Are you wearing the right hat?

Being good at something doesn't necessarily mean it's what your business needs you to be doing.

I've worn quite a few hats over the years. Professionally speaking, obviously, although having spent a considerable amount of my life in showbusiness, I've also worn a frankly ridiculous number of literal ones. Some have been rather fabulous, some have been deeply questionable, and a few have involved enough feathers and sequins to constitute a fire hazard. But it's the professional collection that's probably the most interesting, because I've never been particularly good at staying in one box. I've been a dancer, performer, choreographer, fitness presenter, instructor, business development manager, marketing manager, consultant and business owner. I've worked in corporate environments, creative industries and hospitality, and I still occasionally find myself behind a bar pulling pints, which is a useful reminder that no matter how impressive your professional credentials might sound, somebody will eventually ask you to change a barrel.

The interesting thing about having worked across so many different environments is that you start to recognise the same problems wearing different outfits. The language changes, the budgets change, the organisational structures become more elaborate, and occasionally somebody gives a perfectly ordinary activity an unnecessarily complicated name so they can justify charging more for it. But underneath all that, the fundamental challenges are often remarkably similar. People are busy, resources are finite, customers have expectations, and somebody has to make decisions about what matters most. And one of the things I've noticed, both in other businesses and rather inconveniently in my own, is that we're not always doing the job our business actually needs us to do.

When somebody starts a business, it's usually because they're particularly good at something, passionate about something or have spotted an opportunity to do something better. They might be an excellent designer, an experienced tradesperson, a talented chef, a brilliant instructor or somebody who's recognised that an existing service could be delivered in a much more useful way. That's the part they understand. It's the work they enjoy, the skill they've developed and, quite often, the reason they wanted to work for themselves in the first place. Unfortunately, somewhere between having a good idea and becoming an actual business owner, they discover that delivering the thing they're good at is only one small part of the operation.

Because now somebody has to find the customers, communicate the offer, answer enquiries, manage the finances, deal with suppliers, maintain the website, understand the booking or payment systems, sort out the administration and work out why something that functioned perfectly yesterday has suddenly decided to stop working. If you're running a small business without a team behind you, that somebody is generally you. You become the managing director, marketing department, sales team, accounts assistant, customer service representative, IT support desk and occasionally the person responsible for locating the missing extension lead. It's an extraordinary collection of responsibilities to attach to one human being, particularly when that human being originally just wanted to make excellent cakes, teach Pilates or provide a really good service.

And because we're resourceful creatures, we get on with it. We learn things, solve problems, develop systems and become surprisingly competent at jobs we never imagined we'd need to do. There's a certain satisfaction in being able to turn your hand to almost anything, and I understand that better than most. My own working life has been an ongoing exercise in acquiring new skills, sometimes deliberately and sometimes because I've found myself in a situation where somebody needed something doing and apparently I was the nearest available person with a functioning brain. But there comes a point when being capable of doing so many different things creates a problem of its own. Just because you can wear a particular hat doesn't necessarily mean it's the one you should be reaching for.

And this is where I have to admit that I'm as guilty as anyone.

My background means I'm extremely comfortable with the creative, strategic and communications side of business. I love understanding how an organisation works, exploring what makes it different, untangling a complicated customer journey or finding the language that finally explains something in a way its audience can understand. Give me a business that's struggling to communicate its value, a website that makes its customers work unnecessarily hard or an idea that needs developing into something commercially useful, and I can happily disappear into the problem for hours. It's fascinating work, I enjoy it enormously and, rather conveniently, it's also something I'm good at.

But enjoying something and being good at it can make it very easy to convince yourself that it's the most important thing you could possibly be doing.

I can spend hours refining a piece of content, exploring an idea or improving something that's already reasonably good, and at the end of it feel as though I've had an incredibly productive day. And perhaps I have. But if the business actually needed me to follow up a potential client, have a conversation about pricing or make a decision I've been putting off, then all that lovely productive activity might have been doing something else entirely. It might have been allowing me to stay comfortably occupied without addressing the thing that would make the biggest commercial difference. That's the particularly sneaky thing about this sort of avoidance. It doesn't look like sitting around doing nothing. It looks like working extremely hard, often on perfectly legitimate business activities, which makes it considerably easier to justify to yourself.

