Month: June 2026

Growing fast is not the same as growing well

I speak to a lot of founders who are, by any obvious measure, doing well. Revenue is up. The team is growing. They’re winning new clients. And yet something feels off.

They’re working harder than ever but feel further from in control. Decisions that used to be straightforward now feel complicated. The business they built around their own judgment has grown to a point where that judgment alone isn’t enough.

What I often find, when we start to dig in, is that the growth has outpaced the foundations.

The foundations most growing businesses are missing

I’ve built and scaled businesses myself. One of them, a specialist travel business, I eventually grew and sold. And across those experiences, and the coaching work I’ve done since, I keep seeing the same gaps come up. Not in every business, but in enough of them that I’d call them patterns.

Vision and clarity

Not a mission statement on a wall. I mean real clarity: about where the business is going, what it’s optimising for, and what success actually looks like in three years. Without that, every decision becomes harder than it needs to be. Your team can’t prioritise effectively because they don’t know what matters most. And as the founder, you end up as the bottleneck for things that shouldn’t need you at all.

Understanding the numbers

Most founders I work with understand their revenue. Fewer have a clear grip on margins, cash flow timing, or the unit economics of what they sell. That’s not a criticism: it’s often just not where their energy has gone. But it matters enormously as you scale, because the decisions that look obvious on the surface often look quite different when you understand the numbers behind them.

Systems and processes

At five people, you can run on tribal knowledge and a founder who holds everything in their head. At fifteen or twenty, that breaks down. The businesses that scale well are the ones that have started to build repeatable, documented ways of doing things. Not bureaucracy: just clarity about how the work gets done, so that the business doesn’t depend entirely on specific individuals.

Leadership

As a founder, you were probably very good at doing the thing your business does. That’s how you got here. But leading a growing team is a different skill set, and most founders have had to learn it on the job, with real consequences for getting it wrong. Knowing how to set expectations, have difficult conversations, delegate effectively and build a culture that retains good people: these matter more and more as headcount grows.

Why coaching can help earlier than you think

Most founders come to me at a point of strain. The business is growing but something isn’t working, and they can feel it even if they can’t name it yet.

That’s a perfectly good time to start. But the founders who get the most from coaching are often the ones who start a little earlier, when things are going well but the complexity is beginning to build. At that point, you have the space and the runway to put things in place proactively, rather than reactively.

Coaching isn’t about being told what to do. It’s about having a thinking partner who has been through it themselves, who will ask the questions you haven’t thought to ask yourself, and who can help you see your business more clearly than you can when you’re inside it every day.

A question worth sitting with

If someone asked you right now to describe your business’s vision for the next three years, could you do it clearly and confidently? Could your team?

If the honest answer is no, or not really, that’s not a failure. It’s just information. And it’s a good place to start.

Talk to us about coaching and mentoring  → either use the contact form below, or call us on 0330 223 7580 

What our clients say

“Sarah asked me some tough questions and introduced me to lots of ideas, theories and tools as well as some business basics. I was muddling through before Sarah’s help but now have clear structure and processes I can follow.”

Vicky, Little City

“Sarah helped me to develop structure and systems and has given me a much better understanding about my business. I now feel more empowered and in control and have seen a direct increase in productivity.”

Amanda, Colchester Children’s Counselling

About the author

Regional Director for Essex and Suffolk, Sarah helps ambitious business owners get the right support without the cost of full-time staff. A serial entrepreneur herself, she brings real-world experience, Virtual Expert connections, and leadership coaching to every client relationship.

Why most training doesn’t stick – and what to do instead

I’ve had a version of the same conversation dozens of times.

A founder or MD gets in touch. Their business has grown, usually faster than they expected. The team has doubled. New managers are in post. There’s a culture they want to protect, and a performance bar they need to lift. They know training is part of the answer. So they find a provider, book a programme, and send the team along.

Six weeks later, I’ll often hear the same thing: ‘It was a good day, but I’m not sure how much has changed.’

Sound familiar?

The problem isn’t training. It’s the wrong kind of training.

Most training programmes are designed for large organisations: companies with dedicated L&D functions, multi-year development cycles and the luxury of time. They’re then sold, with a few tweaks, to businesses a tenth of the size.

The result is training that’s well-structured, professionally delivered and largely disconnected from the reality of running a 20, 30 or 50-person business.

In a scaling business, your managers are often leading people for the first time, without a blueprint. Your HR function (if you have one) is probably one person building the plane as it flies. Your culture is a genuine competitive advantage, but it’s under pressure as headcount grows. These are specific, urgent challenges. Generic solutions don’t serve them well.

What actually works

In my experience, training sticks when three things are true.

