Our own model · Metaphor
The snowball.
Developing yourself is like rolling a snowball. It grows with every year that passes, of course, but it only rolls where you walk yourself, and it never gets bigger than one person can manage. Anyone who develops other people instead sets a lot of balls rolling at the same time, in directions you'd never have got round to going, and some of them end up bigger than your own.
Why your own ball runs out
An owner who is genuinely good at their craft gets better every year that passes, and that’s exactly what makes the limit so hard to see in time. The company grows at the pace one person can roll, and once the calendar is full it’s full.
The next step then costs health instead of time, and that usually gets noticed at home a good while before it shows in the results.
The ball grows from what it rolls over
A snowball doesn’t get bigger from somebody telling it how to grow, it gets bigger from what it rolls over. Development is therefore rarely about courses, it’s about what somebody actually gets to take responsibility for, and about who’s there when it goes wrong.
A ball rolling in a direction you never go also picks up things you wouldn’t have spotted yourself. It’s uncomfortable the first time somebody solves something better than you would have, and that’s the whole point as well.
What it does to the company’s value
A company that can only do what the founder can do is worth exactly as much as the founder has the stamina for. That shows when somebody wants to buy it, when the bank is deciding whether to lend to it, and long before either of those in something as everyday as a holiday.
The dependency rarely shows up in a report. It shows in the fact that certain decisions simply wait until you’re back, and in the fact that nobody thinks that’s odd.
Something to try
Go through last week’s calendar and underline everything only you could have done. Then look at what’s left, and ask who should have done it instead and what was missing for that person to manage it.
The answer is rarely competence. More often it’s mandate, or that nobody dared risk it coming out slightly worse the first time.
In practice
The question in a Bollplanket conversation is therefore rarely what you should do next, it’s who could do it instead, and what’s needed for that to work. That question comes out of sixteen years in youth football, where you win nothing by playing the match for somebody else.