Author: Fiona Ibbetson

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.

In previous pieces I have written about planning, accountability, and the gap between delivering a project and realising its benefits. In this one I want to step back and look at something that sits beneath all of those: the cost of not deciding, and the art of knowing which decisions actually matter.

No decision is a decision

One of the things I learned early in my career, managing complex supply chain programmes, is that a stalled project is never neutral. It always has a cost. The question is only whether that cost is visible.

When a project drifts, when scope discussions go unresolved, when the next step waits for a conversation that keeps being postponed, the business is not standing still. It is continuing to operate without the improvement the project was designed to deliver. Every week of delay is a week without the benefit.

That is the opportunity cost of an unfinished project. It is real, it compounds, and it is almost never quantified.

The morale cost is equally real

There is another cost that is harder to measure but just as damaging: what a stalled project does to the people involved in it.

I have seen this in my own career, and I see it regularly with growing businesses. A team that commits energy and effort to a change programme, and then watches it drift and stall, does not simply shrug and move on. They become more cautious. They are less willing to invest in the next project. The instinct that change is possible and worth attempting gets quietly eroded.

And the business owner or leader who sponsored the project carries the additional weight of a commitment not delivered. That weight accumulates across multiple stalled projects, and it is one of the most consistent sources of leadership fatigue in growing businesses.

Morale is not soft. In a smaller business, where the energy and belief of a small group of people is often the primary competitive advantage, morale is a genuinely strategic resource. Wasting it on projects that drift is a cost that deserves to be taken seriously.

Sometimes you have to keep moving

All of this points to a principle that is counterintuitive for many business owners: sometimes the worst option is to wait for more information or a better moment.

Projects stall most often not because the decisions are genuinely impossible, but because the people involved are not comfortable making them without certainty they will never have. They wait for the risk to reduce, for alignment to emerge naturally, for someone else to take the first step.

Meanwhile the cost of not deciding keeps accumulating.

There is a version of caution that is wisdom: taking the time to understand what you are deciding and what the consequences are. And there is a version of caution that is avoidance, dressed up as diligence. The skill is telling the difference, which is easier when you have an experienced outside perspective and harder when you are close to the project and carrying the pressure of it.

Not all decisions are equal

The other side of this is equally important: not every decision in a project is a decision that needs to be agonised over.

In my experience, most projects have a small number of genuinely critical decisions, the ones where the choice of direction will have a lasting, material impact on the outcome. And a much larger number of decisions that feel significant in the moment, generate extended discussion, and ultimately make very little difference to the result.

The skill of good project leadership, and of experienced external support, is distinguishing between the two. Knowing when to push for a decision because the cost of delay is real, and knowing when to make a pragmatic call and move on because the decision is less important than the momentum it is consuming.

Spending hours debating a choice that turns out to be marginal is itself a cost. The time and energy that goes into low-stakes decisions is time and energy that is not available for the decisions that genuinely matter.

The discipline of moving

What this adds up to is a case for a particular kind of project discipline: the discipline of keeping things moving, even when not everything is resolved.

That does not mean ignoring risk or making reckless decisions. It means having a clear sense of which risks are worth managing carefully and which ones are overstated. It means being willing to make a good enough decision now rather than waiting for a perfect one that may never arrive. And it means having someone in the project whose job includes recognising when delay is becoming more costly than the thing being delayed over.

In growing businesses, that discipline is hard to maintain from the inside. Everyone is close to the work. Everyone has a stake in the decisions. And the pressure of the day-to-day makes it easy to let project decisions wait for a better moment.

That better moment rarely comes on its own.

Making the cost visible

One of the most useful things an outside perspective brings to a stalled project is simply making the cost of the stall visible.

Not as a criticism, but as a practical question: what is this delay actually costing us? What would we have, if we had decided this three months ago? What will we not have, if we continue to wait?

When those questions get asked directly, the case for moving tends to become clearer. The risk of a decision that turns out to be slightly wrong usually looks smaller than the cost of not deciding at all.

The projects I have seen recover from difficult stalls almost always share a common turning point: a moment when someone named the cost of waiting, and the team chose to move.

If you have a project that has lost momentum, or a decision that has been sitting unresolved for longer than it should, I am always happy to think it through with you. Sometimes an outside perspective is all it takes to see a clear way forward.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

Making Change Work – A series discussing project management in growing businesses:

In this series I have written about the planning that gets skipped at the start, and the accountability that drifts once a project is underway. This time I want to focus on the end, or rather, what happens when a project does not quite get there, and what is lost when it does not.