I suspect most business owners have their own version of this. The person who's brilliant at delivering their service but finds every possible reason to avoid selling it. The creative who keeps improving the product instead of putting it in front of customers. The operationally minded owner who can spend an entire afternoon perfecting a spreadsheet while the business's actual commercial direction remains something of a mystery. Or the person who's so busy responding to everyone else's demands that they've forgotten they're supposed to be the one deciding where the business is going. None of these people is lazy, incompetent or lacking in ambition. They're often exceptionally capable. They've simply become very good at spending time in the parts of their business where they feel most comfortable.

I've always had a slightly awkward relationship with the phrase, "That's how we've always done it." In fact, one of the more unexpected turns in my career came when I applied for an administrative role at a promotional marketing agency. I'd done what seemed perfectly sensible to me before the interview and looked at the business itself. Its website, its communications, how it presented its services and whether everything actually worked. I'd spotted spelling and grammar issues, broken links and opportunities to explain the business more clearly. I also found myself questioning parts of the recruitment process, particularly the things that didn't appear to serve any useful purpose beyond the fact that somebody had decided they should be done that way.

Now, I appreciate that questioning a company's processes and pointing out problems with its website isn't necessarily the conventional approach to an interview for an administrative position. Most people probably concentrate on demonstrating that they're organised, reliable and proficient with Microsoft Office. I apparently decided to conduct an unsolicited business review. But the result was that I was offered a Business Development and Marketing Manager role instead, with an opportunity to help shape the department and contribute to the wider business. It was one of those wonderfully unexpected moments when the way my brain naturally approaches problems turned out to be exactly what somebody needed, even if neither of us had anticipated it when I walked through the door.

That experience has stayed with me, not least because it reinforced something I've always believed about business. Sometimes the most useful contribution isn't doing the job exactly as it's been described. It's recognising what actually needs doing. The agency had advertised for one set of skills, but the conversation revealed a different opportunity. Had we all remained firmly attached to the original job description, that opportunity might never have been explored. And I think the same thing happens inside businesses all the time. We become so accustomed to the roles we perform and the tasks we complete that we don't always stop to ask whether they're still the things that will move the organisation forward.

Of course, there's an important difference between recognising an opportunity and deciding you personally need to do absolutely everything about it. This is a distinction I continue to work on, because having a broad range of experience is both useful and occasionally a complete pain in the arse. When you know how to do something, it's tempting to just get on with it. You can see what needs changing, you understand how to change it, and doing it yourself often seems quicker than explaining it to somebody else. Before long, you're simultaneously developing the strategy, writing the content, updating the website, sorting the booking system and wondering why you've somehow reached the end of another working day without touching the thing you originally sat down to do.

The problem isn't necessarily the volume of work. Sometimes it's the absence of a deliberate decision about which work deserves your attention.

I've met business owners who are astonishingly busy. Their diaries are full, their inboxes are overflowing, their customers are being looked after and they're constantly dealing with whatever happens to demand attention next. From the outside, everything appears to be moving. But when the conversation turns to where they want the business to be in twelve months, which parts of the operation are actually contributing to its success or what needs to change to achieve the next stage of growth, things can become a little less clear. Not because they haven't thought about those questions or don't care about the answers, but because the day-to-day operation has a remarkable ability to consume every available minute.

At some point, you can become so busy working in every department that nobody's left in the director's office.

And before anybody suggests that the solution is simply to delegate everything, outsource the administration and employ a team of specialists, I'd like to point out that most small business owners are already quite familiar with the concept of other people doing work for them. The difficulty is generally paying for it. Advice about hiring a virtual assistant, marketing manager or fractional finance director is all very well when the business has the resources to support those roles, but considerably less helpful when you're a sole trader carefully managing your margins and trying to decide whether you can justify another software subscription. Telling someone in that position to outsource their problems can feel rather like suggesting they solve their housing difficulties by purchasing a second property.

Sometimes you genuinely do have to wear all the hats. That's simply the reality of running a smaller operation, and pretending otherwise doesn't make the advice more useful. But even when you can't hand the work to somebody else, you can still make better decisions about when and why you're doing it. There's a difference between choosing to spend an afternoon on administration because it's necessary and disappearing into administration because it's easier than making a difficult commercial decision. There's a difference between developing a marketing campaign because you've identified an opportunity and creating more content because posting something feels more comfortable than picking up the phone.

