Proactive vs reactive: The difference between running a business and it running you

Founders come to me with the same problem, dressed up in different outfits. “I’m working my arse off. The team’s bigger than ever. Revenue isn’t collapsing. But it feels like we’re treading water.”

Welcome to scaling.

Too big to be small. Too small to be big. That lovely early momentum dies… and for a lot of businesses it happens around 70 employees. Not because 70 is magical. Because that’s often the point where founder heroics stop working and the business starts demanding a different operating system.

What you did before worked really well. Then one day it didn’t. And you don’t understand why.

It’s because you’re spending your best hours reacting to the business, rather than building the business.

That’s the whole proactive vs reactive problem in one line.

And if you don’t fix it, your company turns into a constant state of “busy” with zero forward momentum.

What “proactive vs reactive” actually means (in the real world)

Let’s bin the self-help definitions and use the only one that matters:

• Reactive time is when your day is controlled by other people’s priorities. Inbox. Client drama. A “quick call”. A “tiny decision”. Immediate issues. Immediate challenges. Immediate problems. All the stuff that involves responding.
• Proactive time is when you choose the work that moves the company forward. Strategy, hiring, systems, process, pricing, positioning, culture, decision-making, big deals, partnerships – the stuff that creates long-term growth.

Or the blunt version:

Reactive time is playing the game.
Proactive time is designing the game so you stop getting punched in the face.

Most founders think they have a “time” problem, but actually it’s a management style problem.

A reactive management style is addicted to urgency. A proactive approach is built on planning ahead, forward thinking, and doing the hard work early so the business gets easier later.

The no man’s land: Why it breaks at 50-100 people

In the early stages, you can be involved in every move. Hell, you often have to be.

You can “just jump in”. You can “just sort it”. You can be the human router for every decision.

That’s basketball. Constant sprinting. Touching everything. Being involved in every play.

Then the business grows, complexity multiplies, and the same behaviour turns into a tax.

Now you’re not the magic ingredient. You’re the choke point.

Scaling turns the game into football. You can’t be involved in every touch. Your job is to shape, decisions, coaching, and creating the space for other people to play.

If you don’t make that shift, you don’t get growth. You get exhausted competence.

The hidden cost of reactive management

Reactive managers don’t wake up thinking, “Today I’ll create negative outcomes.”

They just spend their days dealing with unexpected situations and external factors, one after another, until their calendar is full and their brain is empty.

When you’re mostly reactive:

• You confuse motion with progress.
• You say yes to things you don’t even believe in, because you’re tired.
• You hire badly because you’re desperate for relief.
• You keep doing jobs you swear you “handed off” six months ago.
• You solve symptoms with short term solutions, then act surprised when the root problem comes back.
• You miss opportunities because you’re too busy putting out fires to spot new ideas.

Then you wonder why the business feels heavier every month.

The audit that tells the truth: Colour-code your diary

Here’s the exercise that removes all bullshit in 30 minutes.

Open your calendar. Look back at the last two weeks. And colour-code every block.

• Red work = operational activity, firefighting, reactive behaviour, being the backstop.
• Blue work = customer / revenue.
• Green work = people leadership (one-to-ones, coaching, hiring, keeping employee morale and employee engagement from falling off a cliff).
• Black work = strategy (future-facing thinking, strategic planning, proactive planning, continuous improvement).

Now look at your diary like a grown-up.

Two patterns appear instantly:

1. Leadership teams are often 120–140% committed on paper. They’ve stacked “important initiatives” on top of already full weeks. Then everyone acts surprised when delivery falls apart.
2. CEOs/founders often have little to no black work at all. Zero strategic thinking time. And when they do strategy, it’s “at the weekend”, like it’s a hobby. Either that or they think “I’ll do it when things are quieter,” which is a totally mythical season. Like summer in Newcastle.

If your diary has no black work, you are literally trying to build the future out of leftover time.

Strategy is next year’s profit (and you’re starving it)

If you’re not doing the founder work – big deals, new products, new markets, partnerships, recruiting the top team, building the machine – your business stalls. Not immediately. Slowly. Quietly. But when it hits, everything crashes down in the blink of an eye.

Most founders I meet are doing seven days a week of red work and calling it leadership.

Red work is necessary. But it’s not your job.

At scale, red work belongs with the leadership team and the systems, not trapped in the CEO’s skull.

The biggest lie founders tell themselves

“But Dom, I can’t block out proactive time. The business will implode.”

No. It won’t.

What will happen is worse (and better):

People will be forced to grow up.

And if they don’t, you’ll finally see who needs coaching… and who needs replacing.

Within 90 days, try to get yourself doing a day a week of black work. Protected. Non-negotiable.

Not “when it’s quiet”.
Not “after the board pack”.
Not “once I get through this launch”.

A day a week. That’s the job.

 What a proactive management style focuses on

This is where people get it wrong. They hear “proactive” and think it means “do more”.

It doesn’t.

A proactive management style focuses on making you able to:

• Anticipate problems before they become a crisis.
• Build a solid foundation (clear roles, clear decisions, clear standards).
• Provide resources so team members can actually deliver (time, people, budget, authority).
• Actively listen, so you spot friction early (before it turns into resignation letters or customer churn).
• Open communication, so problems surface as information – not as drama.
• Resource allocation based on impact, not whoever shouts the loudest.
• A mindful approach to your own behaviour (self awareness matters, because your stress becomes everyone else’s operating system).

