Delegating for Success

The Small business show episode 372 for Wednesday, March 23, 2022. Greetings folks and welcome here to the Small business show at BusinessShow Co where we are small businessing together. All of us. Not just me and that guy, but you and me and that guy. We're all doing this together, small businessing every single week. Sponsors for this episode include rate tracker from skysale@sky-sale.com ratetracker and hunterdouglas.com SBS where you can go to get your free Style Get Smarter design guide. You can get all those links, of course, if you remember them, that's great. If you don't, visit our show notes at BusinessShow Co and then you can just click them from there. It's great. Or subscribe to our mailing list. And then you get not just the sponsor links in your email, but you get all the links of all the things we talk about in the episode delivered to you and a reminder that the episode is up. It's a great way to do it. We'll talk more about those sponsors in depth in a few minutes here. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And here in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. How are you, man?

I'm doing well. I'm, you know, shouting shaken through crazy days, but I like that. Productive days. Yeah, that's great.

Yeah. There's nothing worse than not having something to or thinking what should I work on? There's nothing, you know what I mean? I love being driven by the projects and things that are going on and creating your task sheet and what's going on. Looking at your two did list at the end of the day, seeing everything. Got that you knocked out.

We talk a lot about that here on the show as sort of as a given, if you will. Right. Like you have your to did list, you have your things, you know that you need to figure out what you're gonna do. I've always done that because I'm petrified of needing to go get a job.

Unemployable, Dave.

I am unemployable. Right. It's not about you, it's about me. Right. Like for people who are employable, it's fantast, to be fair. Everybody that I've I had worked for Citibank and GE Capital and Deloitte and Touche, like big name companies and they all loved me. I hated working for all those places. Not the people, but just the bureaucracy of it. I just can't do it. So I am Driven to ensure that I have, like, it's just a part of me now. And it didn't really dawn on me how important that was and how active I actually was about creating my own task lists and creating things to do that furthered essentially my mission of not having to go get a job. That really is what fueled me, especially in the early years. And when I say early years, I mean, you know, up until maybe 18 months ago with, with my various businesses at, you know, different degrees at different times, it didn't hit me until probably three years ago. I was involved in what turned out to be a fiery dumpster fire disaster of a business partnership, and it came home to roost, or it began to come home to roost. The lawsuit followed on, but came home to roost. And one day when I was on the phone with one of my business partners who had been a silent partner and then decided they wanted to be like, the leader and CEO of this business, which was fine. I had no interest in being the leader and CEO of this business, although other people were convincing me to be. And, and, and this person was doing a terrible job at, at being a leader and, and CEO. And so I, I, you know, got my partner on the phone, I had several partners, but I got this particular partner on the phone and said to them, like, you know, it's not working out. You know, you. You're not doing the things that are the right things to be. To be doing as a, as a leader. And they said to me, well, you can't fault me for this because no one told me what to do.

And employee mentality.

That was an employee mentality, right? And it, it just didn't. It never dawned on me that this is how a problem might manifest itself until I heard that statement. And it was just a very difficult phone call to make. Like, I do not like telling people that they are effectively. I didn't say the word incompetent, but I know that's how it comes across. Like, I'm aware of how difficult a message this is to hear, and therefore, because actually I'm far more empathic than you, you folks might think I sort of have to work really hard not to buy into it because otherwise I would just be frozen and paralyzed all day. But I know how difficult it was. It was a super difficult phone call to make for all those reasons. And when they said that, it was like, oh, well, then I absolutely did the right thing making this phone call. Like, it instantly justified. Everything was like, right, if you don't understand that as the leader, you are the one that decides what you and the rest of us are going to do and then executes on those things. And if your execution or the decisions are wrong, then the company suffers. It's just how it be. The buck stops with you.

Well, I think lots of people fall in love with titles.

That's what happened here. In retrospect, I realized that's what happened here. Right.

Yeah. Without understanding. And they want to make it part of their story on the CEO, I'm the whatever and the president, this kind of thing. And I had a partnership go sideways because a partner who thought their title was kind of a. It was just a negative connotation to that. When we suggested, here's your title, you do this. And they said, well, I'm an owner and I want people to know. I said, oh, okay, you can tell them. But we do need a title. Chief Technology Officer.

Right.

That's your. It's in your wheelhouse. But yeah, that's an employee mentality.

