■ A fortnightly business advice column by Whakatāne accountant and business adviser, Jason Lougher

A few weeks back, I did the Tough Guy and Gal Challenge in Rotorua. I would like to tell you I trained for it. I would also like to tell you I read the entry properly.

I had spent the week before giving a client a hard time about entering. Plenty of encouragement, no skin in the game, the way you do when it is somebody else’s morning. By the end of that conversation, I had somehow entered myself, which serves me right.

In my head, it was about two kilometres. A bit of mud, a wall to climb over, home in time for a coffee. It is 6km. Farmland, bush, hills that keep arriving, mud pits, a swamp, tunnels to crawl through and a net to climb.

The organisers say the obstacles are challenging but achievable for people of all abilities, which is true, and also a sentence you only really appreciate once you are on your hands and knees in a culvert.

Then about 10 minutes before the start, my son William decided he was coming with me. No training, no preparation, no real idea what he was looking at. He just decided it seemed like a good idea, the way kids do. So off we went.

The first stretch was brilliant. He was ahead of me for most of it, and had that thing kids have where the mud is the point rather than the obstacle.

The trouble came somewhere in the middle. We had been going long enough to convince ourselves the end was close. You could hear noise from the finish area, we were doing the maths in our heads the way you do when you have already decided what answer you want, and we had agreed we were nearly home.

Then somebody coming past told us we were not even halfway.

I have thought about that moment a lot since, because I watched what it did to him in real time. He went from running, to walking, to sitting down on a bank. It had nothing to do with his legs. Nothing about the course had changed. The hill was the same hill it had been 30 seconds earlier. The only thing that changed was the number in his head. That is exactly what I see in the businesses I work with, and it is one of the quiet reasons good people give up on good plans.

An owner does the numbers on a new site, or a build, or a big piece of gear, and works out it will take 18 months to come right. Two years in, it has not. Nothing has gone wrong. The thing is trading, the customers are turning up, the plan is still a good plan. But that 18 month number is sitting in their head like a scoreboard, and every month past it feels like losing. I have sat with owners doing genuinely well who were flat as a pancake, purely because they were measuring themselves against a distance they guessed at over a coffee three years earlier.

The truth is that almost every owner I work with underestimates the course, and not by a bit either. Cashflow takes longer to turn than the forecast said. A new staff member takes six months to be worth what you are paying them, not six weeks. The systems project you thought was a summer job is still open at Christmas. That is not bad management. That is just what the distance is.

So, the first thing worth doing is finding out how long the course actually is before you start, and being honest with yourself about the answer. This is where an accountant is useful, and not in a clever way. Work out what the real numbers say about how long it takes and what it costs to get there, then set your expectations off that rather than off the version you would like. A plan that says three years and delivers in three years feels like a win. The same plan sold to yourself as 18 months feels like a failure at exactly the same point on the course.

The second is what we did on the day, because we still had 3km in front of us and no way around them.

We stopped talking about the finish. We picked the next fence post, got to it, and then picked the one after that. That was the whole strategy. Not a motivational speech, not a fresh burst of energy, just a smaller target than the one that had flattened him. And it worked, because the problem was never the distance. It was trying to carry all of it at once.

I use that with owners more than anything else I do. When somebody is under it, the answer is almost never a new five-year plan. It is: what is the one thing you are doing this week. Get to that, then we will pick the next one. You would be amazed how much ground you cover that way.

We finished. Filthy, sore, both of us a bit surprised. He has not stopped talking about it since.

■ Jason Lougher is the owner of Calc Business Advisors & Chartered Accountants. Our team advise businesses throughout the Eastern Bay of Plenty — and across New Zealand. Like this article or want to chat? Feel free to send me an email: [email protected]