Category: Leadership

When priorities compete and the workload keeps growing, your mission and values are the quickest way to decide what to do now, what to hand over and what to drop.

Everything on this list is urgent. So where do I start?

As the end of the year approaches, work can start to feel like one long list of competing demands. Marketing needs attention, the finance deadlines won’t move, admin keeps piling up, and your team keeps asking which of it matters most. Everything is shouting at once.

A to-do list can’t settle that for you. It treats every item as equal, and the most urgent things are rarely the most important. What you need is a filter, and most businesses already have one, even if nobody has looked at it for years: a clear sense of what the business is for and how it wants to work. In other words, its mission and values.

What we learned rewriting our own

Rebecca and I have spent the last few weeks revisiting Get Ahead’s mission, vision and values. The old versions weren’t wrong, and they read well on the website. But when we asked whether they helped us make actual decisions, the answer was mostly no.

So we rewrote them to do specific jobs. As we open new regions, our values need to help us judge whether a prospective Regional Director is the right fit. They need to show Virtual Experts that joining Get Ahead means joining a network, not signing up to a job board. And our goals need to keep the two of us focused on a small number of priorities rather than on whatever lands in the inbox.

The lesson was simple. If your mission and values can’t help you make a decision, they’re decoration.

What useful mission and values look like in a small business

A mission says what you do and who you do it for, in a sentence you could say out loud without cringing. Values describe how you work, in terms specific enough to rule some choices out. “Excellence” rules nothing out, because nobody sets out to be mediocre. “We reply to every client within one working day” or “we’d rather turn work down than overpromise” does, and your team can check themselves against it.

You don’t need many. Three to five values that people can remember will do more than a list of ten that nobody can recall. They also need to be written down and shared, so they guide the whole team rather than only the person who wrote them.

A quick test: think of a decision you made last month, perhaps a client you took on or a request you said yes to. Would your mission and values have pointed the same way? If they wouldn’t have helped either way, they need sharpening.

Do it, delegate it or drop it

Once your purpose is clear, it becomes a practical filter for the list. For each item, ask three questions.

Does this move us towards what we’re here to do? If not, it’s a candidate for dropping, however urgent it feels. Does it need me, specifically? If it matters but doesn’t need your judgement, it’s a candidate to hand over. Would anyone notice if it stopped? Some regular tasks carry on long after the reason for them has gone.

What’s left is the work that only you can do and that moves the business forward, and that is where your time should go. As the year closes, it’s also worth asking one bigger question: if you could add one thing to the business next year and remove one thing, what would they be?

Giving your team a message they can use

A clear purpose isn’t only for the owner. When everyone can explain in a sentence what the business does and why, they make better calls without checking back, and they describe you consistently to customers, suppliers and anyone else who asks. That consistency is a large part of what people come to trust.

Try asking a few people in your team to describe the business in one sentence. If the answers vary widely, that’s worth knowing, and it’s a cheap problem to fix. There’s more on getting a team pulling in the same direction in how to improve performance in a growing business.

Where Get Ahead can help

Much of what lands in the “delegate” pile is the work our Virtual Experts do every day: marketing, bookkeeping and finance support, admin, and the operational tasks that crowd out thinking time. They are experienced, UK-based professionals, and your local Regional Director takes the time to understand how your business works, and what it’s for, before matching you with the right person.

If your list feels longer than your week, let’s talk about what’s taking up your time and where the right support would make the biggest difference. Find out more about our services or call 0330 223 7580.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between a mission and values?

A mission says what your business does and who it is for. Values describe how you go about it: the standards and behaviours you expect from everyone in the business, including yourself.

How many values should a small business have?

Three to five is usually enough. A few specific values are easier to remember, and more useful when making decisions, than a long list.

How can mission and values help with prioritising?

They give you a test for each task: does it move the business towards its purpose, and does it fit how you want to work? Tasks that don’t are candidates to drop.

How do I decide what to delegate?

Hand over work that matters but doesn’t need your personal judgement, such as regular admin, bookkeeping or social media scheduling, and keep the decisions only you can make.

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

Six practical ways to improve performance in a growing business when everyone is busy but things still slip.

We’re busier than ever. So why does it feel like we’re getting less done?

If you run a growing business, you may recognise that thought. The team has grown from three people to eight. There are more clients, more projects and more conversations, and everyone is working hard. Yet things that used to happen without anyone thinking about them now slip through: a client follow-up nobody sent, a decision made in one meeting that half the team never heard about, a project everyone assumed someone else was leading.

Nothing is broken, exactly. The business has simply outgrown the informal way it used to work, when most of it ran through the owner’s head and a quick word across the desk was enough to keep everyone in step.