It's funny, that was actually in that particular business venture that died a fiery death. That was my title in that. And I was happy with that title. I didn't need anyone to know that I had any ownership in the project at all other than when, you know, we sold the business, which never happened.

Yeah. You just want to let your bank know.

Yeah, I want to let my bank know. That's right.

Everybody else is irrelevant.

Everyone else was irrelevant. That's exactly it. Yeah. I want to make sure the people writing the checks at that one moment in time are aware of where the. To distribute the proceeds. That's the only time that matters. Yeah, yeah.

And it, and it is that we. We've mentioned it here. It's that do you have a. An E mentality or an er mentality?

Employee, employer.

Yeah. And you know, it's just so true. Even now, be like, oh, you know, what do you do? What's. What was your career? And it's like, I just, you know, I own a bunch of businesses. It's not like you go into a laundry list of, well, I own this company. Do this. No, you know, and if you need to do that, I think it's a. It's a problem. You're falling in love with the.

Fall in love with titles. That's it. Yeah. I, I certainly fell victim to that early on and thankfully for a short period of time, you know, in the beginning of a few of our businesses. But I remember the day that I was signing a contract. It was just an ad contract. At Backbeat, you know, which we do well as often as we can. Right. Like, that's our. That's the bread and butter of our business, is. Is, you know, you know, selling ads. And so I had, you know, I had to sign a contract that was doing a PDF, signature, whatever, like you do. And this was, you know, 15 years ago, maybe more, and there was a line for title on there. And I had always put, you know, president or CEO or whatever it was. And this one day, it kind of stopped me. I'm like, why do I want people to know I'm the president or CEO or owner? I don't actually that that might be bad. And so I wrote director of operations.

And I like that.

Right. And it was like, it's perfectly vague. It's. It's not misleading. I certainly at the time was director of operations in addition or as a byproduct of being CEO, like, but, you know, and now all I do is I put publisher on there. That's it.

I like that, too.

Yeah, it's. It's far less informative. And, you know, people, people that do business with us know very quickly what the corporate structure is and who the players are and all that stuff. And they know that I'm the owner of the business and it's fine. I don't. Yeah, I'm not against people knowing, but I don't. I'm not. Your comment. I like this. Beware falling in love with titles. I mean, I've fallen in love with the publisher title because it's super convenient.

Well, I like that, too. I use the word founder because. Yeah, I'm. I'm the founder. I'm a founder.

You are.

But it doesn't mean I run the business. Doesn't mean I'm the president. Doesn't mean I make all the decisions. I may, you know, I'm going to go find the people to build this thing and all that kind of stuff. So somebody told me years ago about titles, and I don't know how relevant it is this conversation, but maybe a little bit. It was. You should always pick a title that impresses people, but you should never be impressed by titles.

Ah, I like that. Okay. Yeah. That's fair.

Is it kind of like you're on the other side of the velvet rope here? It doesn't mean, you know, it's just like, what you get done and, yeah.

The buck stops with you, no matter what you call yourself. Yeah, it doesn't matter.

That's it. Yeah.

Doesn't matter.

And since it stops with You. You know, we always talk about systems here on the show, how to be successful, you know, and create systems. And a key part of creating a system of success, in my opinion, is all about delegating. And I'd love to talk about it on the show. I have, as you can imagine, a lot of things to say about mistakes I've made in this area and things I've learned and.

No, I'd like to talk about it, too. I love having employees because it allows me to grow what we can do with the business.

Yeah, that's nice.

I hate having employees because I have to manage them. And I have been super, super fortunate to cherry pick some fantastic employees. And if they're not fantastic, they don't stay because I can't deal with it. I'm a terrible delegator. I'm definitely gonna learn the most from this episode, but I understand the value of not having to do all the work myself because there's only so many hours in the day. And quite frankly, I'm not good at everything. In fact, I'm only good at a few things. Managing people is not one of them. But I'm getting better at that because it's a necessity as a byproduct of not wanting to go work for someone else. But, yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah, that should be interesting.

It should, and I want to have it. The next thing that I would like to do, though, is I want to talk about our two sponsors for this episode, if that's all right with you, Mr. Gene.

Yeah, let's do it, man.

