There’s a period in PTL’s history I don’t talk about much.
Not because it was catastrophic – it wasn’t. We didn’t fold. We didn’t lose everything. But it was a period where, if I’m honest, I was running on the illusion of progress rather than the thing itself.
Yes, we were growing. Yes, orders were coming in. The phone was busy. I was busy.
And I took my eye off the things that actually mattered.
I started treating activity as an indicator of health.
Full diary? Good sign. Lots of quotes going out? Good sign. Team busy? Good sign.
None of those things are bad. But none of them tell you whether the business is actually working.
Activity (what I was tracking)
- Full diary. Always on the phone.
- Quotes going out constantly
- Team looking busy
- New conversations every week
- Felt like momentum
Progress (what I wasn’t)
- Quality of delivery, not volume
- Right clients growing, not just any clients
- Team having what they needed
- Decisions being good, not just fast
- Building something durable
What I wasn’t tracking was the quality of what we were delivering. Whether the right clients were growing. Whether the team had what they needed. Whether the decisions I was making quickly were actually good decisions or just fast ones.
The chickens came home to roost in about month four. Three things went wrong in the same quarter. Not dramatically – but enough to make me stop and look properly at what was happening.
or am I just busy?”
The version of PTL I’m running now is structurally different to the one I was running then.
We’re clearer about what we’re trying to do and why. We’ve better lines of accountability – internal ones, not just ones we show clients. We make fewer decisions quickly and more decisions well.
I don’t confuse a full week with a productive one.
Most of the time.
Busy is easy to generate. It doesn’t take much to fill a diary or create activity. Progress is harder to manufacture – and you know the difference, even if it’s uncomfortable to look at directly.
If you’re in a phase where things feel busy but something feels off – I’d trust that feeling.
The best thing I did in that difficult quarter wasn’t fix the immediate problems. It was stop and ask the right question.
Everything else followed from that. Too busy to think about this right now? You know what you need to do.
Being busy is not the same as building something. The difference is worth stopping to look at – before the quarter makes it unavoidable.
Building something
or just busy?
PTL – twenty years of learning to ask the right question at the right moment.
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