How Many of Last Week's Decisions Actually Needed You? A Quiet Exercise for UK Manufacturing MDs

It's quarter to eight on a Monday. You've not taken your coat off yet and there's already someone hovering by your office door. Then another. The works manager wants to know if he can bring the weekend shift in for the big repeat order. Sales want you to look at a price before they send it. Accounts want to know whether they can release a job for the customer who's now sitting at sixty-two days.

None of it's dramatic. It's just Monday.

I want to suggest something slightly odd, and I'll say up front that it isn't a strategy, or a framework, or anything you need to buy. It's an exercise. It takes about an hour, maybe a bit longer if you're being honest with yourself, and all you need is last week's diary, your sent emails, your phone and a sheet of paper.

Here it is. Go back through last week and list every decision you made. Then mark the ones that only came to you because of habit, because of history, or because nobody had ever written down where the line was. Then, next to each one, note roughly how long it waited before it reached you.

That's it. That's the whole thing.

I first watched someone do this properly a few years ago. He was the MD of a precision engineering firm in the Midlands, about a hundred and twenty staff, third generation, the sort of place where half the shop floor had known him since he was a lad sweeping up at weekends. He did the count on a Sunday evening, mostly to prove a point to his finance director. He rang me on the Monday and the first thing he said was, "Most of them. It was most of them."

He didn't sound upset, exactly. More puzzled. A bit like he'd found a room in his own house he'd never actually been into.

I'm not going to tell you what you'll find. To be honest, I don't know, and it would spoil it if I guessed. What I'd ask is that you don't argue with the page while you're filling it in. Argue with it afterwards, by all means. But fill it in first.

Pull last week back out of hiding

The first thing to know is that your memory is going to lie to you. Not maliciously. It's just a generous editor, and it tends to keep the big decisions and quietly drop the small ones. You'll remember agreeing to the new press. You probably won't remember saying yes to a courier upgrade on Tuesday afternoon or telling someone in dispatch which of two late orders to send first.

So don't rely on it. Rebuild the week from the evidence instead.

Start with your diary. Every meeting you sat in almost certainly contained a decision, even if it was only "let's leave it till next week", which, by the way, counts. Then go through your sent emails, day by day. Look at the short ones especially. "Yes, go ahead." "Fine by me." "Hold off for now." Those two-word replies are usually where this gets interesting.

Then your phone. WhatsApp, texts, the call log. A lot of manufacturers I've worked with run half the business through a WhatsApp group that started as a way to organise the Christmas do in 2019 and somehow never stopped.

And then, and this is the hard bit, the stuff with no record at all. The conversation in the corridor on the way back from the canteen. The five minutes by the loading bay. The call in the car park before you'd even got inside. You won't catch all of these. Catch the ones that stuck and assume there were more.

What counts as a decision? Keep it simple. If someone was waiting for an answer, and your answer changed what happened next, it's a decision. Approving a price counts. Agreeing an overtime rota counts. Settling a squabble between sales and the planner about which job goes on the machine first definitely counts. Choosing which supplier to chase first counts too, if someone asked you.

Don't filter them yet. Don't think "well, that one was obviously mine" and leave it off. Just write them all down, one line each, with the day next to it.

I'll be honest, most people get to about fifteen and think that's the lot. Then they open the sent folder properly and it's forty. Then they check WhatsApp and it's sixty something. One MD I sat with, who runs a food packaging business in Yorkshire, got to ninety-one and then stopped. Not because he'd finished. Because he'd started to feel a bit queasy.

You might not get to ninety. Maybe you're more organised than that. But whatever number you land on, I'd put money on it being bigger than the one you'd have guessed on Friday afternoon.

Three marks: habit, history and the missing rule

Now go back to the top of your list and, for each decision, ask one question. Did this genuinely need me, or did it just come to me?

Those aren't the same thing. I think, if I'm honest, that's the whole exercise in a single line.

If it came to you but didn't genuinely need you, give it one of three marks. I use a tick, a circle and a cross, mainly because they're quick, but use whatever you like.

