The Mess You (Probably) Made While You Were Busy Growing Your Business

It usually starts with something pretty small.

You need to update your business bank card details on a website urgently because you changed it a few weeks ago, and the subscription to something you’re trying to use right now has been declined because of it.

Maybe you’re still receiving random invoices to your personal inbox, which you may or may not successfully forward to your first accounting hire in a timely manner.

Or maybe a new sales hire wants to be proactive and asks you where to find lists of companies you were outreaching to a couple of years ago so they could use this information to build their own outreach lists and strategy. And you probably know the silence that follows such a request. The kind that sits in your chest like a stone, because the honest answer is that it exists somewhere - probably in a folder, maybe some spreadsheet, but most possibly just in your head.

You built quickly, because you had to. In the early days, speed was survival and the filing could wait. There was always something more urgent than the admin, and the admin was always right there, patient and dull, waiting for a quieter week that never arrived. Now it feels like a villain that’s been growing in the background the whole time.

Let’s assume that the quieter week is here now.

Except it’s not as quiet as you’d like - it’s stressing you out with the thoughts of things that were left unattended for a long time and now need your urgent attention. You need to somehow untangle the mess you kept ignoring, and you’re the only one who knows where any of it is. That means you’re the bottleneck (again) and the business you’re trying to build to run without you is, in fact, running entirely through you.

If this sounds like your kind of problem, then congrats - you’re in good company with the majority of business owners who build things from the ground up. But this, of course, is not an essay about bad habits. It’s about a very reasonable set of decisions that compound into an unreasonable amount of work. Always later, and always at the worst possible moment.

I. Subscriptions That Nobody Owns

Think back to when you signed up for your first project management tool. You were the only person using it, so you used your personal card, your personal email and your personal login. Sounds sensible, quick, and totally fine.

But then you added a second tool. Then a third. Maybe even an accounting platform, a design subscription, a scheduling app, a LinkedIn automation thing you tried for a month and then forgot about. Each one felt like a small decision at first. You know the sequence - a click, card details, a confirmation email you archived immediately, and a sense of delight that you subscribed to something that will help you run your business better.

Then, eighteen months later, you have no clean record of what you are paying for. Some tools are on your personal card, others on a shiny new company card that three other people now have access to. And the monthly cost of your software stack is also probably a number that you couldn’t tell me even if you wanted to. Could be anything between £200 and £1,000…

But if you’ve been running your business for a while now, then you know that something eventually goes wrong. For example, a payment fails, a tool stops working, a new employee needs login details to use a tool you hired them to use, or maybe a renewal hits that you’d forgotten about. This is when the research begins and it’s not always pretty. You open your email and search for the invoice - you get two hundred results. You start in January and work forward, and you’re doing this on a Wednesday afternoon when you had actually planned to do some real, important strategic work instead. I can guess that this leaves you feeling frustrated, beaten, and even angry. How hard can it even be?!

The fix is really not complicated. A single shared document, with a subscription name, a login email, a renewal date, a card it sits on, a monthly cost… Ten or eleven columns with all the key info tops, updated as soon as you subscribe to something new and then again when something changes. The document that you’d have spent 10 minutes building eighteen months ago, which would have saved current-you most of a day.

II. The Inbox That Only One Person Can Use

You decided to register the business. You needed an email, so you used yours. Again: fast, sensible, and makes total sense.

Then you used the same email address for everything else afterwards. Now the invoices, supplier confirmations, account verifications, platform notifications, and annual review reminders - all come to you. It felt like the right decision at the time, because this was a great way to ensure you didn’t miss anything important. You received the emails, actioned them, and archived them once done. And you dealt with all of this like a real professional, too - swimming in incoming emails alongside 15 newsletters, client follow-ups, and personal correspondence. :)

Now you may have grown a bit and want to hand this sort of admin over to someone. Maybe your first operations hire, a VA, or a business partner. Except, suddenly, you discover that the email account doesn’t exist separately from you. You are the account. Every tool, every supplier, every service you’ve registered for in the last three years has your name and your inbox as the point of contact, which means access to all of it requires either your login, your trust, or your time. And let me guess, you’re not ready to give that away just yet either.

I hear you. I saw it happen. And there is an easy fix, of course. A generic shared business email, dedicated to subscriptions, suppliers, and website registrations that you need to send to anyone else but you. Just create an ops@company.com or tools@company.com or, if you want to keep the warmth in it, use a random name instead, like steve@company.com - something you can easily hand over to the next person without a lengthy personal handover. This helps you solve the first problem, too. When you use a generic email address for all subscriptions and pass it over to your next person, that other person can do the data entry for you.

Remember, the email address you register a tool under is not a small detail. It’s a decision about who owns the relationship - you personally, or the business. Which means that every tool registered under a personal email eventually becomes a tool that needs migrating later. And while the migration is not hard, it’s time you won’t want to spend thinking or worrying about.