Most advice on improving performance is written for large organisations with HR departments and layers of management. This article is for founders, owners and small teams who need things to work better without adding bureaucracy. From my consultancy work, and from running Get Ahead with Rebecca, I’ve found that when you want to improve performance in a growing business, the answer is rarely a new initiative. It is usually clarity: about what matters, who owns it, and how people find out.

Start with one problem, not six

Before you change anything, pick the single performance problem that is costing you most right now. It might be slow client onboarding, invoices going out late, or a project that keeps drifting. Decide what “fixed” would look like, talk to the people closest to the work, agree two or three actions, and put a review date in the diary.

That may sound modest. It is meant to. A focused fix builds momentum, shows you what works in your business rather than in theory, and gives you something to repeat elsewhere. The five areas below are where most of those problems start, so use them to help you choose.

Is everyone working towards the same thing?

In a small business, the plan often lives in the owner’s head. That works until the team grows past the point where everyone overhears everything. Write down the three or four priorities that matter most this quarter, in plain language, and share them.

Then check that each person can see how their work connects to at least one of them. If someone can’t, either the priority isn’t clear enough or they are spending time on the wrong things, and both are worth knowing. For each priority, agree how you’ll tell whether it’s on track and name one person to lead it. One name, not a committee.

Who actually owns this?

The project that everyone supports and nobody owns is one of the most common reasons good businesses stall. Fiona Ibbetson, our Regional Director for Yorkshire, writes about this well in her piece on project accountability.

In owner-led businesses the hardest part is often the owner letting go. If every decision still needs your approval, you have become the bottleneck, however capable the people around you. Real delegation means agreeing the outcome and the boundaries, then stepping back and letting people decide how to get there. The same applies to outside support. A Virtual Expert given a clear outcome and the authority to act will usually achieve far more than one handed a list of tasks.

Do people hear about decisions at the right time?

Communication problems in small teams are rarely about volume. They are about timing and reasons. People find out about a decision after it has already affected their work, or they hear what changed but not why. Explaining the why matters more than it seems, because it lets people make sensible calls on their own without checking back each time.

Suzanne Evett, our Regional Director for Berkshire, makes a related point in what corporate conference planning taught her about owner-led businesses: people cannot act on information before they are ready to. So think about when people need to know something, not only what they need to know.

It also helps to agree where decisions live. If they are scattered across email, WhatsApp and memory, some will be missed. One agreed place, whether that is a Teams channel or a shared document, is enough. And make it two-way: ask regularly what is getting in the way, then act on at least some of what you hear.

Which processes are slowing you down?

Capable people are held back most by unclear responsibilities and by processes that made sense when the business was smaller. Three places usually leak time: tasks done differently every time, tasks only one person knows how to do, and manual jobs that repeat every week.

Some of these can be automated, and our article on using automation to eliminate repetitive tasks covers where to begin. Some just need writing down on a single page. Others are better handed to someone else entirely, particularly the admin, bookkeeping and scheduling that pull owners away from the work only they can do.

Then measure a small number of things that tell you whether customers and your team are better off: the time from enquiry to proposal, the share of invoices paid on time, how often work has to be redone. Measuring everything because you can is its own drain on time.

What does your own behaviour tell the team?

In a small business, culture is largely the owner’s behaviour, multiplied. If you send emails at 11pm, people assume that is expected. If mistakes are met with blame, problems go underground until they are expensive. If you ask for ideas and then act on one, people keep offering them.

Model the behaviour you want to see, respond to concerns consistently, and make it safe for anyone to say “I’m stuck” early rather than late. None of this costs money, and it does more to hold improvements in place than any process.

Where Get Ahead can help

Several of these are easier with the right support around you. Our HR specialists help owners set clear objectives, hold better performance conversations and support people who are managing others for the first time. Our Virtual Experts take on the admin, finance and operational work that crowds out thinking time, so the owner can focus on direction rather than keeping every plate spinning.

Every client works with a local Regional Director, who takes the time to understand how your business runs before matching you with the right people. If one of the areas above sounds familiar, talk to your local Regional Director. The first conversation is about where you are now and what would make the biggest difference.

Frequently asked questions

What is the quickest way to improve performance in a small business?

Choose one problem that is costing you time or money, define what fixed looks like, agree a few actions with the people closest to it and set a review date. Focused fixes build momentum faster than broad initiatives.

How can I improve team performance without micromanaging?

Agree the outcome and the boundaries, name one owner for each priority, then step back. Short, regular check-ins focused on obstacles work better than approving every decision.

What should a growing business measure?

A handful of measures that show whether customers and the team are better off, such as time from enquiry to proposal, invoices paid on time and how often work is redone.

When should a growing business bring in outside support?

When the owner has become the bottleneck, when the same tasks keep slipping, or when specialist skills such as HR or finance are needed for a defined piece of work rather than a full-time role.

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