ORBIT: a growth system built around how your business actually works

I have spent a slightly embarrassing amount of my career helping other businesses build systems while running large parts of my own business from inside my head.

I could diagnose the problem. I could design the answer. I could explain it beautifully in a room.

Then I would return to a collection of notes, voice messages, inboxes and things I was definitely going to remember later.

You cannot always see your own orbit.

Founder-led businesses are particularly prone to this. The founder is often the best salesperson, the keeper of the history, the final decision maker and the person who can sense that something is wrong before anybody else can explain it.

That is not a flaw. It is usually one of the reasons the business exists.

But gravity has consequences.

Pipeline decisions, team questions, client problems, new ideas and unfinished tasks all travel back towards the same person. Eventually everything begins crashing into the centre. Some things get decided. Some burn up on entry. Others circle the founder’s head for six months while everybody politely waits.

The usual advice is to delegate more.

That sounds sensible, but delegation often fails because the founder hands over a task while keeping the judgement required to perform it. The team can do the activity, but still needs the founder to interpret the situation, make the exception or decide what good looks like.

The work has moved. The dependency has not.

ORBIT is the method I use to deal with that.

The idea is not to remove the founder’s gravity. It is to build systems that can hold their position around it. The important work remains connected to the founder’s intent and judgement without needing to crash into them every time it moves.

ORBIT has five stages: Observe, Reveal, Build, Install and Tend.

Observe what actually happens

Most businesses can show you the official version of a process. It is usually tidy, linear and bears only a passing resemblance to Tuesday afternoon.

Observe means looking at the real work.

Where does information arrive? What has changed recently? Which decisions keep returning to the founder? What gets ignored when delivery becomes busy? Where do people create their own unofficial workaround because the approved system is too slow or too awkward?

In commercial work, this might mean looking beyond the CRM. The useful signal could be sitting in a meeting transcript, a founder’s LinkedIn messages or a conversation somebody had after an event.

You cannot improve a workflow you have only imagined.

Reveal the real constraint

People normally arrive asking for a solution.

More leads. A new CRM. Better follow-up. An AI agent. A rebuilt website. A workshop on prospecting.

Sometimes that is what they need. Quite often, it is the next plausible activity protecting them from a more uncomfortable decision.

An agency asking for more leads may already have five viable conversations sitting still. The constraint is not lead generation. It is deciding which opportunity matters, following it through and accepting that a polite no is more useful than another month of vague optimism.

Reveal is the mirror. It turns the visible symptom into a problem worth solving.

A diagnostic that always concludes you need the next thing is not a diagnostic.

Build it in the room

Consultants are very good at producing immaculate plans for other people to implement.

I have produced a few myself.

The trouble is that a plan is not yet a system. The useful moment comes when the new way of working begins operating inside the tools and relationships the business already has.

Build means creating it with the people who will use it. Not disappearing for six weeks and returning with a 74-page document and an exciting diagram of the future.

If we are fixing a sales workflow, we use live opportunities. If we are improving pitching, we put a real pitch on the table. If we are designing an AI-supported process, we identify exactly where human judgement enters and what the technology is allowed to do.

People need to feel the difference before they will trust it.

Install ownership, not just software

A system is not installed because somebody has connected two apps and sent the team a Loom video.

It is installed when the work can survive a wobble.

Someone goes on holiday. The founder has a difficult week. A team member forgets a step. An urgent client job lands on Wednesday morning.

If the whole thing quietly stops, it was never installed. It was temporarily being performed.

Installation means ownership is clear, decisions are visible and people know how to restart without waiting for the consultant or founder to rescue them.

Tend it when real life arrives

Most systems decay.

The business changes. People leave. The market moves. A field in the CRM becomes meaningless, then mandatory, then ignored. Eventually the workflow is technically still there but nobody believes in it.

Tend is the least glamorous stage and one of the most important. It creates a rhythm for reviewing what is working, spotting drift and adjusting the system before everybody returns to instinct.

The aim is not perfection. It is recovery.

This matters particularly in neuroinclusive design. Consistency should not mean never dropping the ball. A resilient workflow assumes attention, energy and capacity will vary. It makes the next useful step easier to see when somebody returns.

What stable orbit looks like

In a founder-led sales system, stable orbit does not mean the founder disappears from selling.

It means technology monitors the market and organises the information. A team supports research, follow-up and CRM rhythm. The system surfaces the right decision at the right moment. The founder brings the judgement, trust and commercial conversation only they can bring.

The founder is still important. They are simply no longer being used as the database, reminder system and emergency restart button.

That is the point of ORBIT.

Not a business with less humanity. A business where human judgement is used deliberately, and the surrounding work can keep moving without everything being personally gripped from the centre.