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As your business grows and becomes more successful, it also becomes more complex. I don’t mean that negatively, it’s just a fact of life.
This extra complexity creates challenges that all business owners need to notice, accept and respond to. Otherwise, you’re going to stay stuck and find work overwhelming.
You can’t do it all
Everyone knows that “they can’t do it all” and yet everyone fights it tooth and nail.
When you’re a relatively small firm, as the owner, your job is to delegate the tasks you’re no good at. However, as you grow in size the owner’s job is to delegate business functions that you are good at. For example:
- Marketing and communications
- Client Advice
- Finance
- Operations
- Compliance
You might continue to contribute to each of these areas – and ultimately the buck stops with you the business owner – but you don’t have to be the person responsible for performing these functions on a day-to-day basis.
Do you know how to get good at this? Hire great people and get out of their way.
The only function that a business owner should hang onto is business strategy (i.e. direction and vision).
I’m struggling to think of any others that are a “must-keep”.
The truth is, there is hardly anything you need to ‘own’ personally. Assemble a team that ensures all of the key tasks and functions get done.
Think “who, not how”.
Who can do a specific task or a function within your firm? Identifying and nurturing talent is your job as a leader.
Heather Robertson Fortner, CEO of Signature FD in the US said that when she was appointed CEO the business owner said to her, “Heather I won’t pay you for anything other than developing the next generation of talent. But you have to promote them and give them chances and let them fail.”
Plan A is obviously to hire people who “don’t need to be told” because they’re experts in their particular role. However, if you can’t find those types of people, then your job is to train and develop the existing team until they reach that standard.
Even the training and development and the managing of your team can be delegated to a great practice manager or operations manager.
Yes, it’s scary
When you let go of more and more aspects of your business there is an element of fear; business owners are by nature control freaks.
However, not knowing how a particular process works, not knowing how to use a piece of technology, or not knowing how to do the role of each and every person in your business is to be celebrated, not feared.
As one of my clients said to me recently, “Richard Branson can’t fly a plane.”
Do your job
I’m an American Football fan and on a team there are a load of specialist positions. Tom Brady, the now-retired quarterback and 7 time Superbowl winner is famous for telling his teammates, “Do your job.”
What he means is that if everyone is covering for someone else, they can’t do their own job properly. Yet, if every person takes responsibility for doing their own job 100%, that allows the rest of the team to do the same. That’s when you get high performance.
It’s exactly the same in a business, it’s about ownership and trust. People owning the job they’ve been tasked with, and trusting that others will do what they said they would do.
In a financial planning business that means handing on work to the next person in the process in perfect condition. Not making them do part of the job again because stuff has been left out or has not been done to the standard required.
The business owner’s job is to ensure that everyone understands why this approach matters and to hire and develop people that can work to that standard. It’s not the business owner’s job to jump back on the tools every time something is not done to the standard.
Fix the real issue, don’t just treat the symptom.
You can do this
You can scale your business and have it run like clockwork, but only if you’re focused on the right issues.
Working harder, or longer, or taking pride in the fact you can do every job in your business is a fool’s errand. Stop trying to do it all and start assembling a team of people who can perform specific tasks with genuine skill.
Do that and you’ll find that not only do you feel more in control when delegating business functions but your focus can swing fully to where it should be, the direction and vision of your business and how you make it grow.