All right. First up is Rate Tracker, presented by skysale Solutions, your trusted payments partner. Listen, we've talked about it on the show here before, right? Payment processing is confusing as it is, and that's intentional because a lot of these companies out there want to hide things like the rates and the fees associated with accepting credit card payments as payment. What if there was a free solution that allowed you to easily and automatically understand your bott online credit card processing rates and fees every month? Well, Rate Tracker is a free and simple way for you as per. As a person out there who's small businessing every day to know your cost to accept payments so you don't get lied to or taken advantage of by your payment processor. You can tell why we were super happy to take on Rate Tracker as a sponsor here, right? This sort of fits with what we do here. In fact. Exactly fits. Too many times payment processors have intentionally left merchants in the dark. And as a responsible business Owner Rate Tracker is your tool to level the playing field. Take back your hard earned money. Rate Tracker makes it super simple for you to understand your costs to accept payments and provides you with free access to trusted payment experts like skysale Solutions that can give you free advice on how to optimize your payment acceptance program. Visit sky-sale.com Rate Tracker to sign up for the only service that's dedicated to helping you know your numbers, keep track of your payment processing costs and alert you immediately if there's ever a rate increase. You've got to go check this out again. It's sky-sale.com rate tracker or you can just click the link in the Show Notes at Business Show Co. Our thanks to Rate Tracker presented by skysale Solutions here for sponsoring this episode. Who doesn't love to live well? To be perfectly at ease in comfort and in style? Hunter Douglas can help you do just that. With their innovative window shade designs, gorgeous fabrics and control systems so advanced they can be scheduled to automatically adjust to their optimal position throughout the day. You got to go check this out, right? You're going to go to hunterdouglas.com SBS and you get to see the way the shades diffuse harsh sunlight to cast this glow across your room. You get to see how you you can enjoy the view outside the window while protecting your privacy inside. And they'll also let you learn about the superior insulation that their shades provide, keeping you warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer, lowering utility bills. These are things you're going to want to know about. And then because you're listening to podcasts, you understand tech stuff. You want to tap into Hunter Douglas Power View technology and that way you can set your shades to automatically reposition for the perfect balance of light, privacy and insulation morning, noon and night. I am super stoked to be able to check these things out soon here and we will report back when we do. You can live beautifully with Hunter Douglas, enjoying greater convenience, enhanced style and increased comfort in your home throughout the day. To do that, visit hunterdouglas.com SBS today for your free Style Get Smarter Design Guide with fresh takes, creative ideas and smart solutions for dressing your windows. That's hunterdouglas.com SBS for your free design guide. And our thanks to Hunter Douglas for sponsoring this episode. Shannon Jean, you are my only hope. You're going to teach me how best to delegate and hopefully those of you listening, some of this is going to rub off too. Really what Shannon's going to do is teach you how to delegate and I'm hoping that some of it rubs off on me. I'll share some of my. My failures as we step through this.

I don't claim to be a fantastic delegator, but I. Looking back as I did some research for this story, there's a lot of things that I've learned over the years, and I want to talk about them because, you know, you can't do it. All right.

No, I know that. Yeah. I've learned that lesson. Right?

Yeah. You don't want that superhero complex. Like, the entire company revolves around me, and everything has to go through me. And you will quickly become the log jam and slow down, you know, growth of your. Of your business, and everybody will resent you for it, and it's not the way you want to run your business.

No.

And, you know, we talk about the E Myth book all the time, and you should definitely read that. And one of the things that we love about the E. Myth is in the beginning, you create this org chart for your company, and you're putting, you know, boxes for all these different roles. And, you know, you may put your own name in every single role. Right. And that's just the way. And that's fine.

Sure.

Because it's helping to identify everything you do. But you then have to just keep constantly. As you start to bring people in, grow your team. How do I start replacing myself? How do I delegate this? Who can take this over?

And I want to stop you right there asking that question. How do I replace myself? That's a mindset.

That's scary.

It's super scary. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you trust me when I say you want to adopt this look. We held onto Mac observer for 23 years. Right. And when we sold it, it was at a point where, for the most part, we had replaced ourselves, at least in terms of the daily, like, what it took to produce the site. And so when, you know, when a buyer approached us, we were like, wait, wait, wait. We can do this. It's ready. We weren't ready, but we got ourselves there very quickly. But, yeah, asking that question, that's huge. Yeah, it is.

