We brought together 17 professional services owners from Lanarkshire and Central Scotland to talk about business resilience and what would happen if they couldn’t work for 6 months. We asked where the business relied too heavily on them, what a healthier firm could look like in 5 years, and what it really takes to build a more resilient business.
At our roundtable in June, we brought together business owners from industries including solicitors, architects, brokers, coaches, IT, fire safety and wellbeing. They were all different sizes and at different stages of growth, but they were all running their own firms and carrying some version of the same questions.
We opened with a keynote from Ricky Munday. His talk covered following your dreams, getting back up after failure, and setting goals big enough to scare you. It gave the morning a more open tone from the start and helped lead into a roundtable where people were willing to talk properly about what resilience looks like in real businesses.
The business resilience questions we asked the group
We ran the roundtable around 3 questions. Simple ones, but not easy to answer.
- What would happen if you couldn’t work for 6 months?
- Where is your business most reliant on you, and is that a strength or a risk?
- What does a healthy, resilient business look like for you in 5 years?
What struck us was how quickly the room opened up. These aren’t questions that tend to get asked in professional settings, but when you’re sitting with other people who understand what it feels like to run their own firm, the conversation changes quickly.
People were willing to say things they might not usually say out loud. Where the business still depends too much on them. Where the next hire feels difficult. Where they know the business needs to become less reliant on one person, but haven’t had the time or space to work out what that means.
What the roundtable showed about business resilience in professional services
One theme came through quickly: most professional service business owners are more reliant on themselves than they would like, and many already know it. The harder question is how long they can afford to leave it that way.
For some owners, that reliance sits in client relationships. For others, it sits in decisions, systems, knowledge, or the day-to-day running of the team. The 6 month question made that reliance harder to ignore, because it showed which parts of the business still needed the owner in the room.
That came through clearly in the feedback.
Michael Hughes of Complete Finance Solutions left asking, “Should I share the load?”
Martin Williams of Secure Fire Protection said the morning “further enhances our drive to make our business function without us.”
Hiring came up again and again, whatever stage people were at. Whether it’s a sole trader considering their first employee or a business with 30 people thinking about the next layer of management, the question of who to bring in and when is one that most owners are navigating largely on their own.
For Susan Maitland of SupportAct, the takeaway was “setting boundaries for self-discipline” and working on “non-negotiables at this very early stage of the business.”
That’s a different stage from building a management layer, but it comes from the same place. The owner is thinking about what needs to be in place before more of the business depends on other people.
The 5 year question produced as many answers as there were people in the room. Some wanted to scale. Others wanted to step back. A few were thinking about what the business would be worth if the time came to sell.
Doug Hall of Cadboll Wealth took away the “consideration of building better systems and processes.”
Kenneth Martin of Block Architects pointed to “the value of different experiences in the room.”
The room gave people a chance to hear how other owners were thinking about the same problems from different stages of business. What a lot of people had in common was that they hadn’t stopped to write down their answers before that morning.
What people took away afterwards
The feedback afterwards showed that people had left with specific questions to take back into their own businesses.
Sandeep Mohnir of Tech First IT Solutions said it was “something I was missing in my work life.”
Antony Murray of EG Murray Business Insurance said it was, “great to hear everyone’s experiences. My head’s buzzing with thoughts.”
Stephen O’Donnell of Action Coach called it “a brilliant morning” and was already looking forward to the next one.
Those comments say a lot about why the morning worked. Business owners often spend their days answering other people’s questions, so it can be rare to sit with people facing similar pressures and look properly at their own.
Why we host professional services roundtables like this
We’re Chartered Accountants, so of course we work with numbers. But the numbers usually lead to bigger conversations around:
- Can the business cope if the owner has to step back?
- Is the team structure right for where the firm is going?
- Are the figures giving the owner enough confidence to hire, invest, change direction or plan ahead?
These are the kinds of questions we work through with clients all year round. At Benson Wood & Co, we work with professional services firms across Lanarkshire and Central Scotland that have outgrown a once-a-year relationship with their accountant.
They want someone who knows the business well enough to be a real sounding board. Someone who can look at the figures with them, understand what they’re trying to build, and have the conversations that are easy to put off when the day-to-day takes over.
That’s why the morning felt so relevant to us. It gave owners the time to think properly about questions that are easy to put off.
How you can work through the questions
If these questions have always just stayed in your head, our Growth Vision Workshop gives you space to work through them properly.
You spend a day with us at our Bellshill office, looking at what you want from the business and what the numbers need to look like to support it.
You leave with a high-level 3 year roadmap and a clear list of practical next steps.
