Andrew De Groot: How to Futureproof Your Business

Dream, team and regime: three practical lessons for building a business that can grow

Business has a habit of taking over.

What begins with an idea, a sense of purpose and genuine excitement about what could be possible can gradually turn into a constant stream of customers, emails, decisions and problems that need sorting. You can find yourself working harder than ever while quietly wondering whether you are still building the business you originally set out to create.

That was the challenge Andrew De Groot brought to Rediscover Business & Leadership 2025. As Managing Director of ActionCOACH Exeter, Andrew works with business owners and leaders who want to grow without simply piling more pressure onto themselves. His earlier career included senior roles at NatWest and HSBC, with responsibility spanning 40 countries, so his session drew on a long view of what helps businesses move forward and what causes capable people to get stuck.

Rather than offering another collection of tactics, Andrew kept returning to the foundations. He explored the extraordinary pace of change in business and the danger of assuming that hard work alone will carry you through it. Owners can become so absorbed in keeping things moving that the business gradually starts running them instead of the other way round.

His answer came down to three memorable words: dream, team and regime. Get clear about where you are heading, surround yourself with the right people and protect enough time to work on the business rather than spending every available hour inside it.

Are you building your business or just surviving it?

One of Andrew’s most useful observations was that surviving in business and actually growing are not the same thing. A company can continue for years while its owner repeats much the same pattern. Customers are served and bills are paid, but another year passes and the bigger vision that inspired the business in the first place becomes harder to see. Add the speed of technological change and shifting customer expectations, and it becomes even easier to use all your energy reacting to whatever arrives next.

Andrew’s challenge was to see that environment differently. Change can feel threatening, but it can also create opportunities that would not have existed a few years ago. Futureproofing, in his view, does not begin with another marketing trick or by squeezing more hours out of the week. It begins with knowing where you are going and being prepared to think seriously about the relationship between the business and the life you actually want to build.

That raises bigger questions than turnover or growth. Where does God fit into the picture? Has the business become a vehicle towards a wider vision for your life, or has running it gradually become the whole vision? From there Andrew moved naturally into the people around us and then into something almost every busy leader wrestles with: time. His practical challenge was to create five hours each week for working on the business rather than continually working in it.

You can watch Andrew’s session below, or continue down the page for the edited transcript.

Watch Andrew De Groot at Rediscover Business & Leadership 2025

Andrew De Groot’s Rediscover Business & Leadership 2025 talk

Getting to know the room

Great to see you. This is going to be slightly different to the other sessions. It’s interactive. I don’t know you all that well, but I’m getting to know you a little bit and I want to know a little bit more about you, especially when it comes to business. How long have you been in business? And you’ve got a choice. I’m going to put up here a few time categories. So less than a year, up to three years, up to five years, up to ten years and then ten years plus. Let’s do a little bit of a set here.

Anyone in the business less than a year so far? Hands up. Thank you. One, two, three, four, five, six. Brilliant. Thank you. Anyone up to three years? One, two, three, four, five or six. We’ve got six there. Fantastic. And up to five years? Anyone? Five years? One, two, three, four. Four of the up to five years. Brilliant. And let’s have up to ten years. Come on. Those are my ten year people. One, two. Any raise on two? No, two it is. And then ten years plus. There they go. I knew this was going to be the case. Let’s count it. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. So that’s fantastic.

Now we understand the crowd. You understand a little bit about yourselves as well, which is great. Can we have hands up, by the way, for those people who are employed, not own a business, employed? Fantastic. Great to see you guys as well. And anyone else who’s neither employed or owning their own business at the moment? Brilliant.

Surviving in business

Okay, so if you’re in business, you know something for sure and that is that survival isn’t assured at all, is it? You have to navigate your way through making that happen. And I thought it’d be useful to share with you just how much of a survivor you are and the latest stats that are out there from the Office for National Statistics, which looks at business survival rates.