And one of the first things on my list to talk about delegating as kind of a part of a system for success is delegating helps you to think like a boss. And, you know, that's kind of a funny comment. People say, you know, this kind of stuff, but it's really a meaningful shift of how you frame and how you view yourself. What's the framework for looking at yourself? And by learning to delegate, especially if you can do it on a small scale to begin with, it helps you in so many different aspects of leadership and management. You know, you learn to trust people more.

Sure.

You learn to hire better because you know you're going to give them these tasks. You got to talk about it more. It allows you. It teaches you how to identify strengths and weaknesses in the people around you. I mean, and much, much more. We could do a whole show on this, how you think about it.

Yeah.

Thinking like a boss is just, you know, in a good way. You're going to have to delegate. That's just part of your growth. That's just part of the system. And as you start to do, you know, whoever your first employee is, if you're just getting started or if you've got tons of employees already, you just have to give it up. And one of the things you're going to hear me talk about over and over on this show is that to really gain power and to build wealth, you have to give up control. And that's a hard thing. All of us.

No, dude. No, no, no. Okay, look, I'm out. Listen, folks.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mr. Shannon Jean's going to finish the episode here. I can't be a part of nobody. You're right.

Creating wealth for yourself. It's your employees too. Right. You want to.

That's fair.

That's a good way to look at it, this company. Not just enrich yourself, enriching everyone around you. And you want to get more powerful, you need to give it up, give up control. You know, I always used to joke around, you know, the people that are really powerful, they don't carry a phone with them. They're not attached to it. They don't have to be checking things all the time because they've given up and it works and their system is working and they can check in on it from time to time.

It's true. The most success that I've had with this is starting a business with out ever controlling anything. I mean, maybe I'm in control. Like. Like at the end of the day, I'm one of the powers that be. Right. But never once being in charge of making sure something gets done or responsible as the primary. At the end of the day, the buck stops, you know, with the owners. So we're always responsible for getting things done, but not being the one on point for doing anything. If you can do that and that, like, very rarely are you able to do that with your first business, but.

Right.

You know, but I.

Getting those Opportunities is great, but I.

You know, I'm thinking about a business. There's this one business that I mentioned on this show and I'm cagey about for a variety of reasons. Hopefully later this year I can explain why I'm cagey about it. It has nothing to do with the business. It has to do with the wishes of my business partners, really. And I'm happy to honor them. It's totally fine. But that business was started in a way that allowed me to be part of the ownership structure and not part of most of the day to day stuff. Yeah, yeah.

You're not a managing partner.

Actually, I'm a managing partner. We are involved in the management of it, but not in the running of.

Day to day operations.

Yeah, the day to day operations. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you know, as you, as you look back and as I look back on starting my first company, you know, I never thought, oh, I'm going to get this and I'm going to start another business and do this. I mean, I was just struggling to get my first business off the ground and everything.

Sure, yeah. Of course.

As you, you know, bring people on and you become more comfortable with giving up control and giving more responsibility to people, it opens again. I come back to this framework in your head of, oh, wow, you know, I could. This business is doing its thing. I don't have to be involved every second. And so if I delegate more, may I can go try something else and learn from that and do different things. And looking back, it's much easier to look back than forward. That made a big difference in my life and in my career and my story, which I'd love to talk about here every week.

Right. That's what we do. Yeah, yeah.

So the other thing it does by delegating it, it allows you to take back your time. You know, you need time to work on your business and not just in your business. Right. When you start delegating, you recapture that time to guide your company, guide your team, walk around, connect with people on another level. Because you're not, you know, dealing with every bit of minutiae and responding to every quote, emergency or putting out every fire. You get that. And it's a luxury. And if you think about it as a luxury that you're gaining back for yourself, I guarantee you'll learn how to delegate more.

Okay, so this is, I'm pausing because you're causing my mind to grind here. We talk about brain hacks on this show all the time and you just laid out perhaps the Most important one ever. And that is training yourself that not having a job to do is a luxury.

Absolutely.

Oh, no, you're right about it.

Your time is the most valuable thing. Right. You never get it back.

But that's the right way for us control freaks. Or one of the right ways. I don't want to say it's the only right way, but that is a way for us control freaks to wrap our heads around the story we want to tell. I like this. Okay.

Yeah, it works if you can do it. It's not.

No, it's not easy.

