Paul and David both started logistics companies around the same time.
Both built them to roughly $8 million in revenue with teams of about 30 people.
For the first seven or eight years you couldn’t tell them apart.
Then Paul did something that David thought was insane.
He stepped back.
Not out of the business but out of the middle of it.
He admitted that he was the bottleneck and spent two years building a management layer, documenting how the company actually ran, and forcing himself to stop making decisions his team was perfectly capable of making without him.
It nearly killed him.
Not the work … but watching other people do things differently than he would have and biting his tongue.
Every instinct told him they’d screw it up and at first some of them did.
But they learned and adjusted and the business started growing faster because nobody was waiting for Paul’s permission to move anymore.
At year twelve a regional competitor made Paul an offer at 6.2x EBITDA.
Paul’s wife cried when she heard the number.
They relocated to the Algarve where they now spend their mornings walking the coast arguing about where to have lunch.
David meanwhile is still running his company.
Still at his desk by 7am and still the only person who can approve a shipment, calm a key client, or deal with a warehouse crisis at midnight.
He’s been telling his wife for six years that next year things will be different.
She has been tuning him out for the last four.
They started at the same starting point and grew their companies on parallel paths.
Paul decided to see his business differently and did something about it. David is still the Pharisee, certain nobody can see as clearly as he can, blind to what it’s costing him every single day.
Which one are you?
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George Sotiropoulos contrasts two logistics company owners who started identically — Paul who recognised he was the bottleneck, built an independent operation, and sold at 6.2x EBITDA to retire to Portugal, and David who remains trapped in daily operations unable to step away. The concluding post in a series on the cost of refusing to change how you see your business.