1. It starts with your context, not a catalogue

The most effective development conversations I have with clients begin not with ‘what do you want to learn?’ but ‘what’s actually getting in the way?’ Sometimes the answer is a skills gap. Sometimes it’s a process problem. Sometimes it’s a confidence issue, a team dynamic, or a structural change that hasn’t landed yet.

Good training is diagnosis first, delivery second.

2. It’s delivered by people who understand the world of growing businesses

There’s a meaningful difference between a trainer who has read about managing difficult conversations and one who has sat in those conversations themselves, with real stakes, real people and no HR safety net.

At Get Ahead, our trainers work inside scaling businesses every week. That’s not a marketing line. It means that when a manager asks ‘but what do I actually say?’, we have a real answer.

3. There’s support beyond the session

A workshop can shift thinking. What embeds it is what happens afterwards: the follow-up conversation, the coaching check-in, the manager who applies it and gets reinforced rather than left to drift.

One of the things I’m proudest of in how Get Ahead approaches training is that we can stay involved. Because we often support our clients operationally too, we can help embed the learning in a way that a training-only provider simply can’t.

The moment to act is usually earlier than you think

Most businesses come to us about training at a point of pain: a leadership crisis, a performance issue, a team that’s lost cohesion. We’re glad to help at those moments. But the businesses that see the most sustained improvement are the ones who invest in development before things go wrong.

If your business is growing and you’re starting to feel the strain, if your managers are stretched, your culture is harder to maintain, or your people’s capabilities aren’t quite keeping pace, that’s the signal. Not a crisis, but an opportunity.

A conversation is the best starting point

We don’t believe in off-the-shelf answers, which is why we always start with a conversation. If you’re wondering whether structured training or development support could help your business, I’d love to talk it through. Give us a call on 0330 223 7580.

No obligation. No jargon. Just an honest conversation about what might make the greatest difference for your team.

Read more about our bespoke leadership development here.

About Hazel

Hazel is the Get Ahead Regional Director for Kent and East Sussex, bringing over two decades of senior-level experience that spans Russian linguistics, marketing, and a long career in Human Resources across the IT, engineering and charity sectors. For many years, Hazel was part of the Senior Leadership Team at a global engineering company, navigating a venture capital-backed Management Buyout, leading significant organisational change, and representing the business across the Far East, North America and South America. In 2018, she accepted the Queen’s Award for Enterprise at Buckingham Palace on behalf of her organisation. Hazel leads Get Ahead’s nationwide HR Essentials service, helping SMEs build compliant, practical people foundations that support sustainable growth. Her areas of expertise include HR and people management, strategic business development, training and development, and coaching.

Finding a partner that aligns with your needs

It can feel daunting to realise you need support and don’t know where to begin. It may feel as though your organisation is not running at full potential and you need assistance with certain functions. But trust is important. Trusting an organisation and its people to have access to data and to communicate with your audience. So, where to start?

First, work out exactly what you need. Define your core requirements and create a scope of work so that both sides are clear on expectations. Include budgets and timelines so that you have a framework to work with. When you begin your search, you will see if outsourcing companies meet your goals.

At Get Ahead, we make sure that our case studies are available and relevant for potential clients to understand how we work, the skills that we cover and how we can help.

Working to a common goal

An effective outsourcing company will take interest in your overall goals. They’ll want to understand your business and your strategy, not just the parts that need help. To make your business as efficient as possible, a proficient partner will spend time listening and understanding and selecting the right person to work with you to achieve your short- and long-term goals.

As an experienced outsourcing provider, Get Ahead succeeds in improving your ability to return to your core activities and improve customer satisfaction and output.

Carrying out due diligence with a new partner

A reliable and trustworthy outsourcing partner will explain and show proof of how they secure your data and precautions taken to ensure that you are matched with the right person for your organisational needs.

Vicky McKenna, Regional Director for Oxford and Bucks, says:

‘Security is a top priority at Get Ahead. Each of our virtual experts are insured with the ICO to protect your data and adhere to strict guidelines. We use your data responsibly and also have policies around AI.

In terms of ensuring you are working with the person best suited to your organisation, ask plenty of questions. How many specialists are on your team? Do you have the skills that I require? Have you worked with similar organisations to ours? How will I know that they care about our business and our output?’

If a partner doesn’t welcome questions and a dialogue, that tells you want you need to know! If you still feel unsure and need some answers – read this piece about barriers to delegation.

Expert support, delivered with confidence

To discover how we can support your team with outstanding virtual experts – get in contact with us to speak with someone who listens to make the best of your business

The Life You’ve Worked Hard For

This is the final post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision. Earlier posts explored time and attention, trust and control, and what smooth running actually looks like. This one asks the bigger question underneath all of them.

