Hey Reader,
I haven’t written to you in nearly two months.
No insights on exits. No reminders about getting out of the weeds. No nudges about building businesses that can run without you.
The irony is that I was doing just that, just not by choice.
My wonderful, beautiful, irreplaceable Nan passed away in September. Her name was Olive, and she was 100 years old.
She lived through the war, the Blitz, and rationing. She spent most of her life living on council estates, working as a primary school cook with very little money.
And yet she was the richest person I’ve ever known.
Maybe not in money, but rich in love, in presence, in the way people felt around her. When the school didn’t have the budget for fresh strawberries, she grew them herself in her greenhouse and brought them in for the children. That greenhouse was always full of fruit and vegetables she quietly gave away. She didn’t want applause. She didn’t even need anyone to notice. That was simply who she was.
She was loved by everyone. Not just by our family, but by the children she cooked for and the teenagers on the estate who knew her door was always open. Half my friends came to her funeral because growing up, she was their Nan too.
On her 80th birthday, I took her to New York. We stayed at the W Hotel, and I’d called ahead to let them know we were celebrating. When we arrived from the airport, they had a wheelchair waiting for her. She was mortified and playfully punched the security guard who suggested she might need it.
That was my Nan. She was still getting on buses by herself at 96.
From the time I was eighteen, I spoke to her every single day. I took her on holidays with me throughout my life, even as a young twenty-something.
When my Nan took a turn for the worse, I was supposed to be running a two-day Board mastermind. Instead, my long-term business partner Matt Thomas and my long-time friend Piers Linney stepped in and ran it for me.
During the following weeks, we launched The Published Expert. It went ahead. It worked.
Deals still closed. Clients were still served. Projects moved forward. The business didn’t crumble.
Not because I was firefighting behind the scenes, but because years earlier I’d made decisions that most people keep putting off. I’d built systems. I’d hired people I trust. I’d delegated work that doesn’t need me. I’d removed myself from the day-to-day running of the business long before I ever planned to test whether it actually worked.
And I’d built up years of goodwill with my clients, many of whom actually refused to let me work.
The truth is we talk a lot about exits, about selling businesses, about succession planning and stepping back when the time is right. What we don’t talk about enough is that you need a business that can run without you now, not one you hope will run without you one day.
Because life doesn’t wait for you to be ready. It just happens.
This isn’t just about succession. It’s about freedom. Freedom to step away when someone you love is dying, freedom to be present when your child needs you, freedom to stop when life demands your full attention.
Michael Gerber put it bluntly in The E-Myth Revisited: if your business depends on you, you don’t own a business, you own a job. And it’s the one job you can’t walk away from when it matters most.
That became very real for me over those two months.
Here’s What I Learned (And What You Can Do)
The first thing I learned is that you can’t schedule life’s defining moments.
I didn’t plan to step away. If my business had needed me every single day to survive, I would have been faced with an impossible choice, and no one should ever have to choose between the people they love and the thing they’ve built. Let’s not get it twisted, we all know what choice I would have made; my Nan all day, every day, but that’s also because I could.
If you had to step away tomorrow for eight weeks, what would break first? What would stall? What would fall apart because it only lives in your head, or because you’re the only decision-maker, or because your team can’t move without you. Write it down. That’s what needs to change.
The second thing I learned is that the people around you are often more capable than you’ve allowed them to be.
There’s a big difference between delegating tasks and genuinely empowering people to decide without you. That only happens when you stop rescuing, stop hovering, stop being the automatic answer to every question.
If you want one immediate shift that changes everything, it’s this: the next time someone comes to you with a problem, don’t solve it. Ask them what they think the options are, what they recommend, and what the risk is if they’re wrong. Give them room to think, not just room to do.
And the last thing I learned is the one I already knew intellectually, but had never experienced quite like this.
A business that can run without you isn’t about preparing for an exit. It’s about designing a life where you have space when life happens. Grief. Illness. Family. Or simply the need to stop and think for a moment without the whole thing falling over..
If there’s one place to start, start with what only exists because you’re there. Pick one process. One recurring decision. One client workflow. Write it down, record it, make it transferable. If knowledge lives only in your head, it becomes a bottleneck and then, eventually, it becomes a liability.
My Nan taught me that the richest life is not measured in money. It’s measured in love, in memories, and in the freedom to show up when it counts.
Your business should give you that freedom. Not take it away.
You’ve got this …