The statistics are stark

The data on project outcomes is not reassuring. Research by the Project Management Institute found that only around 29% of projects are completed on time and within budget. The Standish CHAOS Report, which has tracked project outcomes for decades, consistently finds that fewer than a third of projects are considered fully successful.

A separate PwC study of more than 10,000 projects found that only 2.5% of organisations complete all of their projects successfully.

These figures are drawn largely from larger organisations with dedicated project management capability. The picture in smaller businesses, where projects tend to be less formally managed, is unlikely to be more encouraging.

Most projects, in most organisations, do not fully deliver what they set out to do.

Why projects stall in the final stretch

The halfway point of a project is where the energy peaks. The initial excitement is still present, some progress is visible, and the end feels close enough to motivate.

But the final third is harder. The interesting, creative work is largely done. What remains is often the detailed, painstaking work of implementation: testing, training, communication, process embedding, and the thousand small tasks that turn a project output into something the business can actually use.

This is also the point at which the business, having waited patiently for the project to deliver, starts to expect results. Pressure builds. People who have been borrowed from their day jobs want to return to them. Sponsors who have been funding the work want to see a return.

And so, more often than not, the project is declared done before it is finished. A system goes live without proper training. A new process is documented but not embedded. A change is announced but not followed through.

Finishing is not the same as succeeding

This is the distinction that project management theory calls benefits realisation, and it is the phase that most organisations handle least well.

A project is not successful because it was delivered on time and within budget. It is successful because the change it was designed to create actually happened, and the business is genuinely better as a result.

If a new CRM system goes live but the sales team does not adopt it, the project has not succeeded. If a new process is designed but not followed, the project has not succeeded. If a restructure is completed on paper but the working patterns and relationships do not change, the project has not succeeded.

Benefits realisation is the work of making sure the change actually lands. It is unglamorous, it is slow, and it requires sustained attention after the moment of launch when everyone’s focus has already moved on. Which is precisely why it so often does not happen.

Why this matters more in growing businesses

In a large organisation, a project team might stay in place for months after go-live to support adoption, manage issues, and track whether the intended benefits are being realised. There are often formal review points, benefit tracking mechanisms, and governance structures that persist beyond delivery.

In a growing business, the project team is usually the senior leadership team, plus whoever else could be spared. When the project is declared done, everyone returns to their day jobs immediately. The headspace that was devoted to the project disappears almost overnight.

And so the final 10% of the work, the embedding, the adoption, the measurement, gets quietly abandoned. The project is considered finished. The benefits are assumed rather than tracked. And six months later, when someone asks whether things have changed, the honest answer is: not as much as we expected.

Asking the question at the start

The most effective way to improve benefits realisation is to define what it looks like before the project begins.

What does success look like, specifically, 90 days after go-live? What behaviours will have changed? What metrics will have moved? Who is responsible for tracking that, and what happens if it is not happening?

These questions are uncomfortable to answer before the project has started, because the honest answer is often: we do not know yet. But the act of asking them forces a clarity about purpose that makes everything that follows more deliberate.

A project with a clear definition of the change it is trying to create is more likely to get to the end. And a project team that knows it will be asked to demonstrate benefits is more likely to plan for the work of realising them.

The question worth asking

Before the next project begins, it is worth asking a simple question: if we get to the end and declare this done, how will we know whether it actually worked?

If the answer is uncertain, that uncertainty is worth resolving before the project starts, not after it finishes.

The cost of a project that delivers without landing is not just the budget and the time. It is the opportunity cost of change that did not happen, and the organisational fatigue of going through the process of change without receiving its benefits.

That is an expensive outcome. And in most cases, it is a preventable one.

If you are planning a project and want to think through how you will know whether it has truly succeeded, or if you are partway through one and wondering whether the benefits are being properly tracked, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

This series has explored why projects stall before they start, when planning gets skipped in the rush to act. But even when a project is well-planned, there is another failure mode that is just as common, and just as avoidable. It is the question of who, exactly, is responsible for making it happen.

The accountability assumption

In a small team, a lot goes unsaid. That is often a genuine strength. Growing businesses move quickly precisely because there is less bureaucracy, fewer sign-offs, and a higher degree of mutual trust and understanding between the people involved.