There is a myth that most high-achieving people have internalised so thoroughly that they rarely notice it is there. The myth that it is possible, with sufficient capability and organisation, to have it all: the demanding career, the well-run home, the family life you want, the social life, the presence. All of it, sustainably, without anything giving.

I believed this for a long time. I imagine a lot of people reading this have believed it too, or still do.

What I have found, in my own experience and in my coaching work, is that eventually the cracks appear. Not dramatically, usually. Not in a way that anyone on the outside would necessarily see. But in the small subtractions: the conversation you were not quite present for, the evening you spent on the phone sorting something that should not have needed sorting, the weekend that went on logistics rather than living.

The Myth of Having It All

The narrative around needing to be capable of managing everything is shifting, slowly. There is more honest conversation now about what that level of operation actually costs, and more willingness to admit that behind many apparently seamless lives, a great deal of support is quietly in place.

Admitting that you could genuinely do with an extra pair of hands is, I think, one of the harder things for people who are used to being the capable one. It can feel like a concession. Like something has slipped.

It has not. What it actually reflects is clarity: a clear-eyed assessment of where your time and energy are most valuable, and the decision to stop spending both on things that someone else could handle just as well, or better.

What High Achievers Know About Time

In my coaching work, two patterns come up with remarkable consistency.

The first is that people are significantly kinder to others than to themselves when it comes to workload expectations. They would never expect a colleague to absorb the volume they quietly expect of themselves. They give others permission to have limits that they do not extend to themselves.

The second is that the things taking up the most time are rarely the things they value most or do best. The pressures on their hours, at home and at work, are disproportionately concentrated on tasks that are necessary but not important in any deeper sense. Necessary in the way that administration is necessary. But not the things they will look back on.

Outsourcing is not, in my experience, primarily about creating free time. It is about reclaiming the right time: the time you want to spend doing things you want to do, and the things you will be glad you did.

You have worked hard for the life you have. The question worth asking is whether you are living it, or spending your best hours running it.

What Presence Actually Looks Like

I do not use the word presence lightly. It is one of those words that gets deployed a lot without much examination. What I mean by it is simple: being somewhere fully, with your attention available for what is in front of you, rather than running a background process on everything else that needs doing.

For busy people managing complex households, presence is often the thing that quietly erodes first. You are at the dinner table. You are also aware that you need to book the boiler service, reply to a personal email, check something you meant to check yesterday. You are there, but not entirely.

That erosion is gradual. It is also reversible. And it tends to reverse not when things get less busy (they rarely do) but when the background load is being held by someone else.

A Final Thought

This is the last post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision. Earlier posts explored protecting your best hours, the freedom of letting go, and what smooth running actually looks like. This one asks the bigger question underneath all of them.

What is the life you have worked hard for? And are you spending enough of your time actually living it?

If that question lands somewhere, I would love to have a conversation. Not about what we offer, but about what you want. What changes. What matters.

Book a private call here, or email me directly at natasha.doran@getaheadva.com. I am always happy to talk.

Click to find out more about our Lifestyle Manager service.

Natasha Doran is the Get Ahead Regional Director for East Surrey and West Sussex, bringing over 20 years of experience in the insurance and fintech sectors to her work with entrepreneurs and SMEs. Her corporate career spanned senior commercial and strategic roles at Simply Business in both the UK and the US, where she led complex projects and tender processes that shaped the company’s future direction. After leaving corporate life, Natasha qualified as an executive coach and founded Fern Growth, offering leadership coaching, mentoring and fractional leadership support. She joined Get Ahead in 2025, combining her strategic expertise with a passion for helping businesses and busy individuals free up time to focus on what matters most. Natasha’s areas of expertise include strategy execution, organisational and team development, coaching and mentoring, and business scaling.

What ‘Running Smoothly’ Actually Means

This is the third post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision. Earlier posts looked at protecting your best hours and the freedom of letting go. This one asks what you are letting go into.

Ask most busy people what they want from their home life, and they will say something along the lines of: I just want it to run smoothly. It is one of those phrases that everyone means sincerely and almost no one has thought through in any detail.

What does it actually look like? What is the difference between a household that is coping and one that is genuinely supporting the life you want to live? And how do you get from one to the other?

I have been thinking about this a lot, not just in the abstract but in the specific and practical. Because the households I work with tend to run at a high level of complexity: multiple demands, multiple properties in some cases, multiple people whose needs and schedules need to be held together. And what I have found is that smooth running is not an accident. It is a design.