Now, what do you think the survival rate is for a business that has been going for one year? Anyone coming in with some numbers? 96? 92? Don’t tell me it says it behind the screen! Oh, fantastic. Look at that. Thank you to the back. Thank you to the back. Listen, she felt he needed a helping hand. That’s what she felt. Okay. Let’s have the next one then. Let’s wait for the roll on this one. Let’s see what’s the survival rate of someone up to three years. This is quite interesting, this one. What do you think three is? 20? 40? 30? Let’s roll it up. Let’s see. We’ve got 53%.

So, you know, it’s a pretty big drop off, right? Think about it. 92% did survive the first year, which is impressive. Then you get up to three, it’s a big drop off, right? A 39% drop at that point. You’re not feeling so smiley at this point, are you? So this emoji changes. So let’s work out what the survival rate is then to the magic of five years. Give me the percentage. You’ve got to see it coming down a bit here. Ten? You think that’s a big drop off. Wow. You’re not confident in business there. 30? Yeah. Let’s go for it. Roll it out. Let’s see what we get. 39%.

Okay, so you’ve got this big drop, a little bit drop off there, and suddenly, you know, you’re feeling a little bit, this business is a tough old game. And then we get to the ten year mark. Ten year mark. Give us the number everyone. What do we think? 10%? Any raise on 10? 20? Roll the numbers. And the answer is 15%.

Now why did I put a washing machine as a symbol there? That’s because I find that most people, when they get to ten years, they are rinse and repeat in the business year on year. It hasn’t really changed. It just keeps on going. So well done surviving. But if you’ve survived in business at this stage, you are a winner. So well done. A round of applause, right, I think, for all these people who push it out there. It really is not easy.

The world of business is crazy fast

Now, it’s especially not easy because the world of business at the moment is crazy fast. The speed of it, right? The speed it is moving. It’s moving in all sorts of ways fast. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the economic shocks of the market, lots of those. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the product life cycle changing. It’s whether the information of media 24/7, customer expectations. We are demanding people. Click. Why is it not here? Everyone is getting higher expectations.

And indeed, just in the workplace, right, new jobs are appearing, but also other jobs are disappearing. So the workplace is changing. It is a difficult place. But if you want to exemplify the pace of change of business in one single slide, I think this one. And this slide is fascinating.

It looks at the speed at which businesses get business adoption to scalability of some very well known brands we all know. So if you look at the first one there in the purple with Netflix, you see it took them about four years to get to a million users. That’s the second one down. So that’s ten to the power of six and ten to the power of eight is 100 million. So to get the first million, it took them about four years. It then took ten years to be able to get to 100 million users. And boy, they must have been happy. You know, 100 million users. You’re thinking that’s a great subscription income business.

But then look what follows right behind it. It took five years for Twitter to make it to 100 million users. But then look at that thing, Spotify and Facebook. How long did it take them? Four years to get 100 million users. This is incredible, ladies and gentlemen. Instagram must have thought they smashed it out of the park when they achieved it in two years. But ChatGPT, well, how long did that take them? Two months. Two months to get to 100 million users. That is the speed of adoption of technology we’re working to. That is a very different environment.

And of course that can create some anxiety in us as business owners. Even if you survive, you think, wow, can I keep up with this? Sometimes I can’t make a decision. Should I hire someone? Find someone? Let alone two months getting 100 million users. This is a difficult place to be.

Opportunity or threat?

Now there’s a great sort of fork in the road for you here because you can either see this pace of change as an opportunity or you can see it as a threat. You make a choice what you want to do. Now, there’s a great phrase by the wonderful Henry Ford. May not be a nice character, but he did come up with some great phrases. And this is what he came up with. He said this: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” That’s the choice.

So on this journey with me today, I want you to think a little bit about the fact the pace of change, the world is crazy fast, is an opportunity. Because if you think it is, you’re right. It is an opportunity. It can be a negative. But let’s take that.

So with me, let’s go on a little bit of a journey to see if we can’t futureproof your business, which I think we can. And while we’re there, why don’t we try and smash last year’s performance at the same time? Yeah? Would that be a good thing to do? Let’s learn how to do that.

