Welcome to a free edition of Start Up To Grown Up: Your source for ideas, insights and tactics to take back control of your business and scale it sustainably and profitably by Heather Townsend, award-winning author of The Accountants’ Millionaires’ Club and Founder of The Accountants’ Growth Club
The end of January is nearly on us, and if you’re like many of my clients, you’re sitting there going, “Where’s January gone?” But worse still, you know those rosy and optimistic intentions that you had that:
We’re going to smash it in 2026, it’s going to be our best year!
They’ve gone too. It feels like New Year, same old problems.
Despite the forecast you’ve set, I suspect you may be looking at what’s actually coming in and realising that nothing’s changed; that big upswing that you were going to have in activity and leads?
It’s probably not happening. Even worse, you’ve been back to being the busiest person in your firm, just to make sure that you’ve got enough cash in the business to pay the wages in the next couple of months.
So what happened? After all in late December, early January, you were really positive it was going to be your year. What REALLY happened? And that’s the topic of this article. Why despite our best intentions, stuff doesn’t change, and the first step you need to do to change.
The pattern: what actually happened?
Many of us start January with clear intentions that this is going to be the year that we:
Delegate more
Actually have the time to work on the business
Eliminate the bottlenecks
Reduce our working hours so we are at a 4-day working week
Tackle our business problems that we know we need to address… but never have the time to do?
But then the first client crisis hits, or maybe the dreaded flu has decimated your firm. That actually happened to us in January 2019. It’s one of the reasons I am very pro ALL my team getting a flu vaccination (or for my US readers a “shot) each year. Maybe a client changed the goalposts on you (already one of our smaller clients has paused a chunk of work) and a deadline suddenly became urgent. Of course you told yourself,
“I’ll step in just this once,” but just this once becomes just this twice…
Once again the bad habit carries on, and before you know it, you’re back in the weeds, responding to every email, feeling like you need to be in every meeting, doing the long, long hours, the very thing that you promised yourself would be different in 2026.
I’m just going to say this now: this isn’t a failure of willpower or discipline. It’s really easy to go,
“There’s something wrong with me. I’m lazy or I’m disorganised or just can’t do it,”
Whereas in real terms you’re doing really well. But… (and there is always a but isn’t there?)
But what you’re doing really well at is your old job description.
What got you there is not going to get you to the next step.
If you’re going to move your business from growing to scaling, your job has now changed. Your role and responsibilities are now different. But nobody tells us that the game has changed.
The brain science of why this happens
Here’s what’s actually happening in your brain when you revert to old patterns:
The certainty trap
When you think about working on the business, it can be seen as threatening. For example, there are often uncertain outcomes and delayed rewards. You know what you’re doing when you’re winning work and servicing work. When you’re having to move your role, it feels uncomfortable, and your brain will go, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ After all, doing that client work gives you that immediate dopamine hit, for example: task completed, client happy, the invoice sent over, all the things that made you really successful in the early days.
Under pressure, your brain always chooses certainty over uncertainty. It will always go back to its comfort zone. Working on the business at a brain-based level can feel risky. Whereas winning work, servicing work is your comfort zone and feels productive and safe.
Decision fatigue takes over
Being exhausted and overwhelmed was probably one of the very reasons that you said 2026 is going to be different. You carry on with working this hard and you know your body will keep the score. And not in a good way. Then add in the problems of your brain likely to be cognitively overloaded.
When your brain is cognitively overloaded, it decides to conserve energy by defaulting to familiar patterns. It just picks up on your existing behaviours and habits, even if they’re not going to serve you going forward. At the end of the day,
“I’ll just do it myself” often requires less mental effort than delegating it to a team member, particularly if it’s a team member that you haven’t worked with a lot.
Maybe you’ve got some doubts about their competency. This suddenly means you need more mental effort, and you don’t have that bandwidth for that mental effort.
Of course, you know you need to delegate, but every delegation conversation needs more stuff from you; after all you need to think about delegating. It’s just one more decision you don’t have a capacity for.
The survival response
Going from growing to scaling is the toughest bit of growing a firm. You’ve got to go from being the most chargeable person to the least chargeable person. But the problem is you now need to pay for your team members. As a result you can see the profit margin of your firm tumbling. I’ve been there. It’s one of the reasons that I decided when enough was enough for my business. I didn’t like it when my month-by-month payroll was over 30 grand a month. It just felt like too much pressure for me.
