How To Build A Business You Don’t Need to Escape From (Systems)

Dominic Monkhouse2 January 2026

If you think you’ve built a successful business but you can’t take three weeks off, you haven’t built a business, you’ve just got a job with shit holidays.

Most founder-CEOs are stuck playing basketball when they need to be playing football. The ball always goes through you. Every decision, every problem, every customer complaint. You’re the pivotal player, and if you’re honest, you probably secretly love it. But you can’t scale that way. I’m Dominic Monkhouse. I scaled two UK firms. Rackspace and Peer-1. To £30m ARR in five years. I’ve coached over 100 founder-CEOs through no-man’s-land (that 50-100 employee phase where it gets really hard), 12 of whom have gone on to have fantastic exits. I’m going to show you how to create a Target Operating Model that lets you take holidays without your phone ringing every ten minutes.

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:

0:00. Introduction

1:15. The Basketball vs Football Problem

3:10. Finding the Real Problem: The Theory of Constraints

4:12. The Target Operating Model (TOM)

5:28. Colour It In: The RAG Score Exercise

8:03. The CEO Can Only Do One Job: Being the CEO

THE BASKETBALL VS FOOTBALL PROBLEM: Most leadership teams operate like basketball. Fast, chaotic, the ball always goes through you. You’re the best player, and you probably secretly love it. To scale, you need football: players making their own decisions, taking accountability, and the manager staying off the pitch being strategic.

THE THEORY OF CONSTRAINTS: From Eli Goldratt’s The Goal: in any system, there’s one thing limiting performance. Think of a motorway with one lane closed. Doesn’t matter how fast cars go elsewhere, the constraint dictates speed. Any improvement not at the constraint is wasted effort.

THE TARGET OPERATING MODEL (TOM): Get your team to draw your quote-to-cash process and identify who’s accountable for each function. Groups will draw different versions, showing you’re not aligned. Then colour it with a RAG score (Red, Amber, Green). The person who owns the function doesn’t get to colour it. The rest of the team does. First time they’ll say something critical to each other’s faces instead of bitching outside the room.

THE SUPPORT MANAGER’S REVELATION: A Support Manager at one client was fighting fires, felt like she was failing. Team coloured her function Amber. Then she looked at the whole diagram: “I can never make Support green on my own. Marketing and Partners are red, so Sales close shit-fit customers who land in my lap with wrong expectations. Unless we fix marketing, I’ll never make support green.” That’s the moment everything changes. Team stops celebrating individual wins while the business loses. Who owned Marketing? The CEO. The CEO can only own one job: being the CEO. When they’re also Head of Sales or Marketing, it blocks accountability. Week three of holiday is when you get clarity. If you can’t build a business that allows for that, you can’t scale.

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