And sometimes, the hat your business needs you to wear is the one you particularly dislike.

Perhaps you've been avoiding a conversation about pricing because you're worried about how customers will respond. Perhaps you know your website isn't helping people understand what you offer, but you've become so familiar with it that you no longer notice the gaps. Perhaps you're brilliant at attracting enquiries but haven't examined why so few of them become paying customers. Or perhaps you've spent so long keeping everyone else happy that you've stopped asking whether the business is actually working for you. These aren't always enormous, dramatic problems requiring a complete organisational transformation. Quite often, they're relatively ordinary issues that have been allowed to sit in the background because something more immediate, more interesting or simply less uncomfortable keeps taking priority.

This is one of the reasons I find working with businesses from the outside so interesting. I don't arrive carrying the same assumptions about how things have always been done, and I haven't spent the last six months dealing with the operational distractions that have gradually become part of somebody else's normal working day. I can look at what the business is trying to achieve, what it's communicating, how customers experience it and whether the various parts of the operation are actually helping one another. Sometimes the problem is marketing. Sometimes it's the offer, the customer journey, the way information is presented or an internal process that's creating unnecessary friction. And occasionally, the issue everyone has been concentrating on turns out not to be the thing causing the greatest commercial difficulty at all.

That doesn't mean an external perspective is automatically better than the knowledge of the person running the business. Far from it. Nobody understands the history, relationships, practical constraints and everyday realities of an organisation quite like the people inside it. But when you're immersed in something every day, familiarity can make certain problems almost invisible. It's rather like living with a slightly crooked picture on the wall. After a while, you stop noticing it, even though everybody who visits your house immediately wonders why nobody's straightened the bloody thing.

And sometimes that's all it takes to begin making progress. Not a complete reinvention, another complicated framework or a seventeen-page strategy document full of terminology nobody uses in real life. Just a clearer understanding of what's happening, what's getting in the way and where the next bit of effort would make the most meaningful difference. Because businesses don't necessarily need more activity. They need the right activity, applied to the right problem, at the right time.

I'm not suggesting that every business owner should spend their days contemplating strategy while somebody else gets on with the actual work. I enjoy being involved in the practical side of my businesses, and I have no intention of becoming one of those people who talks endlessly about vision and leadership while appearing to have very little understanding of how anything actually gets done. Nor do I think there's anything wrong with spending time doing the work you love. Quite the opposite. The ability to build a working life around something you enjoy is one of the genuine privileges of running your own business, even if that privilege occasionally comes with bookkeeping, technical problems and an unreasonable number of passwords.

But I do think we need to be a little more discerning about what we call productivity. Finishing the day exhausted doesn't automatically mean you've moved the business forward. Crossing seventeen things off a list doesn't necessarily compensate for leaving the eighteenth untouched, particularly if that eighteenth thing is the one that would have made the biggest difference. And being exceptionally good at something doesn't mean it's where your attention should always be directed.

I know this because I still catch myself doing it. I can disappear quite happily into research, writing, creative development or improving a customer experience, and occasionally I have to remind myself that Vector & Verse also needs somebody to be its business development manager, not just its consultant, strategist and enthusiastic collector of interesting problems. It's a mildly irritating realisation, particularly when the alternative involves doing something less enjoyable than the work I'm already absorbed in. But recognising the pattern is useful, even if I don't always appreciate the timing.

So perhaps the question isn't really how many hats you're wearing. For most business owners, the answer is already somewhere between "quite a few" and "please don't ask."

Perhaps the more useful question is whether the hat you've instinctively reached for today is the one your business actually needs.

Because sometimes the work that feels most natural isn't the work that matters most. Sometimes the thing you're exceptionally good at is also the thing you're using to avoid something else. And sometimes being a good business owner means putting down the work you enjoy, picking up the responsibility you've been sidestepping and accepting that being busy and making progress are not necessarily the same thing.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got a business to run. Which means I should probably stop polishing this article and go and do some actual business development.

Well, that's bloody inconvenient.