Biz Growth Matters - The Fultz Group

05/30/2026

Follow up to a post from earlier this month…
“Post Leasing this is Steve” enjoyed Acadia National Park without his phone. Practicing being Obsolete by Design!
Take the trip.
Make the memories.
Soak it all in. Fully.

05/29/2026

Melissa asks better questions than I do. She always has.

Last September on the porch, she asked me to name the last three friends I'd called for any reason that wasn't related to a transaction.

I sat with it. I named one. Then a second. I had to think hard to come up with the second. I never named a third.

A few minutes later she said something close to: "If something happened to you tomorrow, I'd need to know who you would want me to call to tell."

That's the friend question. That's the one I haven't been able to put down for nine months.

I used to host card games once a month.
I used to coach basketball.
I used to know who in the neighborhood had a new baby and who'd just lost a parent.

Twenty-plus years of running companies later, I don't.

That's not a character flaw. That's what the math looks like when one person becomes the answer to every business question for several decades. You don't notice it happening because each individual choice is reasonable.

The vendor meeting tonight matters.
The Friday morning quote matters.
The Saturday emergency matters.

Each one alone looks like the right thing to skip the dinner for. And then you look up after twenty years and realize you can't name three people you'd call on a Tuesday for no reason.

This morning's Substack is the longer version. The reason the Obsolete By Design™ work matters isn't financial. It's so we have lives that look like we wanted them to look when we started out in our twenties.

→ https://theownershift.substack.com/p/the-question-melissa-asked-me-last?r=4xsekh

— Steve & Melissa

05/27/2026

"There has to be a better way."

If you've ever sat in your office at 7pm on a Thursday night, stared at your inbox, and thought, "There has to be a better way to do this..."

You're probably right.

Not "definitely." Not "guaranteed." But probably.

Here's the thing about that voice in your head. The one that whispers there has to be a smarter, calmer, more sustainable version of this. Most owners ignore it. They label it as weakness, or fatigue, or a bad week, and they push through.

But that voice isn't your enemy. That voice is the smartest part of you. It's the part that's been watching the whole machine for years and has finally seen enough to know something's off.

The owners who eventually break free didn't suddenly get smarter. They just stopped ignoring that voice.

Sometimes "a better way" means restructuring how you spend your weeks. Sometimes it means hiring someone you've been putting off. Sometimes it means a longer arc, a transition plan, a different ownership model.

The point isn't the answer. The point is taking the question seriously.

P.S. Writing more of this kind of thing over on Substack. Quieter stuff, longer form. Link in my profile if it's you want to follow there.

05/26/2026

There's a level on the Ownerless Business Ladder™ that's harder to spot than any other. It looks exactly like “working.”

Bills get paid.
Trucks roll.
Customers stay.
Revenue grows.

Most of the metrics the world cares about look fine. From the outside, your friends say you're successful. Your accountant says you're profitable. Your spouse, if she's being polite, says you're working too hard but it's paying off.

What no one says, because the data isn't on the P&L, is that if you took two weeks off, the company would lose money.
Not just stall.
Actually bleed.

We call it Level 1 Owner-Dependent. The polite name.

The honest name is: the business runs because you do.

The trap is that the harder you work at Level 1, the deeper you embed yourself as the answer to every question.
You become more necessary.
Harder to replace.
More trapped.

Working harder at Level 1 is the trap. The way out is not more effort. It is, and this is the line we had the hardest time accepting when we first heard it, less of you doing the work.

Not less of you in the business.
Less of you doing the work.

The simplest move you can make today, if you suspect you're at Level 1: pick one thing this week you're going to NOT decide. Hand it off entirely. Set the expectation with the team, educate them where necessary, and then tell them, “From now on, this decision is yours.” Then let them run with it. But you also can’t go back and undermine their decision. It’s theirs now.

The team gets faster only when they're allowed to be wrong without you saving them.
This morning's Substack is the long version, including what the first inch up the ladder actually feels like.

→ https://buff.ly/B0nZQSf
— Steve & Melissa

Level 1 of the Ownerless Business Ladder. The level that looks like working.

05/25/2026

Haven't taken a real vacation in years?

Quick poll. When's the last time you took a real vacation? And by real I mean phone in airplane mode, laptop in a drawer, not checking email "just once before bed."

If you laughed out loud at that question, you're the audience for this post.

I've sat with owners who haven't had a true week off in years. Some of them five years. Some of them ten. One guy told me his last real vacation was before his oldest started kindergarten. That kid's in high school now.

Here's what I want to say without it sounding preachy. That's not a badge of honor. That's a warning light.

It doesn't mean you don't love what you built. Most of these owners adore their business. The problem isn't passion. The problem is design. You built something that needs you in every chair, on every call, signing every check. So you can't leave. Even when you desperately want to.

A business that won't let you take a vacation is also a business that won't let you sell, retire, or step back. Those are the same problem.

Fix the vacation problem and you've already started fixing the bigger one.

05/22/2026

There's a 90-second test we want every owner reading this to run on themselves this weekend.

Print last week's calendar. Phone, paper, whatever has it. Get out a yellow highlighter.

Go block by block. For each one, mark one of two things: did this work require ME specifically, yes or no.