Maybe it's easy for some of our listeners and we'd love to hear your hacks and tips for feedbackusinessshow.com delegating. Yeah, come tell us. But those two things are related to what delegating does for you. Allows you to learn how to think like a boss. Allows you to learn the luxury of taking your time back and, quote, not having something to do so you can think about your business. So you can walk around and talk to people and ask them what they're working on, so you can cook lunch and barbecue for them on Fridays because you're not running around like crazy. And it also gives you an air of control, even if everything is going to hell in the background. You being calm and walking around and having the time to take a breath, it helps your company tremendously because you're the rock. You have to be the rock when bad somebody happens.

Somebody has to. Yeah, yeah. And you probably already know that as a business owner, like when the emergency happens and everybody is freaking out, you know, they find out about the problem before you do or even if you find out about it, you know, whatever, you know, everybody's freaking out. Most business owners who I know and have talked to are the first ones to say, all right, look, let's just breathe. We're going to figure this out. We're going to get through it. It's fine. And then you get through it. I'm guessing that's true of most people here listening to this show already.

I would think so.

You've already been there at least once and perhaps it's been once today. Right? Like, it's how it goes.

That's right.

Because. And that's why you're able to do this, is because you get you, you know, it's not your first rodeo with it.

And we just. We did that episode on the. Having a problem solving mentality.

Yeah, exactly. That's part of it, right? That's part of it. Correct. And so. And if you are listening to this and haven't started your first business yet, you will get there. These things will happen. But they probably already happened in your personal life or even in your business life as an employee. And you've been the one to be like, okay, we can get through this, it's fine. And that's that problem solving mentality. Exactly. Yeah. And just being the voice of calm, I don't want to say the voice of reason. It's not that people who are upset about whatever's going on are unreasonable. That's the wrong way to look at it. But you have to be that rock. Like, yeah, we're going to get through this. We're going to figure it out. Let's breathe. You know, when I. I'm often reminded of what pilots are trained to do, and when you have a problem with your plane, the first thing you do is nothing.

I like that.

Well, any action you take could be irreversible. So you have altitude, presuming you have altitude. If you don't have altitude, you are trained to do different things. But, you know, you've got a little bit of altitude. Altitude buys you opportunity. Okay, great, there's a problem. The engine is out and. Okay, do we try to restart it? What are the things that we can try to do here? And let's think through them. Let's take 30 seconds, look through all of the problems. Okay. Before we even take one step, you know, is fuel pouring out the back of the airplane or the side of the airplane, whatever. If that's the case, maybe attempting to restart the engine is not the best, you know, first thing to try.

You know, I like that. That's a powerful statement. First thing you should do is nothing.

Is nothing, right? No. When I learned that about pilots, and I'd been through, you know, a few things in my business life or whatever, and it was. When I learned that, it was like, right, this is great advice for a lot of places, but definitely up there.

For problem solving? Yes, for problem solving. What's the first step? Do nothing.

Do nothing. Don't just think.

Stop.

Right? Stop. Breathe. Get yourself into a mindset where you can think and then think. And of course, pilots are trained to not really have to think. There's a lot of common problems that could happen. And so you're just taught, okay, if this is the problem, here are the steps you go through. If this is the problem, here are the steps. You might not have that playbook in front of you for your business. So the first thing you do is nothing. Just breathe.

Yeah, I like it.

Yeah.

So think like a boss. Take back your time. Those are things that impact you. Next. Couple of things I want to discuss are the benefits of delegating to the people around you. Right?

Okay.

The first is it builds trust with your team. Right. When you delegate tasks to your employees, or maybe they're consultants, contractors, partners, you're showing them that you trust them. You. And you know that they can handle the respect. You believe that they can handle those responsibilities of whatever task you're talking about.

Right.

And you'll see, and even if you start small, your people are going to perform better when you give, when you. I'm sorry, when they know you trust them, they want that responsibility, they want that autonomy. At least the people that are going to really help you grow your company over.

Right? Right.

They want that. So building trust. And everybody will watch you do this.

Right.

Not just the people you're delegating to, but, you know, giving up that control. It builds part of your culture of, you know, of your business. The other thing, it's really important, and we've talked about it a lot on the show, is that delegating helps you develop people around you, you know, professionally. Right. When I used to walk around the office, one of my favorite questions to ask all the time was, well, what job do you want next? What do you want to do next? And you know, people, especially new hires, they look at me like, what am I, Am I going to lose my job? It's like, no, but aren't you going to get bored doing the same thing in a couple of years or whatever? And what do you want to do next? And how do you want the manager's job? Because I would like him to go do something else. Maybe we're going to start another company. Maybe somebody should take my job because, you know, I'm not the best person to be here anymore. So you need to be constantly training your people. Right. For future opportunities. And when you delegate them and start giving them those responsibilities, they build new skills, they add to their talent stack. And as you, as you delegate the people, they'll learn more, be more comfortable taking on bigger and bigger challenges.

