Candle or house fire?

Hi there,

Before we start with today’s topic, here’s who I am, and why this landed in your inbox.I spent 20+ years as a COO in the corporate world. These days I work with founders in the messy, unglamorous, endlessly-on-fire operational side of running a business — the part that can stall a company, or stop it moving forward altogether, and yet rarely gets talked about. Making that part more manageable, one idea at a time, is what these letters are for.

So let me start with a confession.

I’ve been binge-watching Chicago Fire. Like most of us do — one episode, then suddenly it’s midnight and I’m four deep. And after a few nights, something stuck with me: on that show, every fire burns the house down. Every call, two or three trucks, the whole crew, sirens, the works. Watch enough of it and you come away quietly certain that a fire — any fire — means the building is going down.

But that’s television. In a real business, it isn’t true.

You know the feeling. A client email lands wrong, an invoice didn’t go out, someone dropped a ball on a handover — and within ten minutes it’s not a task anymore. It’s a fire. And your whole afternoon is gone, because your attention had to go and stand in front of it.

Here’s the thing about a fire, though: while it’s burning, you can’t tell how big it is. Up close, through the smoke, all you can see is flame — and flame always looks bigger than whatever’s feeding it. A candle and a house fire read the same. So you grab the hose and empty it on a candle. And every so often you glance at something that’s spreading and tell yourself it’s contained.

Same failure, both times. It’s not the fire. It’s that nobody can size a fire while they’re standing in the smoke.

And all that water has to come from somewhere. Call it your reservoir — the pool of hours and attention you keep for the work only you can do: the growth work, the parts of this you’re genuinely good at, the reason you started.

When you’re drowning in this stuff, everyone hands you the same list: prioritise, delegate, build a system, automate it. None of it is wrong. But all of it is advice for fighting a fire — and every piece assumes you already know how big the fire is.

That’s the step that gets skipped. Prioritise what, exactly, if you can’t tell the candle from the house fire? Delegate what — the thing that would’ve burned out on its own? The advice starts one move too late.

Here’s the shift.

Before any of those tools, there’s a move nobody teaches you to make first: size the fire up. Not “how do I put this out,” but “what is this, really — and what does it cost me if I leave it alone?”

A candle will burn itself out. You can watch it, do nothing, and lose nothing. A house fire won’t — that one you drop everything for. Most of what lands on your desk is a candle throwing house-fire smoke.

Only once you’ve sized it do the usual tools earn their place — and then only in proportion. Drop everything for the house fires. Hand off or ignore the candles. Build a system only where the same fire keeps starting in the same corner.

That’s the whole discipline. Most of what eats your best hours isn’t the fire — it’s a response three sizes off from what’s actually in front of you.

1.     Get it out of your head. Write the problem in one sentence. In your head a fire has no edges, so it fills the room. On paper it has a size — and half the time it turns out to be a candle the moment you can see the whole thing.

2.    Put a yardstick next to it. Ask one question: in a year, does this move anything? Most daily fires don’t. That’s not permission to ignore them — it’s permission to stop soaking them in water they don’t need.

3.    Match the water to the fire. A candle you can leave to burn out, or take out with a cup of water and a calm hand — not an afternoon and a whole crew. Save the full hose for the fires that are genuinely threatening the building. You’ll have fewer of those than you think.

Your fires are real. You just can’t size them while they’re burning — and most of them are smaller than they look.

Learn to spot the candles, spend a cup of water where a cup will do, and keep the reservoir for the work only you can do. That’s the trade. Not less work. Better-spent work.

Talk soon,