But that same informality creates a particular kind of risk in project work. When responsibilities are assumed rather than agreed, when everyone believes someone else has picked up a task, and when the shared understanding of priorities turns out not to be shared at all, projects begin to drift. And often nobody notices until the drift has become a delay.

This is not a problem that only affects large organisations with complex hierarchies. In many respects it is more acute in smaller businesses, precisely because there are fewer people, roles are less defined, and the assumption of alignment runs deeper.

We’re a small team, we know what we’re doing

One of the most common things I hear at the start of a project in a growing business is some version of: we do not need a lot of process, we all know each other, we communicate well.

And it is usually true, as a general description of how the business operates day to day.

But a project is not day-to-day operations. It is a temporary, specific piece of work with its own timeline, its own dependencies, and its own demands on people who are already busy doing other things. The informal communication that keeps the business running smoothly is not the same as the structured accountability that keeps a project on track.

When those two things get confused, the results are predictable. Tasks sit in the gap between people, each assuming the other has picked them up. Decisions that need to be made wait for a conversation that never quite happens. Priorities shift without the project team being told, because nobody formally owns the communication.

The priority problem

There is a related assumption that is equally dangerous: that everyone involved in a project has the same view of how important it is, relative to everything else they are doing.

In a growing business, most people are operating at or near full capacity. When a project is added to someone’s existing responsibilities, it competes with work that has immediate, visible consequences if it is not done. The project, by contrast, has a deadline that feels further away, and consequences that are less immediate.

Without an explicit conversation about priority, and without someone actively managing the project’s claim on people’s time, the project tends to lose that competition. Not because anyone decides to deprioritise it, but because the day-to-day always feels more urgent.

This is how projects that everyone supports in principle end up being the thing that everyone is too busy to move forward in practice.

The cost of assumed alignment

The damage done by unclear accountability is often invisible at first. The project appears to be moving. People are attending meetings, tasks are being discussed, progress is being reported.

But underneath the surface, the gaps are accumulating. Actions from the last meeting have not been completed. A decision that was discussed has not actually been made. A dependency that was flagged has not been resolved.

By the time this becomes visible, the project is weeks or months behind, and the effort required to recover is significantly greater than the effort that would have been needed to prevent it.

What clear accountability actually looks like

Clarity on accountability does not require a formal project management framework or a dedicated project manager. But it does require a few deliberate habits that smaller businesses often skip in the interest of moving quickly.

It means agreeing, explicitly, who owns each workstream, and what that ownership means in practice. It means documenting decisions and actions, not to create bureaucracy, but because undocumented decisions tend to be unmade decisions. It means having a regular, structured touchpoint where progress is reviewed against commitments, not just discussed informally.

And it means someone taking responsibility for the project as a whole, not just their piece of it. In corporate settings that is the project manager’s role. In growing businesses it can be anyone, but it needs to be someone.

The value of an outside pair of eyes

One of the things external support does particularly well in project work is providing the neutral accountability that internal teams find difficult to sustain.

When everyone involved in a project is also running the business, it is genuinely hard to hold each other to account without it feeling personal. An external coordinator does not carry those dynamics. They can ask directly whether an action was completed, whether a decision has been made, whether the timeline is still realistic, in a way that keeps the project moving without damaging the relationships that the business depends on.

Accountability does not have to be uncomfortable. But it does have to exist. And in many growing businesses, ensuring it exists is one of the most valuable things an experienced outside hand can provide.

If you are running a project and finding that accountability is slipping, or if you are about to start one and want to make sure it does not, I am happy to talk through how the right support can help.

Get Ahead’s team works across the full range of project support, from planning and coordination to delivery and benefits tracking.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

Making Change Work – A series discussing project management in growing businesses:

In my last piece, I wrote about the missing keystone in change projects: the coordination layer that so often determines whether a programme moves or quietly drifts. Today I want to go one step further back, to the moment before any of that coordination begins.

Because in many cases, the real problem starts even earlier.

The pull towards doing

There is a particular kind of pressure that exists in smaller businesses. It is the pressure to be seen to be moving.

When a decision gets made, a new system, a process change, a restructure, the instinct is to start immediately. To assign tasks, hold a kick-off, begin. Planning can feel like a delay. A luxury. Something larger organisations do because they have the time and the people, but not something a growing business needs to spend weeks on.

I understand that instinct. In fast-moving businesses, momentum matters, and stopping to plan can feel like losing it.