The Gap Between Coping and Supporting

Coping is when things get done. The bills get paid, the contractors get booked, the school calendar gets tracked. Nothing falls catastrophically through the gap. You manage.

Supporting is something else. It is when the household is running in a way that actively gives you back time, attention, and presence. Where the things that matter to you are attended to before you have to think about them. Where you are not the bottleneck in your own domestic life.

The gap between the two is not always obvious from the outside. A coping household and a supporting household can look very similar. The difference is felt, not seen.

I hear it described in small ways, usually. It is ordering a food shop while feeding the children and trying to ask them about their day at the same time. It is catching up with personal emails in the evening instead of talking to your partner or just watching something you actually want to watch. It is the perpetual low-level awareness that there are things you should be doing that you have not quite got to.

That is coping. Functioning, but at a cost.

Proactive Versus Reactive

The clearest marker of a household that genuinely runs smoothly is that things are anticipated rather than just responded to. This sounds obvious, but in practice it requires someone whose job it is to think ahead, not just to action what arrives.

A straightforward example: insurance renewals. The default for most busy households is to roll them over, because reviewing them properly requires time and attention that never quite materialises. A proactive approach means sitting down with the paperwork in good time, reviewing what is actually out there, and making a considered decision. The outcome is usually better. The process is not one that needs to sit on your plate.

A less obvious one: a client of mine had a child with a World Book Day event coming up. We got ahead of it a week before, sourced a costume second-hand, had it customised, done. On the day, she was not that parent frantically trying to find something the evening before. She was just present.

It is a small thing in the context of everything a busy family manages. But those small things compound. And their absence, the constant background sense of things being slightly ahead of you, is what costs most.

A smooth-running home does not mean nothing ever goes wrong. It means that when something does, there is already someone who knows the house, knows your standards, and knows exactly what to do.

What Consistent Standards Actually Look Like

One of the things people worry about, when they think about handing over the management of their home, is whether their standards will be maintained. The way they like things. The suppliers they trust. The particular level of detail they care about.

This is a legitimate concern, and it is one I take seriously. The value of a single trusted point of contact is precisely that they hold your standards over time. The contractor who already knows your house does not need briefing from scratch every time. Your preferences are already on file. The things you care about are already known.

That consistency, built up gradually and maintained reliably, is the difference between a service that functions and one that genuinely supports.

Smooth Running as a Design Choice

What I want to leave you with is this: a life that runs smoothly does not happen by accident. It happens because someone has thought carefully about the details and taken responsibility for them. That might be you. Or it might be someone working alongside you, whose job it is to hold that complexity so you do not have to.

Either way, it is a decision. And like most decisions, the first step is simply getting clear on what you actually want.

A Final Thought

In the first two posts of this series, A Smoother Life Is a Decision, I wrote about protecting your best hours and the decision to let go. This post is about what you are letting go into: a household that does not just cope, but genuinely supports the life you have built.

If you would like to talk through what that might look like for your household specifically, I would love to have that conversation.

Book a private call here, or email me directly at natasha.doran@getaheadva.com.

Click to find out more about our Lifestyle Manager service.

Next in the series: The Life You’ve Worked Hard For

Natasha Doran is the Get Ahead Regional Director for East Surrey and West Sussex, bringing over 20 years of experience in the insurance and fintech sectors to her work with entrepreneurs and SMEs. Her corporate career spanned senior commercial and strategic roles at Simply Business in both the UK and the US, where she led complex projects and tender processes that shaped the company’s future direction. After leaving corporate life, Natasha qualified as an executive coach and founded Fern Growth, offering leadership coaching, mentoring and fractional leadership support. She joined Get Ahead in 2025, combining her strategic expertise with a passion for helping businesses and busy individuals free up time to focus on what matters most. Natasha’s areas of expertise include strategy execution, organisational and team development, coaching and mentoring, and business scaling.

The Freedom of Letting Go

This is the second post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision. The first post looked at how to protect your best hours. This one is about the decision that makes that possible.

There is a belief that a lot of very capable people carry, often without examining it too closely. The belief that doing it yourself means doing it better. That the standards you hold, the way you like things done, the particular rhythm of your household, could not really be handed to someone else without something being lost.

I understand that belief. I held it myself for a long time. And I have heard it from almost everyone I have worked with who was considering whether a lifestyle manager might actually be for them.

What I have also seen, consistently, is what happens when someone finds the right person and makes the decision to trust them. The relief is not what people expect. It is not just practical. It is something quieter than that.

Why High Achievers Are the Last to Let Go

It is one of the more interesting patterns I noticed during my years in financial services. The people most skilled at delegating in their professional lives were often the ones most reluctant to do so at home. At work, they had structures that made delegation straightforward: clear accountability, defined roles, the expectation that others would own their areas. At home, there was none of that. Just them, and everything that needed doing.

