Every business owner hits the same walls eventually. The names change, the industries change, but the patterns repeat.
In Episode 9 of the CTD Roundtable, Glenn Marvin sat down with John McConnell, a certified Scaling Up coach with over 30 years in business, to unpack five challenges that show up in almost every company they have worked with. If you are heading into 2026/2027 planning, this one is worth ten minutes of your time.
Most owners have said it at least once: it’s quicker if I just do it myself. John McConnell called it out early in the conversation. “At the end of the day, you’re really saying to someone, I don’t trust you,” he said. “You’re not developing faith, you’re not developing a rapport with them.”
The cost is not just a frustrated team member. It’s an owner who becomes the bottleneck for everything. Glenn’s litmus test: if your business cannot run without you for a week, let alone a month, you have not built a business. You have built yourself a job.
Everyone leaves a strategy day fired up. Then three months later, half the plan never happened. John described it plainly: “You get back to the office and the wheels have fallen off the train.”
The fix isn’t more planning. It’s fewer priorities, owned by fewer people, checked more often. As Glenn put it, “it’s actually the structure that sets you free.”
Revenue growth feels good. It also hides problems if cash isn’t tracked just as closely. Glenn shared why he moved from marketing into strategy work: too many businesses were scaling their problems, not their profits. “If that profit doesn’t turn into cash coming through the business, we’re stuffed,” he said.
John’s take was blunt: “While you’ve got cash in your business, you can do things with it. When the cash starts getting squeezed, all your options dry up straight away.”
Owners rarely get to make decisions with full information. John estimated most difficult calls get made on 20 percent of the picture, at best. “The biggest risk you’ve got is, am I asking the right question?” he said.
Add in the isolation that comes with ownership, and it’s easy to see why good decisions get delayed. Building a small group of people whose judgment you trust changes that equation fast.
The last challenge is simple to state and hard to fix: most businesses aren’t measuring the things that would warn them early. Not everything. Just the handful of numbers that actually matter. “It’s usually only a few things that are critical to your business that you need to measure,” John said.
Glenn and John are running a half-day workshop, Get Business Traction, on 12 October at The Icehouse in Auckland. You will work through a decision-making process to build a plan that carries you through to the next financial year, plus get hands-on access to a business planning tool built specifically for this. The workshop is backed by a guarantee: if you don’t walk away with more value than you paid for, we will refund double your fee.
Register for the 12 October workshop
Can’t make it but want early access to the planning tool? Get in touch and the team will sort you out.
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Glenn Marvin, Connect the Dots
John McConnell, Connect the Dots
6 minutes
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