But here’s the dilemma for your brain: you know you need to make payroll, so there’s that real pull to bill stuff yourself and work the long hours… and bring the cash in. Whereas, you need to get your team to do it. Maybe you know that you are currently operating in a ‘light month”. After all, December is often more like a 2-week month and this January due to where the festive holidays fell is more like a 3-week month. But your payroll is still the same amount in Dec and Jan. In these moments the amygdala in your brain treats these issues with revenue like a survival threat. For your brain, it’s as if the sabre-toothed tiger was hiding around the corner. This will trigger your brain and your body to go into that fight, flight, freeze response.
What does that look like in practice? Very often, if you’re anything like me, this looks like working hard at what you know. It might be going back to tried and tested approaches and not experimenting with new stuff. For example, when I realised our marketing was broken and I wasn’t getting the right number of sign ups from our website, I started a 6-month project to optimise the conversion of existing content on our website. I hadn’t realised the game had fundamentally changed. I wrote about this here:
When you’re tired or overwhelmed, your brain will pull you back to how you used to do stuff. You don’t have the willpower or discipline in order to do what you really need to be doing.
Your identity filter
Since you started your firm, your brain has been trained for years that being a good firm owner or a successful firm owner equals being busy with client work. Your brain filters information through this lens, so it sees billable work or winning new work as the important stuff.
Here’s what this looks like in practice: a client emails with a question. Your team could answer it, but your brain screams ‘billable interaction!’ and you just can’t help yourself get involved. Meanwhile, the conversation with your team about streamlining onboarding new clients doesn’t happen, even though it is on the Growth Plan for this quarter. Very often you can’t even see what you should be doing because your brain is filtering it out. After all, your brain is going, ‘What is important is win work, service work.’
The planning fallacy
The planning fallacy is where you consistently underestimate how long client work actually takes. For example, we took on a really big new client in the summer of 2025. As a team we now know, with the benefit of hindsight, that we underestimated the programme design time, by probably a factor of two.
But it’s not just how long client work takes often you overestimate how much time you have available. As a result, this working on the business stuff is always getting bumped to next week. After all, you’ve got loads of time for that. You’ll do it when we’re quiet. Except that, as you found out, as you get towards the end of January, that next week has the same problem.
What will make the difference for you?
The great news is you don’t need to wait until January the first to start again. Pick a day to restart. Is it the next Monday? Is it the first of the month? As the owner of your firm, you are the boss. It’s time to take back control of the year.
The first thing is this is not about a 12-step transformation. This is not about rebuilding your plan; to your brain that could feel totally overwhelming. Which means it wouldn’t start. Ultimately, you need one thing that will break the pattern.
That thing?
Protect three hours each week to work on your business.
These are non-negotiable hours. They’re not when you have the time. They’re actual hours that you put in your diary.
I find that this has always worked very well on a Friday because a lot of clients don’t want to talk to me. You need to treat these hours like you’re in your most important client meeting. Because after all
your business is your most important client.
What should you be doing in those three hours?
Business development conversations.
Planning how to win the larger clients.
Working out which of your processes need streamlining.
Training someone to take over a task you currently do.
Reviewing your pricing or service offering.
Mapping the next 90 days’ worth of growth priorities and tasks.
Ultimately, anything that makes you less chargeable in the future and helps your firm hits its medium and long term goals.
So what shouldn’t you be doing in those three hours?
Urgent client work. That’s what your team is there for.
Email. Fixing other people’s problems.
Jumping into a meeting with a client.
The gap between knowing what to do and actually doing it? That’s where accountability comes in.
Find someone who will ask you what you’re doing with those three hours. Who are you going to report back to on what you actually did? Who’s going to hold your hand when you realise that you’ve been robbed of those three hours and help you work out why they didn’t happen?
In summary
There’s no guarantee that February is going to be perfect. After all, you’ll slip back sometimes. One of the big things that has helped me, particularly with my desire to meditate every morning, is to realise that as long as I do it five days out of seven, that’s fine.
There will still be genuine emergencies. Old patterns don’t disappear overnight, and that’s okay. In fact, slipping back into an old behaviour, doing it once is fine; doing it twice is then a problem.
What changes as you start to make this three hour time block non-negotiable? You start to catch yourself faster each time you slip. You find your diary has been well and truly protected by everybody around you, after all they know why you need those three hours.
Your brain starts to rely on that time to do the thinking, to work on the business. Then before you know it, you’ll find that your business is going in the direction you intended when you were full of optimism in the run up to New Year.
Questions about implementing this? Email me at heather@heathertownsend.co.uk and let me know what you’re struggling with. I read every email.