That's the whole test. No scoring sophistication. No nuance. The truth of how last week actually went.

Most owners who do this for the first time come back somewhere between 75% and 95% yes. We came back at 78% the first time we ran it on ourselves in 2019. One of our senior techs, last week, was 71%, and he was proud of that number until he saw what it meant.

71% of the work that filled his week could not have happened without him. That isn't a strength. That's a single point of failure with a paycheck attached.

Then do one more pass. For each yes, ask: is this YES because I'm the only one who knows how, or because I'm the only one who has time, or because I haven't documented it yet?

The "only one who knows how" yeses, keep them. Protect them.

The "only one who has time" yeses, that's where your next hire lives.

The "haven't documented it yet" yeses, each one is a 30-minute conversation away from being someone else's job.

Three categories.
One yellow highlighter.
90 seconds.

This morning's Substack is the long version, including the line our senior tech said when he saw his number, and what to do with yours.

→ https://buff.ly/G1Jc0ae

— Steve & Melissa

Print last week. One yellow highlighter. Add up the truth.

05/20/2026

"I just want breathing room."

A client said something to me last week that I haven't been able to shake.

We were forty minutes into the conversation. He'd already walked me through the numbers, the team, the kid who's almost ready to step up but maybe not quite, the bank covenants, the building lease, all of it.

Then I asked him the dumb question. "So what do you actually want?"

He stopped. Sat back. And said, "I don't want to sell. I just want a little breathing room."

I almost laughed at how clean that was. Forty minutes of spreadsheet talk and the actual answer was a sentence and a half.

Here's what I've noticed though. That answer is way more common than people think. Most owners aren't trying to sprint to a finish line. They're trying to figure out how to breathe again inside something they built.

Selling is one path. Restructuring is another. So is delegating, repositioning, hiring up, or just deciding what "enough" means.

But none of that gets to happen if "I want breathing room" stays a private thought.

Say it out loud. That's usually where the real conversation starts.

05/19/2026

There's a question we started asking ourselves a couple of years ago.

It's a quiet question.
It only takes 30 seconds.
And the first time we sat with it honestly, we didn't sleep well that night.

The question: can our business operate without us for a day, a week, 30 days, or 90 days?

The first time we ran it on Knox Trailers and Post-Onsite, the honest answer was "a long weekend, maybe." Not what we wanted to write down.

The dispatch decisions still routed through one phone. The vendor calls still came to me. The senior tech had 17 years of instincts that lived nowhere on paper.

Two years later — running the same test the same way — the honest answer is "30 days, comfortably."

That gap is the work.

It wasn't a single move. It was a hundred small ones.

Documenting decisions instead of making them in our heads. Letting somebody else field the dispatch call and not fixing it after. Writing down the vendor relationships so they didn't end with my phone.

This morning's Substack is the long version of the test, the four levels of honest answers, and the three things I'd write down this week if you sit with the test and the answer comes back smaller than you wanted.

If you've been carrying the whole thing in your head for 25 or 30 years, the test will probably feel heavy when you sit with it. That's not a failure. That's what 30 years of pouring yourself into a thing feels like from the inside.

— Steve & Melissa

Can Your Business Survive A Week Without You?

05/18/2026

Most owners don't want to sell

I asked a guy last month what he'd do if he sold his business tomorrow.

He stared at me for about four seconds, then said, "Probably mow the lawn."

That was it. That was the whole answer. No yacht. No villa. No "finally write that novel."

Just... mow the lawn.

And honestly? I get it. Because here's the thing nobody tells you about owners. Most of us don't want to sell the business. We just don't want to carry the whole damn thing on our back forever.

There's a difference between wanting out and wanting a break.

One says "I'm done." The other says "I built something good. I just want to enjoy it without it owning me."

The owners I respect most aren't the ones racing for an exit. They're the ones who finally admitted out loud that what they really want is the option. The freedom to stay. The freedom to leave. The freedom to mow the damn lawn on a Tuesday if that's what they feel like doing.

That's not selling.

That's living.

05/15/2026

This one's about a word.

Twenty years ago when I told someone I was a "coach," it meant something. People nodded. They knew what they were getting.

These days, "coach" is a marketing category. A 32-year-old with a course and a Slack channel can call himself a coach. So can someone running a $30K mastermind whose only deliverable is a workbook you'll never reopen. So can someone selling an "exit in 90 days" to a guy who's been building his company for thirty years.

I've sat in those rooms. I've paid for those programs. Six figures, the hard way, finding out the word didn't mean what I thought it meant anymore.

So Melissa and I stopped using it.

We're Business Growth Strategists. More importantly — we're Operators. Three brick-and-mortar companies. About 50 employees. Payroll every Friday. Trucks that break down. Vendors who call. A marriage that has to survive the thing we teach other people to build.

That's not a credential. It's a standard.

This morning's Substack is the long version — the pattern, and the five-point standard I'd tell you to look for in anyone you'd ever pay for advice in this space. Plain English. No countdown timers. No three-step cures.

If you've been burned by this industry — and a lot of you have — the post is worth five minutes of your morning coffee.

→ https://theownershift.substack.com/p/why-we-stopped-calling-ourselves?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=post02

— Steve & Melissa