Right.

They'll be excited about them because they know you, you know, they know how to do it.

Okay, wait, this is interesting because as someone who has always run small companies, maximum 10 employees. Well, I guess at computer nerds, we had closer to 30, but for the most part, the businesses that I've run are single digit employees. And there is fear in me as the business owner I don't want to say a generic business owner. I will say for me, in asking people, what job do you want next? Because there may not be other jobs here. Right. Like currently. Like there isn't. Right, currently. But as you're saying this and as I'm in the right mindset to sort of process it, I'm realizing, wait, why not let the people that work for me define a new job that would be theirs next? Because if they can convince me, like, they're gonna. They. But not. They're going to. They do see things differently than I do. Of course they do. They, like, they're different people, number one, but number two, they're in a, literally in a different position in the company. Right. So they're going to see things that I don't and see holes that I don't and see opportunities that I don't. Now, I may not agree with their opportunities. If somebody says, well, you know, the, the next thing I want to do is be the person that sits around and thinks about great recipes all day, like, okay, well, that. I don't see how that fits in our company. So try to convince me or, but let's move on. But giving them the opportunity to define a new role for themselves next, that's like, there's a little bit. It's a little bit scary only because it's the unknown. But otherwise, like, what's the problem with that?

And you can identify, like, I would ask this question the guys in the warehouse, and they were kind of entry level positions, and I often felt compelled to go out and tell them how important their role was because they were the last point of contact that the customer would have.

Sure.

Because they were packaging things and all this kind of stuff. So I really wanted them to get that mindset how important the packaging was and the labeling and all this. I'm kind of a nut about packaging. But I noticed one guy was just a great artist, you know, and he was doing some, you know, amazing stuff. And I could see it in his, you know, workstation, all this kind of stuff. And then he painted like the back of a computer, a laptop, and a case that we had laying around. I was like, dude, that's incredible. You know, why don't we start a business? You want to be a shipping clerk, you know, for the rest of your life and. Or you want to be an artist, you know, and so trying to identify different skills, you don't, you just don't know. You don't know what people know, and you really don't know what they want to do because they're not honest with you until they trust you. So as you give them and empower them through, like, delegating and you creating this culture around you, you'd be amazed at the opportunities. Back to your point. You really nailed it. The opportunities that people will present to you if you pay a little attention to them.

Right, right. Yeah. That's the key. Yeah. Pay a little.

You can't. Yeah, yeah. And you can't do it if you don't have any time. If you're just running around. All this kind of stuff. So delegating, you know, really important. And a quick story. You know, we had a massive project that hit us, you know, after. And I had people working for me 13, 14, 15 years.

Sure.

And this massive project that hit us, I could just see their skill set and their talent stack of how they just jumped in. I wasn't even here. I was in Hawaii on vacation when this opportunity came up.

Wow.

And I can remember jumping on the phone and talking to, you know, this team. Okay, can you guys. How do we do this? How do we do that? I didn't even know where we were going to put all this stuff. And there, you know, and the message I got was, hey, enjoy your vacation. We're going to figure it out. You brought the deal. You managed the finances of everything. Just get it here.

Let us. Yeah, let us get it done. Yeah, yeah.

Those people, those, you know, part of our team, they could never have done that had they not had the power over time and learned and taken on these different challenges. That's how.

That's the. Yeah, that's the people that feel like they have some autonomy. To your point before, like, it. You couldn't have started their autonomy on, you know, that moment of that day.

Yeah, no, exactly. It doesn't work in headline.

Wait, what? You know, you're not here and you're back. Yeah, yeah. You'd come back and there would be nobody left. Yep.

And I've seen it, you know, that's the power of. Of delegating, that kind of stuff, you know, and there's people way, way better at it than I am that build huge, huge companies that. That just give up. They give up control. You said something on last week's show when we recorded about delegating to. To do things you don't know how to do a little bit.

Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.

And I have a hard time.

