Leave for two weeks, and don't fix anything at night

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The buyer’s favourite question is about your last holiday, and most owners answer it with a story. Run the test instead, properly, before anyone asks: two weeks, genuine emergencies only, no approvals, no late-night fixes, no dialling into meetings. Then treat everything that waited for you as evidence.

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You can usually tell from the timestamps. An approval at 5.40am. A pricing exception signed off at 11.15pm. A two-line reply to the biggest customer, sent from a phone between courses. The owner was away for a fortnight, the business didn’t miss a beat, and that’s the story they’ll tell a buyer when the holiday question comes.

The business didn’t miss a beat because the owner never really left.

Most owners who tell that story believe it. Nothing went wrong while they were away, so the business must have run without them. Nothing went wrong because they were quietly holding it up from a sun lounger.

Why two weeks

Two weeks is the useful length because most businesses can hide their dependence on the owner for a few days. People postpone decisions. Customers wait. Problems pile up quietly, on the assumption that you’ll be back on Monday. By the second week the assumption runs out, and the cracks start to show.

A long weekend proves nothing. A fortnight with your phone on proves less.

The rules

The test only works if you actually leave, and most owners need rules to make themselves do it.

Decide before you go what counts as a genuine emergency, and make sure one can still reach you. Then step away from everything else. Don’t build a command centre that quietly defeats the point, like a daily call where your second-in-command reads you the decisions so you can approve them. After that:

• Don’t approve anything routine.
• Don’t answer questions your managers should be answering.
• Don’t quietly fix things at night.
• Don’t ring your big customers just because you normally would.
• Don’t sit in on every management meeting by video.

The third rule is the hardest to keep, and the most revealing when you break it. A problem you fix at 11pm never appears in the test, which means it never appears in your plan to fix the business either.

What to look for when you’re back

Find out what happened. What stopped, what slowed down, and which decisions sat waiting for you. Who got anxious. Which customers noticed. What information nobody could find, and what got escalated that never needed to be. Which manager stepped up, and which one disappeared behind “I need to check with the owner”.

And what went surprisingly well. Don’t skip that one. Owners often find their people are more capable than they’ve been allowed to be.

The point of the fortnight isn’t to prove you’re unnecessary. It’s to find out exactly where the business still leans on you.

Read the backlog before you clear it

The instinct when you get back is to clear the pile. Read it instead. Every item that waited for you is evidence, and it’s the most honest picture of the business you’ll get, because nobody arranged it for you.

Some of it genuinely belongs with an owner or a chief executive, and that’s fine. The rest waited for one of four reasons, and each needs a different fix.

Missing authority. The manager could have decided but wasn’t allowed to. This is the most common, and it’s usually the owner’s doing: responsibility handed over without the authority to go with it. A sales director carrying the revenue target who can’t approve terms. An operations manager who owns delivery and can’t sign off overtime. Titles mean very little if every real decision still travels upwards.

Missing capability. The person in the seat genuinely couldn’t make the call. That’s a hiring or a development problem, and it takes longer to fix than the others.

Missing information. They could have decided if they’d known what you know: the history with that customer, why that exception exists, which number in the weekly report to trust.

A culture that punishes judgement. They could have decided, were allowed to, and didn’t, because the last person who made a reasonable call that went wrong heard about it for a month. If people are punished for sensible decisions that don’t work out, they stop making them. If you overturn managers in front of their teams, their authority becomes theatre.

Most owners find they’ve trained the business to need them without ever meaning to. The queue of questions on their desk every morning feels like proof they’re indispensable. Quite often it’s proof they’ve taught everyone that the hard calls belong upstairs.

Then do it again

Fix the causes, then run the test again. For each of your managers, write down what they can decide without asking, and up to what limit. Then write down, just as carefully, what they should never bring to you at all. Businesses tend to define what must be escalated and forget to define what mustn’t.

A business that can run for two weeks without its owner isn’t automatically one somebody else can own. It is a great deal closer.

Start early, too. Delegation done for a buyer’s benefit is easy to spot. Independence that has been real for a year has a history behind it, and history is what a buyer believes.

If you’re raising money rather than selling, the investor probably wants you to stay. They’ll run a version of this test anyway, because a business that needs you for every hard decision at $10 million can’t get to $20 million without consuming more of you, and there isn’t more of you.

If you are the buyer here: the useful version of the holiday question goes to the managers, not the owner. Ask them what waited for the owner the last time they were away, and how they knew it had to.

What to do this week

Put the two weeks in the diary, at least a month out, and tell your management team the rules now. Decide what counts as an emergency and who makes that call.

Then, before you go, write down what you expect to be waiting for you when you get back, and put the list somewhere you won’t look at it until you’re home. The gap between that list and the real backlog is the finding you didn’t know you were looking for.

The next time a buyer asks who signs off when you’re away, and when that last actually happened, you’ll have a date.

The full test, with what to watch while you’re gone and how to read what’s waiting when you return, is in Maximising Operational and Technological Efficiency. The people side of it, what happens when you stop being the answer, is in Cultivating a Thriving Organisational Culture. Both are free to download from the Download Vault: manolutions.com/downloads.