Build #50 - the journey so far

Hey there,

Today’s Build has a slightly self-indulgent feel.

I’m taking a look back over the last 50 issues of my newsletter for founders. I was going to title it “the greatest hits” but I bailed.

Build began in November 2022 as an exploration of how businesses can scale better – becoming sustainable organisations for the long term, not grown too fast upon weak foundations.

Then as I went independent in January 2023, it became an opportunity to capture learnings, reflections and use writing as a means to think through interesting problems that I was working through.

Twelve months into my independent COO life, I decided it was time too look back at some learnings from my last employed role. The passage of time gave me the chance to take an honest look at what I’d really learnt. The six themes really resonated and sparked off a couple of intense days in my inbox and WhatsApp.

Looking at the analytics, my article on accountability from February 2023 was particularly well shared and I remember a few interesting email discussions coming from this one. It’s a good primer on what we really mean by accountability - something a lot of people talk a lot about, but about which there’s little common understanding.

Decision making is tightly bound up with accountability. My article about “deciding on deciding” played out particularly well on LinkedIn as I unpacked a bit about the need to be intentional in how decisions are made in growth businesses.

And the logical next step from accountability and decison making is being able to hold people to account for their work. This is an area where so many founders go wrong, either failing to hold people to account in any meaningful way or going in far too hard. The real kicker is founders who oscillate unpredictably between these two modes. My article attempts to provide some clarity about how to do this better.

Another commonly misused word in my world is operating models. In fact that’s two words. This article has been shared a lot as a simple explanation of a concept that’s shrouded in consultant BS.

Friction is also a word I notice myself using a lot in my work helping businesses scale. An early article from January 2023 looked at the two types of friction and why they are important for scaling founders to understand.

Problems are things that founders think about a lot. I wrote this article because I observed that founders need to recognise different types of problem and engage with them differently.

But the article I still get asked most about is my exploration of why founders don’t always make the best CEOs for their business. It’s a fascinating topic, bound up in leadership theory, founder identity, ego and all sorts beside.

I love an evidence base for my work, so back in mid-2023 I did a big research project talking to more than 50 founders in scaling businesses about their experiences. As well as underpinning my B3 framework, this research also helped inform a favourite piece of mine about company building being an undervalued craft.

Back in December 2024, I was working on the formative stages of a new venture that ended up as actualise.work. This article about the joy of work generated a lot of debate and reinforced some themes for me as I took on a new fractional COO role.

And more recently I’ve written about the importance of having a business operating system that works. This feels like the logical next step to be able to apply the thinking behind the B3 framework. It gives a tangible form to what founders need to be able to run their growing businesses effectively.

Sometimes my writing efforts have felt more on the contrived end of things. This piece was my attempt to draw parallels between ultra running and leading scale-ups. Through the lens of greater writing experience, it’s one that probably needed more work before I hit publish.

Autumn 2023 was a time when I experimented with formats for Build. This one on the real role of leaders feels a bit over-simplistic and lacking in the depth that I value. I think I was trying to be more LinkedIn but ultimately I learnt to write what I think, not try to ape the style of others.

I find writing Build a pleasure. It gives me space to explore, share and debate the things that echo around my brain across the many plates I spin. I’m very grateful for every person that reads, subscribes, shares, comments and contacts me about my writing.

Next week normal service resumes. If you’ve got a topic you’d like me to explore, just hit reply or find me on LinkedIn.

best regards,

-sw

ps looking back through my writing, I stumbled across a piece I wrote back in 2020 as the pandemic just started to bite. It was a reflection on the agency MD role I was exiting at the time. Looking back it’s a lovely summary of my leadership philosophy and it’s as valid today as it was back then.

I help founders turn visions into high performing businesses working as a fractional COO, consultant COO, advisor and coach.