Part of it is the intimacy of home life. Letting someone into your house, your routines, your preferences, the good and the bad and the sometimes chaotic reality of a busy household, requires a different kind of trust than handing a colleague a project brief.

Part of it is the myth that asking for help at home is a different thing to asking for help at work. At work, it is smart leadership. At home, it can feel like an admission that something has slipped.

It has not. It is simply an honest assessment of where your time and attention are best spent.

The Difference Between Losing Control and Choosing Where to Direct It

The concern people most often express, when they are thinking about this seriously, is that they will lose control. That things will be done differently to how they would do them. That the standards they care about will not be maintained.

What they discover, when they find the right support, is that the opposite tends to be true. The things that mattered to them are attended to more consistently than when they were trying to manage everything themselves. The standards are held. The preferences are known. And because someone else is carrying that load, they have more capacity to notice the things that genuinely need their attention.

Letting go, in this sense, is not an abdication of control. It is a more precise exercise of it.

Letting go is not weakness. It is the decision that the people most genuinely in control of their lives have quietly made.

What a Trusted Single Point of Contact Actually Feels Like

There is something specific that happens when you have one person who truly knows your home, your household, and your life. Not a platform. Not a roster of different providers for different things. One person who understands your preferences, holds your standards, and anticipates what you need before you have to ask.

You stop managing. That is the thing people find hardest to articulate until they have experienced it. The mental file of things to remember, chase, coordinate, and follow up on gets smaller. The low-level background noise of domestic complexity quietens.

It is not dramatic. It tends to arrive quietly, as most of the best things do.

On Discretion

One thing I want to be direct about, because it matters enormously to the people I work with: what we do requires absolute discretion, and I take that seriously.

You are letting someone into an area of your life that is not visible to the world: the good, the busy, the occasionally chaotic. I often say that if you need something done, go to the busiest person. But that is not sustainable indefinitely. And what the busiest, most capable people often carry is a private life that looks quite different to their public one.

Trusting someone with that is a significant thing. It is a privilege I do not take lightly. The confidence my clients place in me, in my capabilities and in my discretion, is the foundation of everything I do.

A Final Thought

In the first post in this series, A Smoother Life Is a Decision, I wrote about protecting your best hours. This post is about the decision that makes that possible: the willingness to find one person you genuinely trust, and to hand something over.

It is not a decision everyone is ready to make straight away. But if you are curious about what it might look like for your household, a conversation is a good place to start.

Book a private call here, or email me directly at natasha.doran@getaheadva.com.

Click to find out more about our Lifestyle Manager service.

Next in the series: What ‘Running Smoothly’ Actually Means

Protecting Your Best Hours

This is the first post in a short series called A Smoother Life Is a Decision, exploring the choices that allow high-achieving people to live well, not just work well.

There is a version of busy that most of us know very well. The one where you are technically on top of things, just. Where nothing is catastrophically wrong, but the day never quite feels like yours. Where you arrive at the weekend with a list that has nothing to do with rest.

I spent twenty years working in insurance and financial services, mostly in client-facing roles supporting executive teams. I have sat across the table from some extraordinarily capable people: people who ran complex businesses, managed demanding stakeholders, and delivered transformation results under real pressure. And I noticed something consistent about the ones who seemed most effective, most present, most genuinely in control of their lives.

It was not that they had fewer demands. It was that they had made deliberate decisions about where their attention went.

The Hours You Cannot Get Back

Psychologists talk about cognitive load, the mental bandwidth we have available for thinking, deciding, and doing. It is finite. And it does not distinguish between a high-stakes work decision and a reminder to chase the boiler engineer. Both use resource. Both take up space.

The problem is that the domestic and logistical load of a busy household is relentless in a way that professional life, for all its demands, often is not. At work, there are structures, priorities, people whose job it is to handle certain things. At home, if it does not land on your plate, it lands on no one’s.

I know this from my own experience as much as anyone’s. When my children were small, I was determined to show that it was possible to do it all: the career, the well-kept house, the social life. And what I found, as the years went on, was that the demands did not ease as I had expected. They increased. The logistics got more complex, not simpler. And the cost, the quiet cumulative cost, was paid in the evenings, the weekends, the moments when you want to be present for the people you love but you are mentally somewhere else entirely.

The question is not whether you can handle everything. It is whether you should.

When the Emergency Hits at Exactly the Wrong Moment

There is, of course, the acute version of this too: the crises you were not expecting. The boiler that goes on the morning of your biggest client meeting. The school costume crisis that surfaces at 9pm on a Tuesday. The contractor who does not show, the renewal you forgot to review, the appointment that clashes with something that cannot move.