That's why Backbeat media was able to get started, to be perfectly honest.

Awesome.

I was super inexperienced at Being a business owner, I was plowing forward with things. I was a massive control freak. I did not. I mean, if. I certainly don't know how to delegate today, I knew a whole lot less about it back then, but I knew that I was bad at sales, and so I had hired someone and gave them autonomy to just get it done. And then that person actually became one of my business partners with Backbeat. That was Greg. And I didn't try to micromanage him because I had no idea how to do that. That was not my thing. I was like, you know this, so you go do it. And I had to trust him because I had to trust someone, and he was the one I chose to trust. You know, it's just how it was. Yeah, yeah. It was not my idea to hire him, by the way. It was somebody else. I was having lunch with a fellow business owner who had much more experience with delegating than me, and he's like, you should hire Greg. He's like, that would be perfect for your business. And do this. I'm like, oh, that's brilliant. Listen to other people. Yeah, Yeah.

I can remember we had Brian o', Connor, I don't remember his company name, on the show a couple years ago. And, you know, his. He was going in an advisory group, and they said, oh, you need to hire a cfo. And he kept putting it, putting it, putting it off. And they said, don't come back to this meeting. Don't come to the next meeting. You haven't hired a cfo.

Yeah, he had.

Delegate, had to give up to get somewhere far beyond. I can tell you today, he's far beyond where he was then.

Far, far beyond. But that. Yeah, that's one of those things that's like. That's huge. Yeah.

If you need help delegating, I would suggest that delegating to things you don't know how to do is a great lesson to start or a great way to start delegating.

Right.

Because you have no choice. Right. You got to hire a sales guy. You need to hire a graphic designer.

Yeah.

Just think of that. On delegating these people, you want to get the work to the most effective person. If they work for you or if they work, you know, you're hiring and whatever.

Contractor.

Whatever. Whatever it is. Yeah. So not knowing how to do something can be a big benefit.

That's powerful. No, in fact, I would say. I would love to say it to all of you, but who I'm really saying it to is my younger self. Find the things that you don't know how to do and make that the first person you hire because it will train you how to delegate to people in general. And you're going to be more comfortable doing it with someone that can do something that you cannot do or certainly can't do. Well, it's going to be way easier. And then you learn the value of delegation. Right.

This is the quote that got me on this delegating topic.

All right.

I shared with you last week and the quote is, it's not important that you have the answer. It's important that you know where to find the answer. And that Mark King, president of Adidas, is a guy that really great. There's a podcast called from the Top that you listen to and he's the president of Taco Bell right now. Really crazy experience that. Not a school educated guy, but a street smart kind of guy. Sure. And that's this kind of thing. You don't have to have the answer, but you need to figure out how to get it or find someone that can get it for you. I'll just leave you with this. You know, there's no growth without delegating. You're going to be stuck. Your business is going to be stuck. You need to surround yourself with capable people that want to do, want to learn, delegate your business to them. You know, you're going to create this kind of cyclical system of success that's going to evolve and grow as your business does. And you know, I really believe that if you embrace this concept that to truly gain power and to create wealth for you and your employees, you have to give up control.

Yeah. You have to. Oh no, it's, it's the way to go. Yeah, for sure.

So we'll put a few, I've got a couple of links that we'll put in the show notes. You do. You don't want to miss those. If you don't subscribe to our newsletter, you definitely should. I don't know what that link is, Dave.

Yeah, just go to businessshow.com and subscribe right there. In fact, all you have to do do is go to Business show and wait a, a nine second pause. That's what I have it set to and boom, you will get a little form that will let you subscribe.

So yeah, because we give you all those notes. I have some more reading if you want some help with, you know, learning how to delegate better and stuff. But yeah, and, and, and if you think I got something wrong or you'd like to share a tip biz Feedback Business Show Dot co. We would love to hear from you.

This has been great, man. Thank you. This has been a masterclass in delegation. I know you say you're not an expert, you're a student of it. I love that. That's great. I'll let you continue to hold that title, even though I might disagree with it. Thank you. Yeah, this is great. Good stuff. Thanks for listening, folks. Make sure to check out our sponsors. As we mentioned in the episode hunterdouglas.com SBS and Rate Tracker from sky-sale.com RateTracker of course, you can find all that at Biz and sign up in the newsletter.

You'll get it right there.

Keep living that charmed life. See you next week.