Thinking | Richard Hulme -- operator & advisor to founders and CEOs

Here's a test you can run right now without leaving your desk

Pick your industry. Any segment of it. Now name the winners and the losers — the companies growing, profitable, and retaining their best people, and the ones that aren't. You can probably do this in thirty seconds. You've been watching it for years.

Now ask yourself: what do the winners know about the industry that the losers don't?

Probably not much. They're in the same market. They have access to the same information, the same trade associations, the same talent pool, the same suppliers. Industry knowledge isn't what separates them. What separates them is the quality of what their leadership has built inside the organization.

You started this business because you identified a real customer pain point and built a solution around it. That was the right move — it's exactly how a business worth building gets started. But finding something worth selling to people who want to buy it is the first threshold, not the finish line. The businesses that scale past it are the ones whose leaders have made three foundational decisions clearly and acted on them consistently:

Where the company will play — the business model. What you sell, to whom, and why they choose you.
How it will deliver — the processes, structures, and workflows that turn your business model into a profitable customer experience that delights.
Who will bring it to life — the roles, the skills required in those roles, and the people trained and motivated to fill them.

Not industry knowledge. Not technology. Not copying your competitors. The quality of what the leadership has built inside the organization is what unlocks value.

Here's what gets in the way. Because you understand the customer problem better than anyone in the building, you naturally keep making decisions from that strength as the business grows. It's a human response — go with what you know. Psychologists call it the Dunning-Kruger effect: deep competence in one domain creates the unconscious assumption that competence transfers to every domain. It doesn't make you wrong or arrogant. It makes you human. But it does mean that over time you become overcommitted — part of almost every flow in the business, involved in decisions that shouldn't require you, and further from the work that only you can do.

The businesses that get past that inflection point are the ones whose leaders have built something that works without them in the room for every decision. That means a strategy that is clearly defined and frequently communicated so everyone knows what they're working toward. Processes that are crisp, effective, and efficient at delivering value to the customer. And people who are trained, motivated, and supported in growing their capability — because people who see a path forward stay and perform, and people who don't, leave.

The research supports this consistently. Gallup’s analysis across thousands of business units finds that managers account for 70% of the variance in employee engagement. Not market position. Not product quality. Not industry expertise. Managers. McKinsey identifies manager capability as the single most important factor in employee experience. HBR surveys find that 81% of executives agree engaged employees perform better — yet only 24% say their people are highly engaged. Highly engaged employees show up with the will to contribute. High performing ones have the skill to deliver. You rarely get one without the other — and top-quartile engagement teams achieve 23% higher profitability than bottom-quartile teams. That gap between what leaders know drives performance and what they’ve actually built is where most businesses quietly lose.

This is where I need to be honest about my own positioning. I work primarily with businesses in industries I know well — professional and business services firms (consulting, accounting, law, agencies), food retail, food service, and other operationally complex businesses where execution is the product. I know these worlds. I’ve run the P&L, made the hiring decisions, managed the margins, dealt with the same kinds of suppliers and the same pressures you’re dealing with now. That shared experience matters — it means we don’t spend precious time getting me up to speed. We get to the real work faster.

But knowing your industry is the entry ticket, not the differentiator. What makes the difference is forty years of real-world experience doing the actual work — sitting with line employees, pen and paper on the table, co-designing processes that make sense to the people who have to run them. Talking directly with colleagues at every level about where the business is going and what it needs from them. Recruiting, onboarding, and developing people in ways that make them want to do their best work. That’s not a methodology. That’s what it actually takes to build a business that delivers consistently — where the customer experience improves, and where you can step back from the flows that don’t need you anymore.

That’s where I work. Your business, running the way it should.