In other words: proactive means you design the system so you don’t have to be the system.

Reactive means you become the emergency services.

Project management software won’t save you (but it can reveal the truth)

Founders love buying tools because it feels like progress.

They’ll spend £12k a year on project management software to avoid one uncomfortable conversation about priorities.

Look – tools are fine. Use them.

But software doesn’t fix a reactive approach. It just gives your reactive behaviour somewhere new to live.

If your team is drowning in immediate issues, a tool won’t fix it.

What fixes it is clarity:

• what we’re doing
• what we’re not doing
• who owns what
• what “done” looks like
• where the bottlenecks are
• and why the same “unexpected issues” keep turning up every week (spoiler: they’re not unexpected)

The best use of software is to make the truth visible: missed deadlines, overloaded people, confused ownership, and the gap between strategic planning and what actually gets done.

How your time actually shifts

Here’s how you stop being reactive and start being proactive in a scaling business – in the real world, with real humans. All of these steps are completely achievable – they may not be quick fixes, but there’s no reason at all why they can’t be implemented by anyone serious about freeing up their time.

1) Stop doing support. Seriously.

I’ve had CEOs say, with a straight face: “I do the support. It keeps me close to the customer.”

Stay close through proper loops. But don’t be the helpdesk. If you’re personally triaging support, you’re not customer-centric. You’re just the emergency services because you haven’t built a system.

2) Get someone to triage your life

People have this weird hang-up about hiring an EA, as if it’s a gold-plated throne thing. It’s not. It’s an absolutely crucial role for any founder CEO looking to scale. A good EA stops you being the default for every “tiny” decision that slowly eats your week.

If you want to stay focused on proactive strategies, stop donating your attention to everyone else’s immediate challenges.

3) Kill the meetings that exist to make you feel safe

Overcommitted leadership teams don’t fail because they’re lazy. They fail because they’re overscheduled. So before you add another “important initiative”, do this:

Take a five-day week and ask:

• Which meetings do I not need to be in?
• Which meetings don’t need to exist?
• Which meetings are status updates pretending to be leadership?
• Which meetings exist because someone can’t make a decision?

Then be ruthless.

If you don’t create space, nothing changes. You can’t add proactive work to an already full week without removing something.

4) Stop being the middleman in your exec team

Fred complains about Sam. You talk to Sam. You take the answer back to Fred. Congratulations. You’re now the bottleneck and the unofficial company therapist.

Get out of the middle. Coach your exec team as a team. In public. Together. Football teams don’t train alone. They train together. If they can’t handle that? Replace them with people who can.

5) Time blocking for proactive work is not optional

You cannot “to do list” your way into proactive thinking. You need big chunks of uninterrupted time. Which means time blocking. Start small if you must:

• 2 x 90 minutes a week
• then half a day
• then one full day

But it must be real calendar time. Not “I’ll do it later”.

6) Why I hate to-do lists (and why founders keep pretending they help)

A to-do list doesn’t create proactive time. It just helps you feel busy.

Founders don’t need more ticks. They need space to think, make decisions, and build the future.

If you want less stress, stop spending time trying to become a better “task manager” and start spending time designing the work properly.

7) If you must write a list, write outcomes – not tasks

Stop writing “tasks”. Write outcomes. Outcomes can be delegated. Tasks get glued to you.

And when you delegate, do it properly:

• Who owns it
• What good looks like
• When it will be done
• Way: how they plan to do it
• Why not: what are the potential pitfalls, and how could this fail?

That last bit is basically a grown-up version of risk assessments for leadership work. You’re anticipating potential challenges before they blindside you out of nowhere.

8) Estimate effort like an adult (T-shirt sizes are enough)

Founders plan their week like they’ve got a spare Tuesday hidden somewhere. That’s optimism, not scheduling. So use T-shirt sizing for effort: XS / S / M / L / XL / XXL.

Then rank work by impact vs effort.

This is how proactive planning survives contact with reality – because you stop pretending everything is urgent and small.

“But what if I’m needed?”

You will be needed. Of course you will.

The difference is whether you’re needed because you’re genuinely the only person who can do the job…

…or you’re needed because you’ve trained the company to treat you like the grown-up in the room for everything.

Most founders aren’t needed.

They’re requested.

And they keep saying yes, because it feels useful and they like being important.

Then they wonder why they’re trapped.

The punchline

The proactive vs reactive battle is not a personality trait.

It’s a choice you make with your diary.

If your week is designed to be reactive, you will be reactive. If your company is designed to escalate everything to you, it will. If your calendar is a game of meeting Tetris, you’ll spend your life clearing lines and calling it leadership.

Build enough proactive time into the system and everything changes:

• decisions get better
• team performance improves
• employee engagement rises (because people get ownership instead of chaos)
• you stop living in a constant state of urgency
• you reduce missed opportunities
• you get back to building long-term growth

Because proactive management isn’t a motivational concept.

It’s how grown-up companies actually scale.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his new book, Mind Your F**king Business here.