Anyone who has managed a busy household alongside a demanding career will recognise the particular exhaustion of these moments. Not because they are insurmountable (you always find a way) but because they land in the gaps. The evenings. The weekends. The hours you were hoping to give to something else entirely.

And the guilt that accompanies them, because you are handling logistics when you should be present, or present when you should be handling logistics, is its own additional weight.

The Difference Between Busy and Effective

Being busy is easy. It requires no particular strategy. You simply allow everything that arrives to take up the space it demands, and you fill your hours accordingly.

Being effective, genuinely effective in the way that extends beyond your professional life into the quality of your days, is something different. It requires being honest about what deserves your attention and what does not. About what only you can do, and what someone else could handle perfectly well.

The people I have worked with who seem most at ease, not the least busy but the most genuinely in control, have usually made a decision at some point that their best hours are worth protecting. That the mental space to think clearly, to be present, to enjoy what they have worked hard for, is not a luxury. It is a priority.

What Protecting Your Hours Actually Looks Like

It does not mean abdicating responsibility for your home or your life. It means being thoughtful about where your energy goes, and having support in place for the rest.

It might mean never having to spend an evening chasing a supplier, because someone who already knows your home, your preferences, and your standards is handling it. It might mean the school costume is sourced and sorted a week before you need it, not the night before. It might mean the insurance renewal gets properly reviewed rather than rolled over by default. It means the domestic complexity that quietly accumulates, the calls, the coordination, the chasing, the admin, is managed by someone whose job it is to manage it, so it does not have to be managed by you.

Not because you cannot. But because your time, your attention, your presence, is worth more than that.

Time is finite. Attention is even more so. The people who live well have worked out the difference.

A Final Thought

This is the first post in the series A Smoother Life Is a Decision, exploring the choices that allow high-achieving people to live well, not just work well. Each post takes one decision: about time, about control, about standards, about the bigger picture, and looks at what changes when you make it deliberately. The next in the series looks at the freedom of letting go.

If this resonates, if you recognise that gap between the life you have built and the time you have to actually enjoy it, I would love to have a conversation. Not a sales pitch. Just a chance to talk about what smooth running could look like for you.

Book a private call here, or email me directly at natasha.doran@getaheadva.com.

Click to find out more about our Lifestyle Manager service.

Next in the series: The Freedom of Letting Go

Natasha Doran is the Get Ahead Regional Director for East Surrey and West Sussex, bringing over 20 years of experience in the insurance and fintech sectors to her work with entrepreneurs and SMEs. Her corporate career spanned senior commercial and strategic roles at Simply Business in both the UK and the US, where she led complex projects and tender processes that shaped the company’s future direction. After leaving corporate life, Natasha qualified as an executive coach and founded Fern Growth, offering leadership coaching, mentoring and fractional leadership support. She joined Get Ahead in 2025, combining her strategic expertise with a passion for helping businesses and busy individuals free up time to focus on what matters most. Natasha’s areas of expertise include strategy execution, organisational and team development, coaching and mentoring, and business scaling.

Taking Time Off: A Business Owner’s Guide to Switching Off (Almost)

Every business owner I speak to says the same thing: “I need a holiday.” And yet, when it comes to actually booking one, taking time off, and being fully present somewhere other than their inbox, most of them find a reason not to.

I’ve been running Get Ahead for over a decade. I’ve had to learn, sometimes the hard way, that taking time off isn’t a luxury. It’s a business decision. The planning, prioritisation and delegation that makes a holiday possible are the same disciplines that make a business scalable.

Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I now share with every business owner I work with.

Why do so many business owners struggle to take time off?

Because the business feels like it needs them. And often, it genuinely does, but usually because systems, handovers and trusted support haven’t been put in place yet. The business isn’t the problem. The infrastructure around it is.

When I talk to owners who haven’t had a proper break in years, it’s rarely because they don’t want one. It’s because the idea of stepping away feels riskier than staying put. That’s the thing we need to solve.

What does good preparation actually look like?

It starts well before you pack. I’d suggest a minimum of four weeks’ lead time if you’re going away for more than a few days. The core areas to address are:

  • Priorities: what absolutely must happen while you’re away, and what can wait
  • Delegation: who is responsible for what, with clear authority to make decisions, not just to escalate
  • Systems: are your CRM, accounts, files and shared drives in order? Can someone else navigate them without you?
  • Communication: who is your point of contact for clients, and what’s the protocol if something genuinely urgent arises?

