What a Competitive Fellowship in Boston Taught Me About Reading a Business
In 2015 I left Scotland on the Saltire Fellowship, run by Entrepreneurial Scotland, to spend several months at Babson in Boston, followed by time in San Francisco and Shanghai. I was an engineer. Almost everyone around me was building something.
I came back with a different way of reading a situation.
What changes
The fellowship wasn't a business programme in the conventional sense. It was designed to shift how participants think about building organisations: what makes them work, what makes them fail, and why the same underlying dynamics tend to recur across very different contexts.
What I took from it wasn't a methodology or a framework. It was the beginning of something more useful: the ability to read the financial logic, operational structure and people dynamics of a business, and see where the constraint actually is.
That's a skill that develops through application. Every subsequent engagement, whether in a private equity-backed turnaround, a multi-billion programme environment, property investment, or direct advisory work with founder-led businesses, added to it.
The part I didn't expect
The real thing that accumulates isn't knowledge. It's unfamiliarity.
Once you have been inside enough businesses, you stop needing months to see where one is losing time or money. You notice it in the first week. And it is almost always sitting in the things everyone inside has stopped seeing, because they walk past them every day.
That is the honest value of an outside pair of eyes. Not that they know your business better than you do, because they never will, and they shouldn't pretend to. It's that they haven't got used to it yet. The approval step that everyone works around. The report nobody trusts. The customer everyone knows is unprofitable but nobody has actually checked. None of those are hidden. They're just normal now.
That's the diagnostic, in practice: the outside read, done properly, before it costs you anything.
What pattern recognition looks like in practice
The patterns repeat. A founder-led business with thirty people has a different surface area than one with ten, but the underlying design questions are consistent. What's the ratio between effort and result? Where are decisions being made that should be running through a system? What's the 20% causing 80% of the operational drag?
The diagnostic step is fast once you've seen the same structure in enough different contexts. The recommendation that follows is specific because it's grounded in what those contexts showed about what actually works, not what looks credible on paper.
The question worth sitting with
Here's the one I end up asking most often: you're busier than ever, but could you point to what actually changed for the better this year?
Most owners find that harder to answer than they expect. Not because they've done anything wrong, but because busy and better stop being the same thing somewhere along the way, and nothing in the working week tells you when that happened.
If you want a read on where to look first in your own business, the Ratio Check is sixteen questions and takes about five minutes.
The Ratio Check is a free, five-minute read on where your business actually stands. It's a mirror, not a mark.