And I would like you to be able to do that without working any more hours or getting more stress. I’d like you to do that without slashing your prices. I’d like you to be able to do that without sleepless nights as well. That’d be fantastic. And I’m going to do that by revealing three secrets that are going to be able to allow you to do that. And these three secrets anyone can do, right? You do not need to be a financial whiz. You don’t need to be a sales marketing guru either. You can make this work.

Three secrets

So what are these three amazing secrets, I hear you say? Well, the first one is the missing ingredient in every failed business that I’ve ever seen. I promise you, I see loads of businesses. Every business I’ve seen that’s failed, there’s one thing they will have in common. And by the way, it’s not just failed businesses. It’s stalled businesses or businesses that are going downhill. They all have the same missing ingredient that we’re going to cover off today.

The second thing is I’m going to talk to you about why giving it everything you’ve got still may result in you failing in your business. You can give it all and still fail. That’s interesting. We need to tackle that. And the third secret we’re going to look at there is, how are we going to tackle the number one growth killer for every business? There’s one growth killer for every business. How are we going to tackle it?

Now, if we could do all those three things, that would be fantastic to do. But a word of warning for you, right? You can’t unlearn this stuff. Once I’ve given you the secrets, you’re going to have a choice. You’re going to be able to go left and try and take them, go right and do something different, or you can stick with your own way, and that could just take you over the cliff, right? That’s not a great place to be at all. So you get a choice of what you want to do at the end of this in about 30 minutes’ time.

Where do these ideas come from?

So where do these secrets come from, right? Where are they? Well, I’ve had the luck to be able to study from the absolute best in the world. Absolutely brilliant. I’ve had basically training in business pretty much all my life.

I’ve worked in London. I’ve been to London Business School twice, been to Harvard Business School. I’m lucky enough to be a chartered accountant. Some of them don’t think I was lucky, but it’s quite helpful. I’m a certified business coach, a qualified executive coach. And, you know, I’ve been lucky to hold some incredible positions. I’ve been Chief Operating Officer, Head of Transformation. I’ve been Head of Global Operations, 3,000 people, 40 countries in the world. And I’m really lucky at the moment that, last month, I managed to get into the top 50 global coaches in the world.

So I’m not saying any of this to impress you, but just to impress upon you that what you’re about to listen to works. It works for my clients, works for me, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t for you. And that’s why I want you to listen today.

Secret one: Destination unknown

So what is that first secret? The missing ingredient in every single business I see that has failed is really simple. It’s this: destination unknown. Simple as that. I see it time and time and time again. Even for quite good businesses, the destination will be unknown.

And what does that create? It’s like walking through the desert in the sand. You spend your time taking step after step after step, yet what are you tackling? You’re tackling the next issue, your next fire drill. You’re walking through and it’s cash flow, it’s difficulties. And what happens to people who walk in the desert? Well, generally what happens? They generally go around in circles as well at the same time. Something we really need to talk about.

Business gives you unconstrained possibilities

So why are dreams not really understood, right? Really known? There’s actually a very reasonable reason for that because what percentage of the population has a job? It’s 89% as it stands today. And most of us have a job.

And what do jobs do? Jobs do some really good things, actually. The first thing a job does is it might give, well, in fact, by law it does give you a pension. Pretty nice, right? What else does a job do? Well, you can be ill for a start and you can still get paid. Incredible. Business owners, none of that happens to you. You know, if you have a job, you might even get some health benefits. Yeah? Guess what? You also get, wait for it, paid holidays. It’s incredible having a job.

Then you also get free time. You can go and do your job and you come back. The job’s there the next day, right? On the whole, that’s the way the world works. So jobs are great things. And the difficulty is that if you have a job, they provide choices. You have a dream. Okay. Now jobs are good to an extent. What do they do about a dream, though, right?

You don’t have to dream that much because the amount of money you earn, right, is limited. Okay? So your opportunities are bounded by the opportunity of a job. So a job is great, right? But it gives you a comfort zone to work within. The most amazing thing, though, about a business is what could happen with a business. You can dream bigger. Your life can be less bounded. You have no boundaries in a business. You can go where you want it to go. That’s why having a business is so exciting.

