As a business owner the buck stops with you.
It's often your name on the door, or the paperwork, and you put yourself into a position where all the major decisions come through you. The same is true with the earliest clients — they were signed by you or came from your network.
Most businesses start that way and many stay that way. The bad news is, this way of working actually counts against you.
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My businesses have often been built on relationships and referrals, which meant that every client wanted to deal with me directly, or I built myself into the project team delivering the output. In both those scenarios the client expectation was that they were getting me, my experience and my skills.
The upside of this was that I was able to secure projects with high profile brands. My first agency business when I was 24 had clients like Intel and Microsoft. I've since completed projects for government departments and ministries.
The downside is that I never set the business up to operate without me.
Over the years I've had 3 people email asking about the possibility of buying my main agency. I'd been able to establish a small brand and credibility in the space based on the projects I'd done and the clients I'd worked with.
But all the buyers walked away when they realised two things: there was no recurring revenue, and that all the projects were based on my relationships.
Even if I was able to turn the clients into recurring revenue, the fact that it was all built on the relationship with me — or my direct involvement — meant that any buyer would need to keep me on for a period until a team could be built around me. And even then, there would be no guarantee that clients would want to continue if I walked out of the door.
A buyer sees this as risk from two angles: revenue and operations.
This experience is one of the reasons I started to think about building systems in my business and having layers. By layers I mean other people in the business who can take responsibility for client relationships — a sales manager, an operations manager. As a business grows there are important decisions to make, and one of those is about where the relationship sits.
Key client relationships, especially for a service business, need to be with a business and a named point of contact — even if that point of contact changes.
Changing the point of contact is something you may have experienced if you've ever bought a service or SaaS platform, or had a business banking account, and been introduced to your Account Manager or Customer Success Manager. I've been in these roles and seen how clients are moved between people in the team based on new hires or when people leave the business. It can be a little disruptive for clients, but it means the owner and exec team never own the client relationship — the business function owns it.
If you're growing a business with some thought that you might like to sell it, it's important to consider how you manage these client relationships.
There are 3 main ways to address this:
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Document everything about a client relationship and make the client aware of other people in the business. This is great if you already have a team that you can eventually hand the relationship to. Documenting the relationship means anyone in the team can pick it up and understand the historic context.
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Give the perception of more people in the business. This is where systems come in. You can create personas for people in the team — including AI agents that answer emails with their own email accounts — even if you are directly managing some of those personas and conversations while the business is small. This is fine until the business gets to a size where you can hire people to manage the relationships.
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Create a structure whereby the relationship is never built with the owner. This is the structure for many established businesses. It provides a level of separation between the business owner and the client. The owner might have been involved in the sales process, but if they then hand the relationship to the project manager, account manager, or operations manager, the separation begins immediately.
You'll notice that AI, systems, and technology appear in each of the above options. They can all be used to support the process of removing you from the client relationships — and it all starts with the decision of which relationships you want to be part of.
A buyer in the US finally decided on which accountancy firm to buy, from all the ones they'd considered, for one simple reason. The current owner was only involved in 2 of the 60 client relationships. That meant the buyer was getting a business that wasn't dependent on the owner being in those relationships.
That's the business you want to build.
If you're already using AI inside your business, I'd like to invite you to join the industry research I'm doing for my book The Optional Founder. The research is looking at how businesses are currently using AI, for which business functions, and the challenges and successes they've experienced. It's 12 questions, takes roughly 10 minutes, and I'll be sending the final report to everyone who completes the survey.