The 3 Questions I Ask Every Business Owner in Our First Sit-Down
Dear Fellow Business Owner,
Before I ever open a spreadsheet, before I look at a single number, I ask three questions. In over a decade of sitting across from business owners, these are the three that tell me more than a full financial statement ever could.
You don't need to be sitting across from me to use them. Pull up a notebook, or just sit with these for ten minutes. Answer them honestly, not the way you'd answer if someone else were listening.
1. If your business stayed exactly like this for the next twelve months, would you be relieved or would you panic?
This question isn't about growth. It's about whether the current version of your business is actually sustainable, or whether you've just been outrunning a problem you haven't had time to name. A lot of owners answer this one faster than they expect to, and the speed of the answer usually tells the truth even when the words hesitate.
2. What are you doing every week that someone else could be doing instead?
Not what you enjoy doing. What are you doing purely because no one else is positioned to do it yet? This question surfaces where the business is quietly depending on you as a person instead of depending on you as an owner. Every hour you spend on something replaceable is an hour you're not spending on the handful of decisions only you can make.
3. When was the last time you looked at your numbers and actually understood what they were telling you, not just whether they felt okay?
There's a difference between glancing at a bank balance and understanding your margins, your fixed costs, and what's really driving your profit or eating it. Most owners can tell you if it's been a good month or a bad one. Fewer can tell you why, in specific, actionable terms.
What to do with your answers
You don't need to fix anything today. You need to know where you actually stand, because you can't build a plan around a problem you haven't named out loud yet.
If question one made you uneasy, that's information, not failure. If question two had an obvious answer, that's your first delegation conversation. If question three stumped you, that's not a knowledge gap. It just means nobody has sat down and walked through it with you yet.
I ask these questions first because they cut through the version of the business we present to the world and get to the version we're actually living inside of. That's the only version worth building a strategy around.
Sit with your answers this week. Write them down somewhere you'll actually look at again. And if you get through all three and realize you need someone to help you work through what they revealed, that's exactly what I built the Read the Chapter diagnostic around. If you're ready to stop guessing and actually see what your numbers are telling you, let's talk.
With love and straight talk,
Celeste "CJ" Potter