Now, the only downside to that is if you go out to business and, guess what, you don’t earn as much as you could if you had a job. And there’s plenty of people who do that. So many of them actually don’t make it out to the boundary of success that is possible by having a job. And for some of these people, they should own up to it and go back and get a job. It’s actually a great thing to do. Nothing wrong with that at all.

But for those of you who are able to dream bigger and have that vision, then it’s worth getting out there to think what you could achieve by having a business itself. And the business basically gives you unconstrained possibilities if it works. That’s why it’s so exciting.

The spiritual and the logical

But at the same time, we aren’t really trained into thinking about how to dream, to think what that is. Now, that dream obviously requires you to think hard. And when you think about it, what do you need to engage? You need to engage the spiritual and you need to engage the logical. You need to engage with both.

And I think it was really interesting listening to the sessions here, where, you know, you need to listen to the spiritual first. You need to hear God’s will for you, but you do need to equally engage with the logical.

There are plenty of businesses I’ve seen out there, two very personal ones, where people absolutely believed that this was from God. They went out there, they spoke to prophets, prophetesses. They had people pray over them and the business failed. And their reflection, and they’re good and godly men and women, was actually they had a lot of confirmation bias. They wanted it to be the case.

And I do think that’s something we need to talk about a little bit. So I believe in spirituality. I believe in grounding. The two have to come together.

Have you lost your original dream?

The other thing about dreaming that’s difficult is that you might have a dream on day one and that’s called a business plan. And then day two, it seems to go into the drawer. And day three, life becomes very difficult. And then the business end of this dream is, “God, just let me be able to pay the bills. If I could pay the bills, that’d be a fantastic thing.”

And then they get to pay the bills and that’s a great thing. But then what happens? They just pay the bills. They’ve lost sight of their original dream in the first place.

So my question to you is, do you have a clear vision both for your life and for your business? Both need to happen because plenty of business owners start to get a dream for that business, but then the business is ruling them. They’re not ruling the business. And remember, this business has to feed into your life. That is the life we’re trying to create out of making a business.

Where are you on the scale?

So on a scale of one to ten, a little bit of honesty here. Let’s have one here. I have no idea and I have no business. And to be fair, a number of you have come up to me today, “I just don’t know what I want to do,” and that’s fine. But that’s one.

Then come down to ten here. At ten, you have absolute clarity. It’s written down. You know what you want in your life. You know what you want out of your business. You’ve shared it with your friends. And in fact, if I asked a member of your staff, they’d be able to tell me what it is. That’s ten. Where are you on that scale?

Let’s have a little sort of test down here. There’s like 30 or 40 of you here. Who’s in the sort of one to three category? Okay. Thank you for the honesty. One, two, three, four. Yeah, okay. Who’s more in the likes of the three to five category? Okay, good, good, good, good.

Now let’s take me all the way to, has anyone reached a seven? Okay, not bad. That’s the majority coming up there. Anyone want to inch up a little bit and say they get to a nine? Oh, that’s impressive. Anyone get a ten? There’s no one with a ten. Oh, that’s interesting. I’d be challenging on a ten. I’ve never seen a ten before, so I’d love to meet you on that. But, you know, it doesn’t matter. You are where you are on that scale and there’s opportunity to make that happen now.

Create a dream chart

So let’s think about how we’re going to choose a couple of tools that can help you dream better and think better. Well, let’s first of all start with your life goals.

One of my great heroes is Eric Liddell. I think he’s a great role model. And, you know, if you think about what happiness is in a Christian life, what do we believe in? You think about happiness is in righteous living. What’s the righteous living? I put the four points up there. I don’t think anyone is going to disagree. You might change it, but you get the point. That’s what we need to think. Happiness is in righteous living.

How can we create, how can we move from the one to three more to the ten? Well, if you had a ten, you’ll probably have one of these. It’s called a dream chart. Really simple thing to do. You don’t need to over spiritualise it. It’s quite a fun thing to do.

In fact, I had a client the other day that really wanted to do this. They couldn’t find any time in their life, they believed, to make a dream chart. So him and his wife asked their parents to look after the children for the day. And one of their dreams they knew already was they wanted to own a boat. So they went to Exmouth Harbour and they hired a boat. And then they went out in the middle of the sea, no mobile phones, and they spent a day doing the dream chart and they had a fantastic time. It’s a great thing to do.