But in my experience, both in large-scale corporate programmes and in the work I do with growing businesses across Yorkshire, skipping the planning phase does not save time. It borrows it, at a very high rate of interest.

What planning actually means

When I was working in Sales and Operations Planning at Morrisons, the entire discipline was built around one idea: before you commit to doing something, you need to understand what it will actually require.

Not in theory. In practice.

What are the resource implications? What does it cost, fully, not optimistically? Who is affected, and how? What has to stop, or slow down, in order for this to happen? What does success actually look like, and how will you know when you have reached it?

These are not complicated questions. But they are uncomfortable ones, because answering them honestly sometimes means adjusting the scope, the timeline, or the ambition of a project before it has even begun.

In large organisations, there are people whose job it is to ask these questions. Project managers, finance business partners, operational planners. They slow things down deliberately, because they know what happens when those questions do not get asked.

In most growing businesses, nobody has that role. And so the questions do not get asked, or they get answered quickly and optimistically, in a meeting where everyone is already committed to the idea.

The compounding cost of under-planning

The consequences show up later, and they compound.

A project scoped without proper resource planning runs out of capacity halfway through. A budget set without understanding the full cost of change gets exceeded before the hard work has even started. A timeline built without accounting for business-as-usual pressures slips, then slips again, until the original deadline becomes a source of embarrassment rather than a milestone.

And because the planning was not done at the start, each of these problems has to be solved in real time, under pressure, by people who are already stretched.

The project that was supposed to reduce the load on the leadership team ends up adding to it.

Why this happens more in smaller businesses

It would be easy to frame this as a discipline problem, as though business owners simply need to slow down and think more carefully. But that is not quite right.

The real driver is structural. In smaller businesses, fewer people are involved in any given decision, and roles are often less clearly defined. There is no one whose specific job is to challenge the plan before it becomes a commitment. The person who had the idea is often also the person leading the project, which makes it psychologically difficult to pump the brakes.

There is also a resource tension that is different from the corporate environment. In a large organisation, a planning phase has dedicated time and people attached to it. In a growing business, planning competes directly with the day-to-day work of running the business. It rarely wins that competition.

So projects begin underprepared, not through carelessness, but through a combination of pressure, structure, and the very real demands of keeping everything else moving at the same time.

What good planning looks like in a growing business

The answer is not to import a corporate planning process wholesale. That would be its own kind of mistake: too slow, too formal, and disconnected from the pace at which smaller businesses actually operate.

But there is a middle ground. A planning phase that is proportionate, practical, and focused on the questions that genuinely matter before work begins.

At minimum, that means being clear on scope: what is in this project, and what is deliberately out of it. It means understanding the resource picture honestly, who is doing what, alongside what else, and whether that is actually feasible. It means having a realistic view of cost that accounts for the indirect and hidden implications of change, not just the headline numbers. And it means agreeing what done looks like before anyone starts moving.

None of that requires a planning department. But it does require someone to hold the space for those conversations, and to keep holding it when the urge to just get on with it becomes hard to resist.

The value of an outside perspective

One of the things I find most useful when working with clients on change projects is simply being the person who asks the uncomfortable questions at the start.

Not to slow things down for the sake of it. But because I have seen enough projects, both at scale and in smaller businesses, to know which questions, left unanswered, tend to cause the most damage later.

An external perspective also helps with a problem that is surprisingly common in owner-led businesses: the difficulty of challenging your own assumptions when you are also the person most invested in the outcome.

Good planning is not pessimism. It is the work that makes everything that follows more likely to succeed.

Before the doing, the thinking

The urge to do is understandable. In growing businesses especially, action feels like progress, and planning can feel like its opposite.

But the projects I have seen succeed, at every scale and in every sector, share a common characteristic. Someone, at the beginning, made the time to ask the hard questions. To understand what the project would actually require. To make the plan before making the commitment.

That step does not guarantee success. But skipping it makes failure significantly more likely.

And the cost of going back to do the planning that was not done at the start, once a project is already in motion, already over budget, already behind, is always higher than doing it properly in the first place.

If you are approaching a change project and want to make sure the planning is solid before work begins, I am always happy to have that conversation.

Get Ahead’s team can support the full planning phase, from scoping and resource planning to cost modelling and stakeholder mapping, as well as the delivery that follows.