A tick for habit. It came to you because it always has. Nobody ever decided it should. It's just that fifteen years ago, when there were thirty of you, everything came to you, and this particular thing was never told to stop. Signing off a small change to a delivery note. Agreeing the running order on the big machining centre. Approving replacement tooling that costs less than your weekly diesel. Habit decisions tend to be small, frequent and, if we're being truthful, quite pleasant. They make you feel connected to the place. That's partly why they survive.

A circle for history. It came to you because something went wrong once. A customer got credit terms they shouldn't have had and went under owing you forty grand, so now every credit call over a few thousand pounds goes past your desk. A batch went out with the wrong finish and cost you a contract, so now you personally check anything going to that sector. The rule made complete sense at the time. The question is whether it still does, or whether it's a scar that's quietly turned into a process.

A cross for the missing rule. Nobody knew where the line was, so they asked. This is usually the biggest pile. Your sales manager knows she can give a bit of discount. She doesn't know how much, so anything past what feels safe comes to you. The planner knows he can reshuffle the schedule, but not whether that includes bumping a regular customer to fit in a new one. Accounts know they shouldn't release goods to someone on stop, but "on stop" has never actually been defined anywhere. So they come and find you.

Quite a lot of what ends up with a cross won't be there because your people lack judgement. It'll be there because nobody ever told them what the judgement was. That's a slightly awkward thought, and I'll just leave it sitting there.

Some decisions won't get a mark at all. Good. Those are the ones that genuinely needed you. A key account on the edge. A big capital spend. Whether to go after a new sector. Anything with someone's job in it. They're MD decisions and they should stay that way.

One test if you're stuck. Could you explain your reasoning to someone else in two sentences, and would that reasoning hold next time too? If so, it probably didn't need you. It needed a rule. And for now, you were the rule.

The second column: how long did it wait?

Here's the part most people skip, and I think it's the part that matters more.

Next to each marked decision, write down roughly how long it waited before it reached you. Not how long it took you to decide. How long it sat there beforehand.

You'll have to guess some of these. That's fine. Look at the times on the emails. Think about when the question first came up versus when it actually landed in front of you. The courier upgrade might have been raised in dispatch on Monday morning and reached you at four o'clock on Tuesday, because you were with a customer, then on a call, then walking the floor with an auditor.

Thirty seconds of your time. A day and a half in the queue.

And the thing about a queue is that someone's stood in it. While that pricing decision waited, a buyer was waiting for a quote, and quite possibly asking one of your competitors for one as well. While the overtime question waited, the works manager couldn't tell his team whether they were in on Saturday, so a couple of them made other plans. While accounts waited for your view on releasing the job, finished goods sat in the warehouse taking up space you're paying for.

None of this shows up on a report. You won't find it in the management accounts. There's no line called "time lost waiting for the MD to be free". But it's there. Most MDs know it's there, somewhere at the back of their mind, the same way you know there's a noise in the car you haven't quite got round to having looked at.

Add the waiting times up if you want to. It's usually a sobering number. Or don't bother adding them up and just look at the longest three. Ask yourself who was standing still while they waited.

There's a simpler version of this, too. Think about your last holiday. Did you actually switch off? If you're like most owners, probably not. A survey by Purbeck Insurance Services last summer found that 76% of SME owners carry on working while they're away, and 57% regularly work well beyond a normal full-time week. I'd guess it's worse in manufacturing, where the call from the works manager on day three of a week in Cornwall is practically a tradition.

So here's a small question to sit with. When that call came, was it something only you could decide? Or was it one of the decisions that would've earned a tick, a circle or a cross on this page?

You don't have to answer out loud.

What the page tends to show you

By now you've got a list, a scattering of marks and a second column of rough waiting times. I said I wouldn't tell you what you'd find, and I'll stick to that. But I can tell you what I've seen other people notice when they stare at their own page for a while.

The first thing is usually the names. Go back through and write, next to each marked decision, who brought it to you. Most people find it isn't the whole business. It's the same three or four people, over and over. Your sales director. Your works or production manager. Whoever runs the finance side. Maybe one other. And, quietly, you.