And when you do a dream chart, you put down the pictures and the images of everything you want to dream about for your life, and then you stick it outside your bedroom for everyone to see it, including your children. You can do it with your children, by the way, and you start to think about where you want to go. A simple tool. Very easy to do.

What is a business?

But then you say, well, that’s my dream for my life, but what about my business? Because I need both of these to work. Well, first of all, you need to define what a business is. And this is my definition of business. In fact, it’s not my definition. It’s the ActionCOACH definition. It’s this: A commercial, profitable enterprise that works with or without you.

That is the aim we’re trying to get out of a business, right? It’s not the dream. It’s the aim. What does that mean? Well, commercial: do people want to buy it? Profitable: it generates excess cash. It works, so you don’t have to put all the hours in. You’ve got some leverage in your system. And then you can hire a team. And then it could work with or without you. What a fantastic thing. If you don’t have a definition, take that one. That will do.

Start with why

Now, that’s great as a definition of the business, but now we need to work out the vision for that business. And there’s only really, I mean there’s plenty of ways of doing it, but the simplest way, just buy the Simon Sinek book there, which is Start With Why.

And it’s so helpful because when I speak to so many business owners or people about to start a business, the first thing they say, “What do you want a business for? To make money.” Guess what? If all you want to do is make money, you won’t succeed. Simple as that. It’s to make money. That’s not it. You want to be able to do more than that, and that is provide a service that people want so very much.

Definitely have a go for that book. So two simple things, and then you have a destination and your chance of winning in business has dramatically increased because I never see a failed business when they’ve got these in place. Simple as that.

Secret two: Why giving it your all can still lead to failure

Okay. Next secret. Why giving it your all can still lead to failure. Let’s take on this one now. Anyone recognise this famous ship? Anyone shout it out? Who said that? Straight off the bat? The Endurance. Of course she won Mastermind. I forgot about that. We’ve got to find the Mastermind. I think that’s a round of applause myself.

Anyway, so yes, it’s the Endurance. Famous ship, captained by Ernest Shackleton, and an incredible story that comes with it. Now, when Shackleton went out to go on the adventure, we’ve got a few adventurers here, a lot of adventure spirits, he went out and put a job advert out. Would you reply to this advert?

Let’s read it out: “Men wanted. Sorry about that. It was 1914. For hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.” And then it goes on to recognition in case of success. Please reply to Ernest Shackleton.

Genuinely, the job advert went out there. How many responses did he have? Thousands. Absolutely right. Thousands and thousands. And why did he have thousands and thousands? A bold vision. It was actually amazing.

The Endurance

And the journey was to cross the Antarctic from coast to coast. Never done it. Incredible, ambitious thing to do. But the thing is, that job advert, did it include anything like knows my numbers? Did it include anyone like being an explorer before? Knows anything about ships? It didn’t include anything about it. It didn’t include anything about skills at all. There was nothing about skills. It was recruiting for this: the mindset. That is the big point to remember.

And on 8 August 1914, he set off from the UK and went off down to the Antarctic. Now, an incredible story then enveloped because when he got down there he got stuck, right? He didn’t even make it to Antarctica. He got stuck in the ice there. And probably when you look at the boat, you’re going, “This thing doesn’t look like it’s crossing the ice, going through it in the beginning,” right? So it was going to get stuck. It did get stuck.

And that was a problem because they got stuck, caught in their boat for nine months. Nine months stuck, just drifting with the ice floes. Really desperate time. And you think that’s got bad? But after nine months, it got worse. Guess what happened? The boat got crushed. Right there was your return journey not happening. Did they have something like a satellite phone in 1914? No, they did not. Was there any helicopter rescue? Not coming.

Everybody has to go home alive

So what happened? They unloaded what they could as they saw the boat cracking. They put all the supplies on top and they created what they called Camp Ocean and then Camp Patience. They made two camps in the end, put all the stores down there, and now they had five and a half months to live without a boat on those ice floes.

