For a long time, I’ve tried to stay involved in everything. It’s only recently that I’ve started to realise that might have more to do with me than the business.
It felt like the right thing to do. If something needed doing, I’d handle it. If there was a problem, I’d step in. If something went wrong, I’d fix it myself.
At the time, it didn’t feel like a mistake. It felt like I was doing things properly. Making sure everything was done to the right standard, keeping control of the details, and not relying too much on other people.
And in the early days, that probably made sense.
The business wasn’t always just me. For a long time, it was me, my brother, and my dad, and between us, we were managing around 80 properties.
A few years ago, that changed. My brother moved back to our hometown in England, and around the same time, my dad stepped back and reduced his involvement to almost nothing.
Since then, it’s been on me.
That’s when things got heavy.
There was just too much for one person. Too many messages, too many requests, too many moving parts, and too many small things that all felt important at the same time.
Guest requests, owner requests, bookings, inspections, accounting, it all landed in the same place.
You end up constantly reacting, jumping from one thing to the next, fixing problems as they come up, but never really getting ahead of them.
At some point, you realise you’re not really running the business anymore. It’s running you. Busy all the time, but not actually going anywhere.
I’m still in that phase more than I’d like to admit.
I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. It feels like I’ve just created a job that’s grown too big.
The part I’m trying to figure out now is how to step back without things slipping, and somehow continue to improve.
That means letting go of things I’ve always done myself, building a team I can rely on, and putting simple systems in place so things don’t depend on me being involved every time.
Not just hiring people for the sake of it, but figuring out the right roles, the right structure, and how everything fits together so it actually works without constant input.
And accepting that not everything will be done exactly how I would do it.
That’s probably the hardest part for me.
Not perfection, just consistency. Things working without me needing to check every detail. Something I probably should have figured out earlier.
I’m not there yet. Far from it.
But I can see that holding on to everything isn’t sustainable, and doing everything myself isn’t the solution.
Duncan