Those names don't just bring you decisions, either. They bring you each other. A fair bit of what's on the page, if you look closely, isn't really a decision at all. It's a disagreement. Sales has promised a date that production can't hit. Production wants a batch size that finance thinks ties up too much cash. Finance has put a customer on hold that sales is desperately trying to win back. Each of them comes to you, separately, sometimes on the same afternoon, and you end up doing the job of referee.

It's hard to spot this from the inside, because refereeing feels a lot like running the business. It's busy, its important, people need you. But written down on a sheet of paper, it can start to look like something else. Like a business with three or four heads, all of them wired through yours.

The second thing people notice is what's missing. The things that ought to be on an MD's list and aren't. The conversation with the bank about the next five years. A proper look at whether that new sector's worth chasing. The succession question, which in a lot of family businesses is the elephant that's been in the boardroom so long it's got its own chair. If your week was full of ticks, circles and crosses, there's a fair chance there wasn't much room left for any of that.

And then the third thing, which is usually where people go a bit quiet. Everyone in that small group already knows. Your finance director could probably have drawn this page for you. Your sales director has almost certainly said something along these lines over a pint. The risk is obvious to all of you. It's just that the people who'd have to fix it are the very same people who are too busy holding everything together to fix it.

That loop doesn't loosen on its own, either. Make UK's latest outlook shows manufacturers holding back on hiring, with the recruitment balance dropping from +15% to +3% between the second and third quarters of 2026, while around 47,000 manufacturing vacancies are still sitting open. So "we'll just bring in another senior manager" is a harder answer this year than it might have been. Whatever changes probably starts with the people, and the knowledge, you've already got.

I'm not going to put a label on what you're looking at. I don't think you need me to.

Bringing it together

So here's where you've got to. You've rebuilt last week from the diary, the inbox and the phone. You've marked the decisions that came to you through habit, history or a missing rule. You've guessed how long each one waited, and who was standing still while it did. And you've probably noticed the same few names, the refereeing, and the things that never made it onto the list at all.

What you do with that is up to you. Genuinely. But if you want one small step, rather than a big restructure you'll never find the time for, maybe try this.

Pick three decisions from the page with a cross next to them. Just three. For each one, write down the rule you were actually using when you made it. Not a policy document. Two or three sentences, tops. "Discounts up to 8% on repeat orders over £5,000 don't need me. Above that, they do." "If a customer is more than 45 days overdue and owes over £10,000, hold the shipment and let me know. Otherwise, release it." "Weekend overtime for a customer order is the works manager's call, as long as the job's margin covers it."

Then hand those three rules to the people who keep bringing you those decisions and tell them you'll back their call even if it isn't quite the one you'd have made. That last bit matters more than the rule itself, I think. People rarely bring you decisions because they can't make them. They bring them because they're not sure you'll stand behind them if they get it wrong.

In a month, do the count again. Same hour, same sheet of paper. See if the number's moved. See whether the waiting times have shrunk. See whether any of those three or four names have started turning up a little less often.

If they have, pick three more.

If they haven't, that's worth knowing too.

Most MDs I've met built their business by being the person everything ran through. It worked, for a long time, and there's no shame in it at all. It's probably the reason the business exists. The only thing this exercise really asks is whether what got you here is the same thing that'll get you to the next stage. You'll have your own answer to that. I'd just rather you found it on a quiet Sunday evening with a sheet of paper than on day three of a holiday, with the phone buzzing on the table.

If you did the count and the page told you something you'd half known for a while, you don't have to work out the next bit on your own. That's what our Ceiling Diagnostic is for. It's a structured look at where your business is actually getting stuck, whether that's too much running through too few heads or one of the other growth ceilings we see in UK manufacturers, so you get a clear picture of what's holding things back before you spend time or money fixing the wrong thing. Think of it as an honest second pair of eyes on the same sheet of paper. You can find out more and book your Ceiling Diagnostic here.

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