They survived with eating seals, penguins and the rest of their stores. Well, that was good. But then at that point the ice broke. What happened then was very interesting. They launched the lifeboats. And you can think of these lifeboats, can’t you? They’re not like a modern one. They’re like this.

I’ve actually seen the lifeboat. When you look at it, it sort of goes from there to about here. And you’re going, “This doesn’t really look like much of a lifeboat. I could die using this.” They launched the boats. They had three of them. And they took this daring journey to go to a place called Elephant Island.

You wouldn’t know where that is, but basically it’s a rock in the middle of nowhere. But at least it wasn’t moving. And it took them seven days to get there and they decamped. Now, that was fine. So they’ve now decamped in a place where they’re never going to be found. Not very useful.

So incredibly, Shackleton took this heroic journey with five of them in one of the boats, the James Caird. That’s the one I’ve seen in London, if you can see it. It’s incredible. And he then rowed, they rowed, sailed 16 days just with the stars to find South Georgia Island. And they did it. Incredible. Sixteen days. I mean, just incredible stories. They did it.

They then got all the way there. And when they landed, they were unlucky. They got to South Georgia Island and they went there because there was a whaling station, but they landed on the wrong side of the island. Yeah, pretty true story. And so then they had to walk for 36 hours nonstop.

By the way, there were five of them. Only three were fit enough at that stage to be able to do the walk, so they left two behind. Three of them got up and they got to the whaling station. All sounds good. No, no, no. Because the mission still had to be, the mission obviously was over, but a new mission emerged, which was everyone has to go home alive.

Everyone has to survive this mission. And then they spent four and a half months trying to get back from South Georgia to Elephant Island to rescue everyone. And quite incredibly, everyone survived. That’s just a story and a half, isn’t it? Just incredible story.

Recruit for mindset first

Now, Shackleton couldn’t have done that by himself, right? What happened was interesting. There were three big lessons that came out of the back of it, and the first was clear responsibility. The second was unshakeable belief, the mindset. And the last thing was team wide ownership. Really quite incredible story.

And that’s why you don’t actually need a team. What you need is the right team. Recruit for mindset first. That’s it. You don’t see that, right? Any job advert, it’s how many years’ experience, skills, what have we had. Very rarely do you recruit the mindset. That is what we need to recruit first for, mindset.

What is the business owner’s job?

Now, it’s a little quick reminder here of what is the job of a business owner. Sometimes really easy to forget the job of business owners. Let me just draw it up for you. Here you are, your business owner. You don’t smell, I promise.

A business owner’s job is to train and hire a team. That’s the job. The team’s job is to look after the clients. The client’s job is to look after the business. And the business’s job is to look after the business owner.

What happens? What do I see time and again and why this is such an important moral of the story? What does the business owner do? Works with the clients. Why bother having a team, right? That’s another thing you see time and time again.

Don’t be that person. Make sure that you’re putting the majority of your time into your team and then you will succeed in business.

Providence guided us

Now there’s one great story, finishing part of the Shackleton story, which has a God element to it, which I want to bring in. So as a postscript, when you read his memoirs, this is what he said: “I have no doubt that Providence guided us.”

He said that during that long, wracking march of 36 hours over the unknown mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to him often that there were four, not three of them. And every single one of the three people wrote that in their memoirs. They all felt God was with them during that challenge. I thought that was fantastic.

Secret three: The number one growth killer

Okay, so, people, let’s move on. The last secret. We need to tackle the number one growth killer of all businesses. And this is interesting, right? I wonder if you’re going to be able to guess what it is.

Let me draw another slide. This is time. This is growth. Let me take a first business. First business is treading water, so quite rightly has a blue line to it. I put the blue line with a wiggly line because you’ll have a year whether it goes up a little, goes down, but it’s operating within boundaries. The business is operating around. This is a business that is treading water.

Now, we also have businesses that are growing. Let’s use green as a business growing. What is the difference between a business that’s growing and a business that’s treading water? Let’s have some answers. Culture. Innovation. Leadership. Product. Marketing. Risk taking. All sort of right, but not the answer I’m looking for. There’s one thing, one thing that you need to put in the answer, and that is this.

