Ego Tax

Shane was comfortable losing money on a system he'd built himself. Less comfortable asking a mate how to fix it.

He wouldn't have put it that way. Neither would you.

We were sitting in his ute outside a job site in Tauranga, waiting for a concrete truck. Shane runs a landscaping company. Eleven staff, decent order book. The sort of business that looks healthy until you ask what's left after everyone's been paid.

I asked how he quoted jobs.

He talked me through a spreadsheet he'd built himself. Some calculations, some instinct, a bit of padding when a job looked risky. No consistent method behind the padding. Just a feeling that the number was probably about right.

He'd been using it for six years. He'd been meaning to fix it for four.

I asked who else around the Bay ran landscaping crews his size. He named three blokes straight away. Good operators. People he knew through the trade association and had a beer with a couple of times a year.

Had he ever asked how they quoted?

No.

Shane isn't shy. Getting him to talk has never required specialist equipment. He didn't think they'd refuse, either. He reckoned at least one would happily walk him through it over a flat white.

But asking meant admitting he hadn't sorted it himself.

Six years in business. Eleven people looking to him for answers. And now he was supposed to ring another owner and ask for help with something as basic as quoting?

So he kept guessing.

That's the ego tax. The time and money you keep spending to avoid being seen not knowing.

It doesn't appear as a line in your accounts. It's buried in underquoted jobs, hours spent rebuilding something that already exists, and problems you drag home because you won't let anyone help you solve them.

It can feel remarkably like hard work. That's what makes it easy to defend.

You're improving the spreadsheet. Researching options. Having another crack over the weekend. Nobody can accuse you of doing nothing.

But all that effort can become a very respectable way to avoid one uncomfortable conversation.

I've watched versions of this for twenty-five years. Owners who will work themselves sideways before asking someone to show them a better way. Somewhere along the line, being responsible for the business got tangled up with having to invent every answer inside it.

There's a name for it in the research. The knowing-doing gap. Business schools have been studying it for decades: people who know exactly what they should do, and do something else instead. Information was never the bottleneck. Will was.

I understand the attachment. When you've built something from scratch, "I worked it out myself" means something.

The trouble starts when you need to keep proving it.

You stop judging your system by whether it works and start defending it because it's yours. The spreadsheet might be costing you margin, but at least nobody can say you needed help making it.

There's an expensive little victory.

Of course, another operator's system needs scrutiny. Their costs, crew and jobs may be different. You still have to understand the method, test it against your own work and adapt it.

That's part of running the business. Asking gives you something better to assess than your own unchallenged guesswork.

Shane rang one of those blokes that week.

Once he'd explained his reasoning out loud, it was harder to defend. He knew someone who might help. He expected the bloke would say yes. He'd been avoiding the call because he thought he should already have the answer.

The system he was shown wasn't a perfect fit. But it gave him a substantial starting point. There was still work to do, just less work he needed to invent.

Think about the part of your business you keep promising yourself you'll sort out.

Who could help?

If you don't know, finding that person is your next job. If a name came to mind immediately, pay attention to the reason you haven't called.

Then make the ask small enough to actually make:

I've been doing this the same way for years, and I'm not convinced it's working. Could you show me how you approach it?

You can run a business and still need someone to show you something.

The ego tax keeps coming due until you're willing to do both.