The key word in that third point is delegation with authority. Handing tasks to someone and then remaining the bottleneck for every decision isn’t delegation. It’s just distributed stress. Trust the people you’ve briefed, and let them get on with it.

What about HR considerations when you’re the one stepping away?

This is something business owners with small teams often overlook. Before you go:

  • Make sure any team members or contractors have a clear point of contact in your absence, with the authority to make day-to-day decisions
  • Set clear expectations about what warrants contacting you and what doesn’t
  • Check that any outstanding HR matters (appraisals, onboarding, contracts) are resolved or safely deferred
  • If you use a virtual team, ensure they’re fully briefed and have everything they need before you leave

The businesses that run smoothly in an owner’s absence are the ones where the team has been trusted, briefed properly, and given room to act. Not the ones where the owner is fielding WhatsApps on the beach.

How do you handle the personal side of being away? The dog, the cat, the house?

This is where our Lifestyle Manager service comes in, and honestly, it’s one of the things I’m most proud of offering. The mental load of a holiday isn’t just professional. It’s personal.

Sorting pet care, ensuring the house is looked after, managing deliveries, handling the things that pile up at home while you’re away: these are all things that can be handed off. A good Lifestyle Manager takes the whole list, not just the work side of it.

When the personal logistics are sorted, you actually get to have a holiday. Not just a change of location where you’re still mentally juggling everything. And knowing that Sydney (aka The Prince) is in good hands and enjoying himself means that I can too!

Do you ever stay contactable while you’re away?

Yes, deliberately and on my own terms. I make sure someone knows how to reach me if something genuinely needs a call. In practice, in all the years I’ve been running Get Ahead, that call has never come.

But knowing it’s possible if needed means I can actually relax. It’s a safety net I’ve chosen to have, not a leash. There’s a difference. And building the right team around you is what makes that distinction possible.

What’s your pre-holiday checklist?

Here’s what I work through before I go anywhere:

  • Goals reviewed: what needs to be done before I leave, and what can genuinely wait
  • Delegation confirmed: named people, clear responsibilities, authority granted
  • Systems in order: shared drives, CRM, accounts, inboxes all accessible and up to date
  • Social media scheduled: posts queued for the duration, evergreen content repurposed where needed
  • Client communications sent: anyone who needs to know I’m away has been told, with a named contact
  • Virtual support briefed: telephone answering, email management, any ongoing tasks handed over with a proper brief
  • Personal logistics sorted: pet care, house, anything domestic that would otherwise be sitting in the back of my mind

What’s the business case for actually taking the holiday?

You come back better. Clearer thinking, more energy, more perspective on the things that actually matter. Every owner I know who has properly stepped away and come back says the same thing: they could see the business more clearly from the outside than they ever could from inside it.

The planning that goes into a good handover also tends to reveal gaps in your systems that you’d been papering over. It’s an audit you didn’t know you needed.

And frankly, if your business can’t function without you for a week or two, that’s the most important signal you could have about what to fix next.

How can Get Ahead help?

Whether you need telephone answering and email management while you’re away, a virtual assistant to keep things ticking over, or a Lifestyle Manager to handle the personal side of life, we’ve been helping business owners take proper breaks for over a decade.

Talk to your local Regional Director about what cover would look like for your business. You might be closer to a real holiday than you think.

www.getaheadva.com or call 0330 223 7580

Rebecca Newenham is the founder of Get Ahead, an award-winning virtual assistant and outsourcing franchise she launched in 2010 following a successful career in corporate retail buying. With a team of over 90 virtual assistants and franchisees, Get Ahead provides flexible marketing and business support to SMEs across the UK. A passionate advocate for flexible working, Rebecca is also a Franchise Consultant at Ashtons, helping founders scale with clarity and confidence. She hosts LinkedIn Local Guildford and is a Baby Naming Celebrant, proof that a purposeful career doesn’t have to fit a single mould. At the heart of everything Rebecca does is people: connecting them, supporting them and helping them build businesses that genuinely work for their lives.

The Latest from get Ahead

Why SME Projects Often Stall, And the Missing Piece That Makes Them Work 

I spent nearly two decades working in supply chain and project management at Morrisons. In that time, I was part of projects most people would find genuinely daunting: integrating the Safeway business after the acquisition, implementing Oracle across manufacturing sites, and building new supply chain teams from scratch. 

What I learned from those experiences – and what I see confirmed every week in my work with SMEs across Yorkshire – is this: the biggest risk to any change project rarely lies in the strategy. It lies in the structure around it. 

Specifically, in what’s missing from it. 

The moment every growing business recognises 

There comes a point in the life of most growing businesses where change stops being optional. 