Five hours working on the business

It is five hours working on the business rather than in the business every week. All business owners that I see struggle that are here are working 100% of the time in the business. They spend none of their time working on the business. That is the reason. Simple as that.

And there’s a little reason in a second for why that is the case. But if you can spend five hours working on the business every week, your business will grow, guaranteed. End of story. That’s what will happen.

Those that don’t, if you look at your business today and it’s not growing, it will be because you’re not spending time working on the business. It is simple as that.

Your business cannot outgrow its owner

So let’s take, for instance, what would happen if we had a turbo business go up here. What’s the risk to be a turbo business and a growth business? You said that ten hours. It’s absolutely right. It’s ten hours working on the business. But also there’s another part to it. It’s ten hours working on the business and also ten hours of learning, self learning.

Your business cannot outgrow its owner. That’s why you’re learning, right? If you’re not learning more, your business can’t grow more. It is as simple as that. So ten, ten, that’s a turbo business.

And there is the odd exception out the side there. You may not like him, Elon Musk, but he goes 20, 20. Twenty hours on and 20 hours learning. That’s what he does. That’s how the business just turbos. I mean, the turbo rocket ships up through them.

So you make a choice. Starting this now, start the basics. Don’t plateau. Grow. How do you grow? You do that by working five hours on the business every week.

How business owners become trapped in the business

There’s a reason why this happens. The reason why is this. You start off as an ideas person. You’ve got an idea for a business. That’s what happens. You then quickly skip to the creative, the inventor. That’s the role you have. You then skip to the next one and then you become the operator. You’re starting getting into the business, so then you’ve got two hands working in.

Then as the business goes on, you think, “Oh, this could work, this thing.” You become a business owner and now you’ve got lots of things happening. And so you start to be pulled more into the business, and you work 100% of your time working in the business, and you’ve lost track of working on the business. That’s what’s happened to you.

And as a number of people said along the journey, you end up wearing all these hats. Head of marketing. Head of sales. Head of everything. Everything that you, and that becomes you, you, you, you, you. And you’re now lost in the business and you’ve got no chance. And you start being walking the desert. That’s what happens to you.

So what I’m saying to you here is make sure that you don’t do that. And that is our last secret.

Dream, team, regime

So three secrets for you to take away. Trying to make a little natty acronym sort of work. First of all, make sure you have the right dream. Second thing, make sure you have the right team. And then, just because it rhymes, make sure you have the right regime.

So spend your time working on the business. That’s where we’re at.

The desires of your heart

So, as we finish up, I just want to go back to the Bible a second and let’s look at this. “Delight in the Lord and…” Get it exactly right. “He’ll give you the desires of your heart.”

Now, can we make this a little bit tougher for the Lord than you’re making it today? Most people haven’t got enough desire. They don’t actually know what they want to do. We need these desires more clearly there because you will get the desires of your heart. It’s in the Bible.

But I do generally think that when I speak to a lot of people in business, we’re not making it hard enough for Him. So please do that. And thank you for your time.

Hear Andrew De Groot at Rediscover Business & Leadership 2026

Andrew is returning to Rediscover Business & Leadership in 2026 after leaving a lasting impression at the 2025 conference. As Managing Director of ActionCOACH Exeter, he now spends much of his time helping owners and leaders build businesses that can grow without demanding everything from the person who started them. That work is informed by a career that previously took him through senior roles at NatWest and HSBC and across 40 countries.

He will speak on Saturday 14 November 2026 at the Mercure Exeter Southgate Hotel. The conference begins on Friday evening before moving into the main programme on Saturday, giving people time to hear from experienced leaders while also meeting others who understand the opportunities and pressures that come with working life.

You do not need to own a company to belong in the room. Rediscover Business & Leadership is for people building something of their own, leading within an organisation or simply wanting to think more intentionally about the influence God has given them through their work. Book now to attend Rediscover Business & Leadership 2026.

Book your place for Rediscover Business & Leadership 2026 now.