A business with several activities has a governance problem that a single-line business does not. A decision inside one activity, such as hiring, entering a market or choosing a supplier, has consequences for the others that the people making it often cannot see. The question is how to keep each activity independent enough to run well and connected enough to make sensible decisions for the business as a whole.
Our answer is unfashionably simple. The principals of each activity meet every week, the decisions that cross activities are taken there, and anything consequential is written down at the time with the reasoning attached. Decisions inside an activity stay inside it. The meeting is short, because the agenda is limited to what genuinely touches more than one activity, such as commitments above an agreed size, conflicts between clients, and anything that affects the name all four activities share.
The alternative, a board meeting once a quarter with the activities reporting upwards, works when the activities barely touch each other. It works badly when they trade with each other, share an office and serve overlapping markets, because the gap between a question arising and being answered becomes the constraint on the work itself.
The hardest part of any arrangement like this is restraint. A weekly meeting that starts taking operational decisions back into the centre removes the responsibility that made the activities work in the first place. The line between what is operational and what belongs to the business as a whole has to be written down and defended, usually against the people who would most enjoy crossing it.
What makes it work at our size is that the people who meet are the people doing the work. Nobody is briefed by someone else about a business they have not seen, and nobody presents a summary of a problem they will not have to solve. A larger group needs more structure than we do, and it also needs to be honest about how much of that structure exists to inform decisions and how much exists to spread the responsibility for them.
The record matters as much as the meeting. Writing down what was decided, and why, at the time it was decided, is what allows an honest review a year later of the choices that turned out badly. Nobody remembers their own reasoning accurately once they already know the outcome, which is why a written note is worth more than a confident memory.
The test of any governance arrangement is not how it looks on a chart. It is whether a question that crosses two activities gets a clear answer within a week, and whether the answer can be explained to the people it affects. Everything else is decoration.