Get in touch: fiona@getaheadva.com   |   Explore our support: getaheadva.com

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 

Making Change Work – A series discussing project management in growing businesses:

Why It Makes No Commercial Sense for Directors to Do Their Own Admin (And When to Change That) 

As a Regional Director supporting more than 40 businesses across Yorkshire, I regularly work with growing SMEs with a turnover of between £5m and £20m.

There is a consistent pattern. The business scales. Revenue increases. The board formalises. Governance expectations rise.

And yet directors are still managing their own diaries. Formatting board packs late in the evening. Chasing actions. Rebooking travel. Clearing inboxes. Updating operational spreadsheets.

Not because they lack support. And not because it is required at their level. More often, it is because in the moment it simply feels efficient to “just do it myself”. Over time, it has quietly become the default.

But at a certain stage of growth, that approach stops making commercial sense.

What Is Board-Level Administrative Support?

Board-level administrative support is structured operational assistance that enables directors to focus on strategic decision-making rather than diary management, document preparation or governance tracking.

It is not simply PA support. It is about protecting leadership capacity and strengthening governance processes as businesses mature.

In SMEs approaching or exceeding £10m turnover, the cost of misallocated leadership time becomes increasingly significant.

Should Directors Do Their Own Admin?

Directors are perfectly capable of managing their own administration. The real question is whether it represents the highest commercial return on their time.

A director in a £15m business may cost the organisation £70–£80 per hour once salary and overheads are included. If five hours a week is absorbed by administrative activity, that equates to nearly £20,000 per year – time not spent on strategy, growth or governance.

That is not a criticism. It is arithmetic.

Beyond the cost, there is emerging research showing that many boards today are not positioned to add maximum value. Recent UK analysis of boardroom effectiveness found that only one-third of board directors believe their board is essential to value creation, with many boards focused disproportionately on backwards-looking reporting rather than forward-thinking strategy and growth planning.

This highlights a deeper issue: if boards are structured in a way that limits strategic focus, any diversion of director time into operational tasks compounds that constraint. In growing businesses, leadership time is one of the most expensive and scarce resources available. How it is deployed matters.

The Hidden Cost: Opportunity, Not Efficiency

The greater risk is not the hourly cost. It is the opportunity cost of time lost for reflection, thinking and strategy.

Industry insight suggests that directors are increasingly overwhelmed with information and under-prepared for meetings, in part because boards are not set up effectively and directors are expected to absorb huge volumes of operational detail.

This overload makes it harder to engage deeply with strategic priorities, especially in leaner organisations where external executive support is not yet formalised.

In a £15m business, a 1% margin shift represents £150,000. Even modest improvements in strategic clarity can outweigh the cost of structured support many times over.

The risk is not that directors cannot do their own admin.
The risk is that they are.

When Should a Business Formalise Board Support?

There is no single turnover trigger. But there are warning signs:

  • Board meetings are dominated by operational detail
  • Directors regularly prepare board materials outside working hours
  • Governance documentation lacks structure
  • Follow-up actions are inconsistent

These are not failures. They are growth signals.

As organisations mature, informal systems that worked at £3m rarely sustain £15m.

Protecting leadership capacity is a sign of organisational maturity, not extravagance.

What Effective Board Support Looks Like in Practice

Board-level support typically includes:

  • Coordinating structured board agendas
  • Preparing coherent, accurate board packs
  • Tracking decisions and actions
  • Managing governance documentation
  • Aligning director diaries with strategic priorities
  • Ensuring follow-up is completed between meetings

In one of our larger SME clients, providing consistent support to the Commercial Director has released meaningful leadership capacity back into revenue-driving activity. Preparation is sharper. Follow-up is tighter. Strategic focus has improved.

The change was not dramatic. But it was material.

Governance Is Ultimately a Capacity Question

Board effectiveness is not just about who sits around the table.

It is about whether those individuals have the time and clarity to exercise sound judgement.

In growing SMEs, directors often remain highly operational long after the business has outgrown that model.

Supporting directors operationally does not dilute their involvement. It enables better oversight, stronger governance and more considered commercial decisions.

It moves leadership time back to where it has the greatest impact.

In Summary

  • Director time is one of the most valuable resources in a growing SME.
  • Administrative activity carries a measurable financial and strategic cost.
  • Structured board support improves governance and commercial focus.
  • Protecting leadership capacity signals organisational maturity.

If you sit on the board of a scaling business, it may be worth asking one simple question:

Are you spending your time where it delivers the highest commercial return?

Because capability is rarely the issue.

Capacity often is.