There’s something most people don’t tell you when you start a business, or when you get promoted into a leadership role for the first time. Being good at the thing is not the same as being good at running it. And for a long time, nobody points that out. You figure it out the hard way, usually when the cracks are already showing.
Although we both work with people in different capacities, from where we’re each sitting, the picture looks very similar.
In episode 3, we talk about the patterns we keep seeing in small businesses, in teams, in leadership and in the people brave enough to ask for a second set of eyes. What’s getting in the way, what’s quietly costing people more than they realise and what shifts things.
Part One: The Business
The gap between your skill and your business
Kate works predominantly with women in service-based and creative industries. Interior designers, copywriters, HR consultants, event managers, lawyers. Women who are genuinely talented at what they do and deeply passionate about it. And across almost every conversation, the same gap keeps appearing.
There’s an 80/20 split happening in most of these businesses. Eighty per cent of the focus goes to the service offering, the actual work, the client delivery, the thing they love. Twenty per cent, if that, goes to running the business itself. The cash flow, the pricing, the systems, the offers, the structure behind everything. And that imbalance is where a lot of the stress lives.
“None of us start a business knowing how to run one. We have a love for a service or a product, something we’re good at, something we want to share. And then we discover there’s a whole other thing that needs running alongside it.” — Kate Addamo
What makes it harder is that for a lot of women, especially in the early stages, the wins come from the work itself. The compliments, the client feedback, the referrals. There’s a real sense of worth tied to the doing. So the parts of the business that feel harder, the finances, the systems, the saying no, tend to get pushed down the list.
The result is a business that works well for everyone else and wears the owner down. Proposals are being rewritten from scratch for every client. Payment structures that change depending on who’s asking. Services tweaked slightly differently each time. It looks flexible but it feels exhausting.
The fix isn’t a complicated one, but it does require some deep reflection, planning and putting boundaries and systems in place. It’s about getting clear on what you’re good at and where your skillset is vs. isn’t. Building repeatable offers around that, pricing to reflect the value of it and putting the right systems in place so the business can run without the owner having to hold every piece of it together personally.
Less, done better.
Part Two: The Leadership
The best salesperson doesn’t always make the best manager
Adrian has spent years working inside businesses of all sizes, with leaders and teams at every stage. And one of the most consistent challenges he sees is the gap between being excellent at a role and being equipped to lead others in it.
The best salesperson gets promoted. The best designer becomes the creative director. The most technically skilled person in the room gets handed the team. It makes sense on paper. But the skillset that got them there, the individual output and personal performance, doesn’t automatically transfer into knowing how to bring a team with them.
“Leadership would be easy if it wasn’t for people. And I say that with full awareness that people are also what makes it the most rewarding thing you’ll ever do.” — Adrian Addamo
What Adrian is seeing inside businesses right now is a particular kind of pressure, one that’s compounding. Teams are being asked to do more with less. Leaders are stretched thin. The economy is tighter and the targets haven’t moved. And in that environment, what tends to drop first is the human stuff. The recognition, the check-ins, the conversations that aren’t about performance metrics and sales.
Pressure without praise. That’s the phrase that keeps coming up. People being pushed hard with very little acknowledgement of what they’re actually doing well and the cost of that, over time, is significant. Not just morale, though that’s part of it. But the energy in a team, the culture, the way a business feels to be inside, all of it starts to flatten.
Culture is what people say when you’re not in the room.
There’s a version of culture that gets printed on a wall. Five values, a vision statement, something about integrity and excellence. And then there’s the actual culture, which is what your team says about the business when no one’s listening, how they feel walking in each morning, whether they’d recommend working there to someone they care about.
Those two things are often very different.
When you walk into a business, you can feel it before you see it. The energy in a room, the way people greet each other, whether there’s banter and lightness or a kind of flatness that sits over everything. And clients feel it too. If the energy inside a business is off, it doesn’t stay inside. It finds its way into every interaction, every sales conversation and every service touchpoint.
“If you need to put your five values on a board, you’ve probably got bigger problems. Culture is what your team says about the business when you’re not in the room.” — Adrian Addamo
The good news is that energy is something you can cultivate. It’s not a personality trait you either have or you don’t. It’s a practice. And it starts with leaders who understand that their own energy, how they show up and what they bring into the room, is one of the most influential forces in the business.
Pressure Without Purpose
Another big thing is the difference between motivation and inspiration and why that distinction matters so much right now.
A lot of leaders are exhausting themselves trying to keep their teams motivated. And motivation, by its nature, dissipates. It needs constant feeding. Inspiration is different. Inspiration comes from within. It comes from people knowing what they’re working towards and why it actually matters to them. Not just the number, but what’s behind the number.
When someone is running on pressure alone, without a clear sense of why they’re doing it, that pressure just accumulates. It sits on their chest. But when the why is clear, when the goal has something personal and real behind it, the same amount of pressure can feel entirely different. It has somewhere to go.
As a leader, knowing what each person in your team is actually working towards is not a soft extra. It’s one of the most practical and powerful tools you have.
Where the Two Meet
What Kate sees in business owners and what Adrian sees in leaders aren’t really two different problems. They’re the same one. Someone who’s excellent at the work, or excellent in the role, finds themselves responsible for something bigger than the thing they were good at. And the version of themselves that got them here isn’t quite enough to carry them forward.
That’s not a failure. It’s just growth asking something of you.
The business owner who learns to run the business as well as she serves her clients. The manager who learns to lead people as well as she performs herself. Both are doing the same work underneath. Unlearning the idea that being good at the thing is the same as building something that lasts.
Whether you’re growing a business or growing a team, the gap is rarely about skill. It’s about being willing to look honestly at what’s working, what isn’t and what needs to change and being willing to do that before the pressure forces you to. That’s the work. And it’s always worth doing.
Both of us have had moments of resistance to being seen. The fear of what someone might find. The discomfort of having a gap pointed out that you half-knew was there. It’s a very human response and it keeps a lot of people from getting the support that would genuinely change things for them.
Kate sees it with women who have been following her work for years before reaching out. Watching, absorbing, not quite ready. And Adrian sees it with leaders who won’t invite feedback from their teams because they’re not sure they can hold what comes back.
The irony is that the blind spots you’re most afraid of are usually the ones costing you the most and they rarely feel as confronting once they’re out in the open as they did when they were quietly living in the background.
Getting a fresh set of eyes on a business, on a team, on how you’re leading, isn’t an admission that something’s wrong. It’s what people who are genuinely committed to growing tend to do.
Listen to Episode 03, What It Actually Takes To Grow In Business And Leadership, on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Until next time,
