The Two Seats Every Owner Sits In: Vision vs. Operations

When was the last time you sat down with nothing in front of you and thought seriously about where your company will be in the next twelve to thirty-six months? Not a revenue number you said out loud at a party. An actual hour, on an actual day, where the only thing you did was think about the future.

For most owners I talk to, the honest answer is somewhere back in January or February. Then the year started, and it has been shouting at them ever since. After forty years in homebuilding and coaching, here is what I have learned: it is not a discipline problem, and it is not a time management problem. It is a seating problem.

What are the two seats every owner sits in?

Picture a work truck. Somebody is driving it, watching the gauges and the mirror, keeping it out of the ditch. Somebody else in the same cab is looking through the windshield at the road a mile ahead. Is that the right turn coming up? Is there weather out there? Are we even on the right highway? In a business, those are the vision seat and the operating seat.

• The vision seat owns the future. Where the company is going, what it will say yes and no to, and relationships that take two years to pay off, such as land, capital, lenders and the superintendent at another company who is not ready to leave yet.
• The operating seat owns this week. The schedule, the people, the process and the follow-through that make the business run.

The vision seat decides where the truck goes. The operating seat makes sure it gets there.

Neither seat is better. They are different gifts. The thing I need you to hear is that both seats are always occupied, whether or not you have named or staffed them. In most small and mid-sized building companies, the person in both is you.

Why does the vision seat always go empty?

It is never the operating seat that goes empty. That seat has a built-in alarm system: a ringing phone, a superintendent in your doorway, an inspector who did not pass something, payroll that runs Thursday whether you are ready or not. The vision seat has none of that. Nobody calls you at seven in the morning about your three-year plan. The present shouts. The future whispers. And guess which one gets your Tuesday?

It does not happen dramatically. I call it the February problem. In January the calendar is clean and you actually think about where the company is going. In February the year starts happening to you. By August someone asks about next year and you hear yourself say, “We are just trying to get through this year,” and you mean it. I have watched companies run three, four, five years of very good operating and end up worth less than when they started, with an owner working harder at the end than at the beginning.

Where is the ceiling for an owner who runs both seats?

People want the ceiling to be a revenue number: twenty houses, ten million dollars. It is not. The ceiling is the day your business starts producing more daily decisions than one human being can absorb. You can cross it at four million dollars with a complicated product and a young team, or be nowhere near it at fifteen million with a seasoned crew and repeatable processes. So do not count houses. Count decisions, and count how many times a week somebody needs you before they can move.

The builder who never got out of the truck

I work with a builder, and I will not name him, because I have seen this same shape a dozen times. He was an excellent operator who could tell you from memory what stage every house was in. I asked what the company would look like in three years. He said, “Bigger.” I asked, “Bigger how?” After a long pause he said, “I honestly have not thought about it. I have been a little busy.”

When we looked, he had built about the same number of houses for five straight years, in the same two subdivisions, with the same product and lenders. His costs and prices had risen almost in step, so his margin looked steady. He called that discipline. It was the absence of decisions. The market moved for him, and in five years he had not entered or exited a market, changed a product or made a single bet. He had made tens of thousands of decisions inside the business and almost none about it.

What we did was not clever. We put two hours on his calendar on Thursday mornings, away from the office, and protected them. The first month produced nothing. In the second he made one decision: he stopped building the product that had always been harder and thinner on margin. Eighteen months later he was building fewer houses, making meaningfully more on each, and could finally answer the three-year question.

How do you tell which seat you are really sitting in?

Every owner says they do both. These three tests look at evidence instead of intention.

1. The calendar test. Go back four weeks in your calendar (not forward, because forward is what you hope) and mark every block O for operations or V for vision. A job in progress, a client walkthrough, a talk about a team member, even reviewing last month's numbers are all O. A V is only a V if it concerns a decision whose payoff is more than a year out. I have had good, hardworking owners come back with a zero.
2. The doorway test. For one week, tally every interruption and write two words about it. Then sort them into what only you can answer and everything else. The second pile will be enormous. People usually do not ask because they are unsure of the answer. They ask because they are unsure they are allowed to decide.
3. The two-week test. What happens if you are truly unreachable for two weeks? What breaks first? Which decisions sit for fourteen days? If the company keeps building houses but stops making any decision bigger than a change order, you are the only occupant of both seats.

What should you do before hiring an operations person?

The instinct is to hire a number two. Sometimes that is right, but I have watched it go wrong in three ways:

1. Hiring a person to be your process. Hand a strong hire the pile of constant questions and you have only moved the pile. That pile is a missing process wearing leadership clothes. Before you hire, answer the ten most repeated questions once, in writing, with a dollar limit and a name.
2. Hiring the seat you like instead of the seat that is empty. Owners hire people who think like them, and now two people are looking through the windshield while nobody has a hand on the wheel.
3. Giving them the title and keeping the seat. You announce the hire, then keep answering the phone. Transferring a seat is about ninety days of redirecting, and every call needs some version of “good question, go ask her.” It will feel awkward for about two weeks. It is the whole job.

Sitting in both seats is not a failure. It is a stage. What is not survivable is sitting in both and pretending the vision seat is getting attention. The problem is not the double occupancy. The problem is the fiction.

Three things to do this week

1. Run the calendar test. Four weeks back, O or V, then write down the two totals. Resist explaining the number to yourself.
2. Run the doorway test for five days. Tally every interruption, then split the list.
3. Hand off five decisions. Take the five most repeated items from the second pile, write a paragraph on each with a dollar limit and a name, and tell your team out loud they no longer come to you.

Then put the vision seat on your calendar like a client: two hours, same time, away from your desk. If it feels unproductive for the first month, that is because you are out of practice thinking. You cannot work your way into the vision seat. You can only decide your way into it. Next up is the other half of this pair: what a company looks like when everyone knows their job and it is still going nowhere.