It is not bad advice. It is just aimed at the wrong thing, which is why it survives about three weeks before the business quietly routes everything back to the same desk.

Here is what I think is actually going on.

You are the centre of gravity

That is not a criticism. It is a description.

Your judgement is why the business exists. It is why the first clients bought, why the good work is good, why the thing that nobody can quite articulate in the pitch keeps winning. You are the mass at the centre. That is what founders are for.

The gravity was never the problem.

The problem is that nothing around you is in a stable orbit. So everything falls inward. Every decision, every handover, every quick question drops out of the sky and burns up on contact with your attention.

"Delegate more" treats the gravity as the fault. It asks you to be less central, less involved, less the reason the business works. No wonder it fails. You cannot delegate gravity.

You can only change what is in orbit around it.

What orbit actually means

Something in orbit is not being held there. Nobody has their hand on it. It keeps its position because the structure is right. The speed and the distance are correct, so it stays put without anyone gripping.

In an agency that looks unglamorous.

Take new business qualification. In the version where everything falls inward, someone brings you a lead and asks what you think. You look at it for ninety seconds, you say yes or no, and you are right, because you have been doing this for two decades. The team learns that the answer lives in your head. So they keep coming back for it, which is rational of them.

In the orbiting version, the criteria are written down somewhere anyone can reach. Sector, size, who the buyer is, what we walk away from and why. The team applies them. What comes back to you is the borderline one, with a note on why it is borderline.

Same judgement. Different position.

You have not handed over the thinking. You have handed over the ninety percent of cases where the thinking was already settled and you were just being asked to repeat it out loud.

My brain, for what it is worth, is excellent at the first version of a thing and useless at the fiftieth. Written down, the criteria do the fiftieth so I do not have to pretend I can.

The test

You can tell when it has worked, because you can step away.

Holiday. Paternity leave. A month buried in delivery on the one client that is paying for everything. And the orbits keep their paths.

That is the only test I trust now. Not whether you feel less busy, because busy is not the measure and never was. Not whether the org chart looks tidy. Whether you could go dark for three weeks and come back to a business that still has its shape.

Most founders do that maths and do not enjoy the answer.

I did not enjoy mine. Eighteen days for a page that was already written, sitting in a document, waiting for the one person in the business who could press publish to have a clear afternoon.

Most founders do that maths and do not enjoy the answer.

I did not enjoy mine. Eighteen days for a page that was already written, sat in a document, waiting for the one person who could press publish to have a clear afternoon.

Here is the part that does not get said. Putting things into orbit is slow, boring work, and it is work only you can do. Writing down the criteria takes an afternoon you have not got, and it will sit at the bottom of the list every single week, because it always looks like the least urgent thing there.

That is why it does not happen. Not because founders are precious about control. Because the one job that would unblock everything is the only one with no client attached to it.

Which is how it ends up waiting eighteen days.