Reading a business you did not build

You arrive with an advantage and a liability, and they are the same thing: you can see the business from outside. Everything obviously wrong is obvious to you and invisible to the people who have lived inside it for twenty years. That is real, and it is also why the first instinct — start fixing — fails so reliably.

What you cannot see yet is why any of it is the way it is. The supplier who charges more is somebody who delivered during a bad month in 2019. The customer given endless credit introduced half the customer base. The apparently pointless register is what settles a dispute when a delivery goes missing. A business that has survived a decade is not a pile of mistakes; it is a set of adaptations, some of which have outlived the thing they adapted to and most of which have not.

So spend the first fortnight watching and writing, and change nothing. Be there at opening and at closing, because those are different businesses. Watch a full week including the slow days. Write down what actually happens, what people work around, and every question you want to ask — and ask them as questions rather than as suggestions. "Why do we do it this way?" gets you the history. "Why don't we just…" gets you a defensive answer and closes the door you were about to walk through.