I handed him a 30-page plan. He handed it back with six words.
“Make hay while the sun shines.”
Ge said it to me over and over again.
I’d just taken over running the UK side of an agency while the CEO focused on international expansion. He asked me for a plan, and I leaned hard on my corporate experience - put together a deck, lots of detail, everything named and titled, spent ages PowerPointing it.
He looked at it and said: “Make hay while the sun shines.” That’s when I realised how different this world was.
In corporate, you plan annually. Set objectives, build the roadmap, follow the process. And when things change, you learn to politically reframe what you actually did to fit what you said you’d do.
In a small agency, you can’t work like that. The sun comes out, you make hay. Something changes, you react. The 90-day plan is really a 45-day plan with 50% flex built in - because reacting is the job.
That’s why founders sometimes resist ops. It looks like the corporate world - rigid, slow, box-ticking. It feels like losing the thing that made them successful: the ability to stay fluid.
But ops for a small business isn’t corporate ops shrunk down. It’s a completely different thing.
It’s not about locking everything into annual objectives. It’s about building just enough structure that you can keep freestyling without things falling apart downstream.
The hay still gets made. You just don’t lose half of it on the way to the barn.
Have you ever been given advice that was technically right but completely wrong for how your business actually works?