About seven months ago, I joined a business community called Entrepreneurly. One of the first things they do when you join is hand you a copy of Traction by Gino Wickman, a book that introduced me to the concept of the business integrator.. I started reading it and kept stopping to highlight things.
Wickman talks about two types of people in a business: the visionary and the integrator. The visionary sees the big picture. The ideas, the possibilities, the destination. The integrator figures out how to actually get there.
I put the book down and thought: I’ve been an integrator my entire career. I just didn’t have the word for it.
Around the same time I was reading Traction, I went through a DISC profile assessment as part of leadership coaching at one of my other organizations. My profile came back DC: Dominance-Conscientious. Results-focused, accurate, skeptical, detail-oriented. Someone who doesn’t just see the destination but can map the entire route from here to there.
That combination of the book, the assessment, and years of building systems in real organizations turned into one of those aha moments that reframes everything you already knew about yourself.
The moment it clicked
I’m an integrator. And most of the small business owners I work with are visionaries. That’s not a flaw. It’s actually a really powerful combination, once you know it.
What a visionary looks like in practice
Here’s what I see most often when I sit down with a new client.
They have ideas. Genuinely good ones. But there’s a gap between where they are and where they want to go, and they’re not sure how to close it. Sometimes the gap is from point A to point B. Sometimes it’s from point A all the way to point Z. I can often see the whole path, even when they can’t yet.
Or it’s something subtler. A business owner doing the same thing over and over, not quite realizing it’s a pattern, because they’re too close to it. No systems in place because no one has stepped back far enough to see that a system is what’s missing.
One of the things I do with every client is take notes during our sessions and send them back afterward. You’d be surprised how often someone reads those notes and says: I didn’t realize we kept coming back to that. That moment, when a pattern becomes visible for the first time, is often where the real work begins.
What an integrator actually does
People sometimes ask me how I’m different from a business coach or a consultant. Honestly, the lines aren’t always clean. There are times when I’m doing all three in the same engagement. But here’s how I think about it.
A coach asks questions and helps you find answers from within yourself. A consultant looks at problems and gives you a roadmap. An integrator builds and completes the systems with you.
That last part matters. Not handing you a plan and wishing you luck. Actually partnering with you, thinking it through together, figuring out the process, and making sure what we build works in your real business with your real constraints.
My measure for whether a system is working is simple: is it making your life easier? If it’s not making things easier, it’s not working. That’s it.
Who I’m not the right fit for
I want to be clear about this, because I think it’s important.
Not every business owner needs an integrator. I had a discovery call recently where it became clear within thirty minutes that what the person actually needed was an administrative assistant. Someone to handle day-to-day tasks, not someone to build systems around them. I referred them elsewhere. That was the right call.
I had another conversation where the business owner mentioned they already had someone on their team who could support them in this role, but they didn’t want to be a bother. We talked it through and realized that leaning on that person wasn’t a bother at all. It was actually the smarter, more cost-effective move. I told them that too.
I’m not interested in providing a service that isn’t needed. If you need something different, I’ll tell you.
So, do you need an integrator?
You might, if you have more ideas than bandwidth to execute them. If your business keeps running into the same walls. If you know where you want to go but the path from here to there feels unclear. If you’re doing everything yourself because there’s no system to hand things off to.
You probably don’t, if you already have someone in your corner doing this work. Even if that person is you.
If you’re not sure, that’s what the discovery call is for. Thirty minutes, no pressure, no pitch. We’ll figure it out together.
Stacy Derrick │ Founder, Stacy Derrick Creative, LLC │ stacyderrickcreative.com
If this was helpful and you want to support the work, you can buy me a coffee.
You may be wondering — did AI help write this? Yes, and I want to be upfront about that. The process, the client work, and the thinking behind every step are mine and they were worth reading before AI touched a word. AI just helped me pull it together more cleanly.
That is a system working the way it should.
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