A new CRM system needs implementing. An operational process needs redesigning. A reporting framework needs rebuilding. A new service line needs launching with proper structure behind it. 

These projects are sensible and often genuinely important. The leadership team agrees the objective. The budget is broadly understood. Someone is asked to lead it. 

And then, quietly, something happens. 

The project slows. Decisions drift. Tasks get started but not completed. Months pass, and the business finds itself asking the same question it was asking at the beginning: why hasn’t this moved forward? 

What large organisations know, and that SMEs rarely have 

When I was part of the Safeway integration, the project didn’t succeed because the strategy was brilliant. It succeeded because there was an entire infrastructure of people keeping it moving – project managers, operational coordinators, finance oversight, communications leads, administrative support. 

Each of those roles played a small but essential part. They weren’t the headline act. But without them, nothing would have come together. 

In most SMEs, those roles simply don’t exist. 

Instead, the project sits alongside everyone’s existing responsibilities. A director sponsors it. A manager contributes when they can. A supplier delivers their specific piece. Individually, everyone involved is capable. But the connective tissue that holds the whole thing together is missing. 

The keystone nobody talks about 

In architecture, a keystone is the single stone at the top of an arch that holds everything else in place. Without it, the structure collapses – not because the other stones aren’t solid, but because there’s nothing binding them together. 

SME projects have their own version of the keystone. It’s rarely the most visible part of the work. It’s the unglamorous, practical coordination layer that makes everything else function. 

It’s the person who orchestrates the meetings and keeps momentum between them. The one who translates a good idea into a clearly articulated operating model that everyone can actually follow. The one tracking actions, chasing progress, making sure decisions are documented and communicated before they get lost in someone’s inbox. 

It’s budget and resource tracking that’s genuinely up to date. Stakeholder management that keeps everyone aligned as the project evolves. The discipline – quiet but essential – of making sure that the right things happen at the right time. 

None of these tasks feel like “the project.” But without them, the project doesn’t really happen. 

This isn’t a leadership problem 

I want to be clear about something, because I see it misdiagnosed all the time. 

When SME projects stall, it’s rarely because the leadership is weak or the vision is flawed. It’s a structural consequence of growth. Most SMEs don’t have the scale to employ dedicated project teams for every piece of change work. Most senior people are already running the business day-to-day, at full capacity. 

The strategic thinking exists. The expertise exists. The intention exists. What’s missing is the operational structure that keeps everything moving – and that gap doesn’t close by itself. 

Where the right support changes everything 

This is where external support – the right kind – makes a real difference. 

Not consultants who produce a report and disappear. Practical, operational people who understand how change actually works – and who can step in to provide the coordination layer that most SME projects lack. 

At Get Ahead, this is something we see first-hand. Every project is different, and every business has its own pressures and priorities. But the pattern we return to again and again is the same: once the missing glue is in place, projects that were drifting suddenly regain momentum. Not because the strategy changed, but because the structure around it finally exists. 

The support might look like project coordination and orchestration. Process mapping and operating model design. Communication and stakeholder management. Budget and resource tracking. Sometimes it’s simply someone who makes sure things actually happen – consistently, at the right time, without the business owner having to carry all of that themselves. 

Change doesn’t just need vision – it needs structure 

Most SME leaders I work with have no shortage of ideas for improving their business. Better systems. Better processes. Better ways of working that would genuinely free them up to focus on growth. 

The ideas aren’t the obstacle. The gap between idea and operational reality is. 

Bridging that gap is detailed, unglamorous, genuinely important work. The coordination. The communication. The tracking. The quiet discipline of making sure things actually happen, in the right order, at the right time. 

That’s the keystone. And in many growing businesses, it’s the piece that makes everything else possible. 

If you’re leading a change project that’s lost momentum – or planning one and want to get the structure right from the start – I’d love to have a conversation. 

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support – from coordination and documentation to process design and stakeholder management. We provide the glue that makes change stick. 

 Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com  

About the Author 

Fiona Ibbetson is the Get Ahead Regional Director for Yorkshire, supporting over 40 active clients each month with flexible, expert-led outsourcing across marketing, HR, finance and business support. She joined Get Ahead in 2018 and has since built a thriving regional network serving businesses from sole traders to multi-million-pound organisations. Before joining Get Ahead, Fiona spent 20 years in senior management roles in the fresh supply chain sector, including at Wm Morrisons, where she led large teams and oversaw complex planning and operations across multiple sites. That background gave her a strong grounding in commercial awareness, stakeholder management and operational efficiency. Fiona’s areas of expertise include consultative client management, board-level support, operational capacity and helping leadership teams protect their focus as their organisations scale.