Buying A Business? Think Again
Business owners who purchase companies often inherit systems, but not the instincts. They become excellent operators. They rarely become restless entrepreneurs.
CEO Brief: A Harvard Business School study by Michael Porter and Nitin Nohria tracking 27 CEOs across 60,000 hours of work found that CEOs spend an unexpectedly small share of their time with customers and a much larger share inside the building (Porter & Nohria, HBR, 2018). Most of the CEOs were dismayed to discover this. The activities consuming the other 97% aren’t frivolous but are not what the business needed most from the person at the top.
Why Do Acquired Business Owners Default to Operations Over Growth?
Leaders who haven't built something from nothing tend to focus energy on what feels controllable: operations and systems. These feel manageable. Meanwhile, sales, marketing, and market understanding receive whatever time is left over. The leader knows these areas matter. But when the day gets full, operational work wins.
This isn't laziness. It's pattern. Leaders naturally drift toward what they already do well, especially under pressure. The person who came up through finance reviews the financials. The person with an operations background redesigns the process. The skills that made them credible enough to acquire the business are the same skills that can quietly become its ceiling.
The same Harvard study found that the bulk of CEO time goes to internal constituencies (direct reports, senior leadership, functional heads), with relatively little reaching customers and the outside world (Porter & Nohria, HBR, 2018). When an acquired business owner inherited a functioning team and a clean set of systems, the internal pull is even stronger. There's so much to learn, manage, and improve inside the building that the market can wait. The market, meanwhile, doesn't.
What Does It Look Like When Operations Crowd Out Market Attention?
The pattern tends to be invisible to the people inside it. The business is running well. People are working hard. The numbers for cost control and process efficiency look healthy. Revenue, though, is a different story.
Watch for:
The CEO spends more time reviewing financials than talking to customers
Strategic discussions focus on improving existing processes rather than testing new approaches
Sales and marketing are delegated but not deeply understood
Efficiency improves while revenue stagnates
The team works harder on activities that used to work
McKinsey research tracking companies from 2016 to 2021 found that CX leaders, companies with strong customer-facing orientation, achieved more than double the revenue growth of CX laggards over the same period (McKinsey, 2022). The implication isn't that customer service programs create growth. It's that market-facing orientation and revenue growth move together. Organizations run by leaders who are close to their customers tend to grow. Organizations run by leaders who are close to their operations tend to optimize.
The problem: you can't optimize your way out of a market problem. If demand is soft, if the value proposition is unclear, if the sales motion needs rebuilding — tightening internal processes addresses none of it. The business becomes very efficient at standing still.
How Does a CEO Redirect Energy Toward What the Business Actually Needs?
The shift begins when a leader asks a specific question: Where am I spending energy because it feels productive, versus where the business actually needs me?
Not all CEO hours are equal. Some create future possibility. Others maintain current reality. Both categories can feel like real work. The difference only becomes visible when you look at what the business needs to change and ask how much of your attention is going there.
This means the CEO has to get deliberately uncomfortable. Sales calls with reluctant prospects. Conversations with customers who left. Time in rooms where the business doesn't already know how to succeed. These activities don't give the same immediate feedback as a well-run operational review. They're messy, sometimes deflating, harder to schedule and harder to justify in a packed week. They're also where a leader learns what the business actually needs to grow.
The reallocation isn't total. Operations matter. The acquired business has systems and people that need attention, and walking away from that isn't the answer. The question is proportion: how much of the CEO's scarce time is going toward what the business can already do well, versus what it hasn't figured out yet?
Clarity about where you're truly needed, not just where you're most comfortable, is what allows a leader to redirect the resource that matters most: their own attention.
3Peak Wisdom
Growth requires different leadership energy than operations. When a business faces market headwinds, operational excellence alone won't reverse direction. The CEO must become restless about customer access, market understanding, revenue generation, even when those functions feel less natural.
Clarity about where you're truly needed, not just where you're most comfortable, allows you to reallocate your most valuable resource: your attention.
What would shift if you spent next week's calendar on the function that would most transform your business, not the one you're best at managing?
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you know if your business has an operations problem or a market problem?
Look at where the stagnation lives. If costs are rising and revenue is flat, you might have both. But if revenue is the constraint (if the business is running efficiently and still not growing) it's likely a market problem. Ask: if the business ran at 80% operational efficiency instead of 95%, would revenue change? If the honest answer is no, the constraint isn't operations.
What does getting closer to the market actually look like week to week?
It means carving out time for activities that don't produce immediate results: customer conversations, sales ride-alongs, calls with people who chose a competitor, time with the sales team that isn't a reporting review. These aren't comfortable activities for leaders whose backgrounds are in operations or finance. That discomfort is usually a good signal that the time is being spent in the right direction.
Isn't delegating sales and marketing to specialists the right answer?
Delegation matters, but execution and understanding are different things. A CEO who doesn't deeply understand what's working in their market, why customers choose them, or where the sales motion breaks down is flying blind on the decisions that matter most. Delegation works when the leader has enough market knowledge to set direction and recognize when it's off.
How do you justify spending time on market-facing work when operations demand attention?
By being honest about what the business actually needs from the CEO. A strong COO or leadership team can run operations. Fewer people can develop and hold the market strategy, build customer relationships at the right level, and make the judgment calls about where the business needs to go. The CEO's time is finite. The question is whether it's being used for what only the CEO can do.
How do you build comfort in areas where you don't have deep expertise?
Slowly and deliberately. The goal isn't to become an expert in sales or marketing, it's to develop enough understanding to lead those functions effectively. That means time with customers, time with the team doing the work, and a genuine willingness to be the least informed person in the room for a while. Leaders who've built businesses from scratch often went through this discomfort out of necessity. Acquired business owners can choose it on purpose.