III. The Data That Exists But No One Knows Where

Three years into running a business, someone will ask you a question that sounds pretty simple at first. Something like: “How many clients did we lose in year two, and why?”, or “What was our average project delivery time before we hired the third person?”, or maybe “Where were the complaints clustering before we changed the process?”

And you’ll know that you lived through the answer to that question. You watched it happen in real time and made decisions based on it. But the clean, retrievable, shareable data simply doesn’t exist. It’s probably somewhere in an email thread, a chat log, a memory, or maybe some archived notes on a laptop you don’t even have anymore.

Tracking key data early doesn’t necessarily mean building a reporting system. It doesn’t even mean dashboards, quarterly reviews or a data team. It can be a simple shared sheet, updated weekly or monthly, with the numbers and notes and maybe summaries that will one day tell the story of how the business grew. Client count, issues logged, revenue per project. Whatever feels relevant to the business you’re trying to build.

The reason to do this now is not that the data matters now, but because the data will matter later, and later it will be very difficult or even impossible to reconstruct. You cannot go back and log the clients or prospects you had in March 2023. That moment is gone. The habit of recording is the only thing that would have saved it. I can’t even count how many times I had to create lists upon lists of clients we worked with a few years ago, so they could be reviewed and used again. I had the data, it was messy and imperfect, but I had it, and we could make use of it for things we didn’t think we’d need in the past.

So think about what you’re focused on right now. What matters in your day-to-day? What data are you accumulating, and what numbers are you carrying around in your head? Just put them somewhere clean - a shared sheet that you or someone else could open 3 years from now and understand without a guided tour. Building sheets of historical data from scratch is not an easy feat and, to be honest, not the best use of anyone’s time.

IV. The Process That Only Lives In Your Hands

There are things you do in your business that you don’t enjoy. The invoicing, the chasing, the onboarding admin, the weekly reporting ritual that takes 40 minutes and produces a document nobody reads but that you send anyway because you think you should... You do these things on autopilot, which means you do them efficiently, which means you’ve accidentally become the only person who knows how to do them.

When you finally hire someone to take these things off your plate, you’ll discover that autopilot doesn’t transfer very well. You’ll sit down to write the process document and find that you cannot describe it cleanly because you’ve never had to describe it - you just did it. There was no structure, no system, no actual designed process behind it. And while you can just show and tell your new lovely employee how things should be done, do you really expect them not to have 15 follow-up questions for every task they attempt to complete? They’ll most likely have them, and you’ll be a bottleneck, because you’ll have another 115 things on your list to go through before you can properly guide them.

The answer here is not to perfect the process before you record it. Maybe a perfect process doesn’t exist yet, and you’re still figuring things out, and that’s totally fine. The answer is to record the imperfect process while you still have the time to press record and narrate your own screen for 10-15 minutes, explaining your thinking behind each step and the decisions you’re making and why, without a new team member standing behind you, waiting for the task list to tackle first.

Film it badly, talk over yourself if you can’t do it any other way, but try to get the rough shape of it captured. You can easily tighten it later - or ask AI to do this for you, and you can review. Tightening a rough recording takes ten to twenty minutes, whereas building a process document from a blank page, your memory, and under the pressure of an onboarding that needed to start yesterday, takes much longer.

Remember, this isn’t about building a policy doc before you know what you’re doing. It’s about having something good enough, with your desired standards, to show to the next person, so that they don’t have to learn the same lessons you already paid for with your time.

The Case For Boring Work

Nobody likes to do the boring work, but it’s the boring work that moves a chaotic, reactive, stressful work culture toward a calmer one - where people can focus on tasks they’re actually good at, rather than the firefighting, the fixing, and the time-wasting.

You could read this essay as a checklist:

• Build a subscription log.

• Create a shared email account.

• Track your numbers.

• Record your processes.

Four simple items, maybe ten or twenty minutes each. All done quickly, and your business is now transformed. :)

But that’s, of course, not what this is really about. I don’t assume the problem is that you don't know what to do. Most people who build businesses know they should do the boring work. The problem is that the boring work asks you to slow down inside a moment that rewards speed: to stop and document the thing you’re currently doing, when doing the thing is already taking everything you have.

I’m not a company founder. But I spent the last 7 years working for one - hired as a third employee, and still there when the team crossed 20 people. I know the headaches, because I watched and experienced them compound in an environment that never had time to slow down.

What changed for me was not finding the right system, but understanding what the boring work is actually for. And with the tools available now (ahem, AI), the boring work has never been less time-consuming - so there are fewer reasons to skip it.

It’s not for you now, but for the person who comes after you. Maybe a new hire, a co-founder, or simply the future version of yourself who has completely forgotten why you made a certain decision, under that pressure, two years ago.

So my take is this: admin is not the opposite of growth, but what growth looks like when you care about your company scaling the right way. The companies that scale the easiest (or are attractive to buyers) are the ones where the founder was willing to slow down once in a while, systemise the company, and write important things down so that the next person didn’t have to start from the same blank page.