The business jigsaw: Building success piece by piece

I spend time over school holidays attacking large jigsaws with my nieces — the thousand-piece kind that promises a weekend and delivers a fortnight. Watching us go at it recently, I was struck by how closely it mirrors what I am seeing in the businesses we work with right now.

The picture on the box is the easy part. Most owners I talk to know roughly what they want their business to look like in three years. The hard part is the table in front of you: hundreds of pieces, no obvious place to start, and a sense that whatever approach worked last time is not working now.

That last bit is the one I want to write about, because it is specific to this moment.

The pieces have changed

The 2024 to 2026 period has thrown a differently shaped piece onto the table. AI is the obvious one where capability is moving faster than most owners can absorb, and the gap between businesses using it well and businesses still watching is widening every day. But it is not just AI. Margins are tighter, the cost of capital is higher than the people running mid-sized New Zealand businesses are used to, demand is softer in most sectors, and the talent question has flipped from “can we find people” to “what work should people be doing now.”

These are not the same pieces we were sorting in 2019. The old approach of work harder, hire one more, run the same playbook faster and more efficiently does not finish the puzzle anymore. And yet most of the conversations I have start with owners trying to apply that old approach to a new picture and end up wondering why it feels harder than it should.

Three patterns come up again and again.

The owner knows the picture, the team does not. My youngest niece joined a puzzle we had been working on for days and I asked her to gather the sky pieces. She looked at me and said, “what sky?” She had not seen the box. I see this in businesses constantly where the owner carries the vision in their head, assumes the team is building toward it, and is surprised when people sort pieces into piles that do not connect. If your team cannot describe, in plain language, what the business is trying to achieve in three years, they are sorting blind. That is not on them, but on the owner.

The new pieces get pushed to the side. AI, in particular. Owners I respect who are sensible, experienced, great at their craft are leaving the AI pieces in a corner of the table because they are unfamiliar and because every other piece feels more urgent. The problem is that those pieces are part of the picture now, whether you sort them or not. Your competitors, your customers, and increasingly your own staff are already using it. Deferring the decision is itself a decision, and the cost of catching up compounds quietly.

Sections get built in isolation. The finance corner is being assembled by the accountant. The people corner by HR. The systems corner by an IT consultant. None of them are looking at the box. This is the issue I wrote about a few years ago in the context of operational reviews, and it has only become more pronounced.  When a business is under pressure, the instinct is to delegate each problem to a specialist and hope the pieces meet in the middle. They rarely do.

Putting it together: the non-negotiables

I am not going to pretend there is one right way to finish a puzzle — there isn’t, and the leaders I admire most have all done it differently. But three things are non-negotiable in my experience.

Get the picture in front of everyone. Not as a poster on the wall. As a conversation, repeated, with the people who are sorting pieces every day. If your senior team cannot articulate the three-year picture and their part in building it, stop everything else until they can.

Pick up the new pieces before you have to. You do not need to commit to an AI transformation to start. You do need to be the one in your business asking what work could be done differently in the next six months, rather than waiting for a competitor or a consultant to ask it for you. The owners I see doing this well are not the most technical but they are the most curious, and the most willing to look uncertain in front of their team while they figure it out. This is me every day at the moment!

Bring the corners together. The financial picture, the people picture, the systems picture and the strategic picture are one puzzle, not four. If your advisors do not talk to each other, that is a structural problem you can solve, and it is usually the highest-leverage piece an owner can fix in a year.

Where we come in

Most of what we do at Gilligan Sheppard is sit on the owner’s side of the table and help them see the whole picture at once. Over the last few years, we have been deliberate about doing that across more of the corners — the day-to-day, the year-end, the tax questions, the capital decisions, and the true financial lens that adds proactive value to a business that used to require a full-time hire and now does not.

When a conversation goes somewhere outside our expertise, we know who to call. The network we’ve built over 40 years is, half the value of working with us. If you are reading this and recognising your own table with pieces everywhere, sections half-built, a sense that the picture has changed and your approach has not caught up — that is the conversation to have. It does not have to be a formal engagement. Sometimes a single conversation is enough to identify which corner to work on first.

The picture is still there. The pieces are different. The work is to keep going, one piece at a time, with people who can see what you are building.