Fire Yourself From Your Business

 

If you want to grow your business, there's one person you need to fire right now.

This person is holding you back from scaling up your business to the next level.

So who am I talking about? You probably guessed it.

Yup, I'm talking about you - the Business Owner.

Just think about it for a minute. You probably have so much on your plate that you can't do everything well.

In this business tip, I'm going to share a strategy to help you fire yourself from the things that you don't want to do or really shouldn't be doing. What I'm saying is, fire yourself from the non-strategic elements of your business.

What I've seen is that the business owners and particularly, maybe founders of the company, they're still hanging on to some of the tasks that they used to do when they started their business.

Well, whether it’s sales or some level of service delivery. This is something that they've always done. They’re probably good at it or they really enjoy doing it. But what they don't realize is that right now it might be slowing them down because we're not focusing on the strategic and the areas of the business that bring us the most value.

You see, we all only have 24 hours in a day and we need to make sure we're focusing on the things that truly matter in our business and not doing the things that we can actually delegate and have some of our team members do.

So how do we break this pattern?

Here's a three-step process on how to fire yourself and become more strategic in your business.

The first thing that we need to do is we need to identify what these non-strategic things are that we're still engaged in that are slowing us down.

Are you still involved in service delivery? Are you still doing some sales?
Or maybe you're just estimating? Whatever you find yourself doing that is not strategic we need to create a list of these things that are slowing you down.

Once we have this list, the second step is to prioritize them to see which one we need to get off our plate first. It could be the one that's taking up the most amount of time or it can be the one that's really the least valuable thing that we should be doing.

Once we have the list, we need to review it with our team. We need to explain to them what we're doing. Let them know that you need to get this, and this — off our plate. Let them know that it's our number one priority and we need their help to get this done.

Once you delegate it, you're going to find that you might need to adjust some job descriptions and let them know the expected outcomes. Maybe your team needs to have a bit more training but most importantly you need to identify who's going to take this off your plate and you need to have a training plan in place for them from the start.

So you just can't hand it off to them and expect them to run with it. You need to have a bit of training and coaching, and invest some time to really off-board this task and onboard them so they could really run with it successfully. You might even be tempted to skip this part.

If you do, you're going to be really taking it over again very soon. You know, thinking, “Hey, no one could do this as well as me” and “what was I thinking when I did this in the first place” and you're going to have no one to blame, but yourself, for not training them properly.

Now, the third thing and this is really the most important thing is to create an official document that says “Hey, I’m never doing estimates.” Let them know that you're going to guide them and train them through doing your estimates but you're not going to do estimates anymore and have your team officially fire you from that role.

Actually, we had this action coach-client that was really determined to get a few tasks off their plate in their business. And this was really a high-growth business. Their team had a little fun with one of their strategic planning days and we drew up this proclamation and fired their boss from the two or three things that were not strategic.

The point is, get your team involved and have a little bit of fun with it, too. When you actually fire yourself, now you got accountability to your team to not do that activity anymore.

Now you have this proclamation - you signed it, you put it on the wall, and when someone catches you doing the non-strategic work, they got permission to call you out and say, “Hey, weren't you fired from that job? Now go, do your real job!” Have some fun with this! It will really help make it stick for you and help your team be accountable, right?

So even though, you know, we're having fun with this know that this is really an important step because it keeps you from spinning your wheels, and now it keeps you focusing on the things that only you can do to bring value to your business.

If you're not sure how to get unstuck and determine where you need to be fired in your business, schedule a free strategy call with me, and let's have a chat. I'm always here to help.