Working 60 hours a week will kill your business

Being busy doesn't necessarily mean being productive. Working hard doesn't necessarily get you the same results of working smart. Taking pause and saying, hmm, maybe I can sharpen the saw, maybe I can work on the flywheel approach, maybe I can get a little more focused. If a leader doesn't have time to be strategic, to be in mastermind communities, to be spending time with coaches, to be spending time observing, disconnecting, inspecting what you expect, you might be productive, but you might be productive on the wrong stuff. I was asked by Fortune magazine in 2003, in the actual physical print magazine, how do you hold employees accountable? I said, I don't. I hire accountable people. I hire people who are gonna do what we need them to do, who have done what we need them to do already. And then my job is to remove obstacles, to coach them, to praise them, to problem solve for them, to help them, to, to care about them, but not to drive them and manage them. Right. If I inspire them and I'm in service of helping them, if I grow their skills, their confidence, and their connections, that's all they really need of us. My job as a dad is not to tell my kids what to do. It's not to manage them all the time. It's not to show them what their chores are every day. It's to show them our, our values as a family. It's to show them and inspire them to become better adults. It's to grow their confidence to be better adults, is to grow their skills to become adults, is to help kick them out of the house to be confident, to make sure they've got hobbies and passions and friends. That's easy. Well, if I, if I grow my kids that way, why would I not grow my team that way? It's the same thing. Sadly, most entrepreneurs have never had any training on leading and coaching and delegating and, you know, leveraging situational leadership. So most managers revert to, I'm going to hold people accountable and tell them what to do. It's because they're bad at interviewing, they're bad at hiring. And they're bad at kind of working in support of people. When you're good at that, business gets very easy. At the end of the day, in fact, I even have a tattoo on my arm that I got back about 4 months ago. It says walking each other home in Hindi. And it's just a reminder that none of this shit matters. Like we're all— I've been joking recently that we're all going to end up as a kebab. We're just meat on a stick, right? At the end of the day, we're all going to die. And our employees have lives, they have hobbies, they have insecurities, they have fears, they have families. They're, they're just here to make a paycheck. Now they want to do great work. They want to be a part of a cause. They want to build something with meaning. But when you own the company, that's why you have a bigger stake in the outcome than they're going to ever have. You can't expect them to care like you're ever going to care because you're not giving them the same as— and nor am I saying you should. I don't think you should give them equity in a company that you're starting, but you also can't expect them to do that. Now, you also said something else, though. You know, employees work or employers, CEOs working like 17 hours a day. I just sat with two very successful entrepreneurs 2 hours ago for breakfast, and I gave them shit for working more than 8 hours a day because they're slowly creating problems in their marriage. They're slowly creating habits around their relationship with their kids that they end up at the end of the day is going to hurt them. And they tell themselves a lie that I'm just doing this to catch up. I'm just doing this to move this ahead. It's just a stage we're at in the business. No, delegate everything except genius. Find the 2 or 3 things that give you energy, that you're amazing at, that you're so good at, and delegate everything else off your plate. And one of them said, well, I can't. I don't have the people who can do it. I said, good. Learn how to interview, hire people, and then spend your time coaching them and giving them the skills and the confidence and the connections to do what's on your plate. But your to-do list does not have your name on it, right? Your Ryan's to-do list doesn't say Ryan's to-do list. Even if it does, you don't have to do it. You can delegate 90% of what's on your to-do list to other people and then grow their skills and confidence and connections so they can do that. That's what really gives us scale. If you look at a sports team or a professional athlete or the Cirque du Soleil, none of those performers or athletes are performing in their peak, you know, sport 60 hours a week. There's not a baseball player, a basketball player, a soccer player, and out like football players, no professional athlete that is performing in their sport 60 hours a week. You know, they might do 4 hours and then they're off. They might do 30 minutes and then they're off. You know, like a tennis player playing tennis for 3 hours. They might be practicing the rest of the week, but that's not high performance. Perform, perform. And when entrepreneurs think that they have to be performing 60 hours a week, they forget that some of their time would be better spent thinking, connecting, praising people, showing up as the Chief Energizing Officer, right, to bring good energy into the group. But if we're drained and stressed, we're bringing in that drained, stressed, negative energy, and that's what we're throwing into our organization. So sometimes it's about doing less. Praising people more, showing up with positive energy more, thinking strategically more. You know, it's about the two guys, you know, they were told to go clear-cut forests and you got Manager 1 and Manager 2 and they're both clear-cutting the forest and they're both like being super efficient. And the one manager climbs up to the tallest tree and looks around and says, holy shit, we're in the wrong forest. Well, if a leader doesn't have time to be strategic, to be in mastermind communities, to be spending time with coaches, to be just spending time observing, disconnecting, inspecting what you expect. Yeah, you might be productive, but you might be productive on the wrong stuff. And I think a lot of businesses are very guilty of that. If you haven't read my newest book, The Second in Command, go grab a copy right now on Amazon and you'll learn how to unleash the power of a COO. And if you already are a COO, you'll learn how to really build an incredible partnership with your CEO. Working hard is like a fly trying to get out a window. That fly is working really hard, and most of those flies end up dead on the windowsill. If the fly would stop and look around a little bit and go, oh shit, there's a door over here, maybe I'll go out the door. That path is easier. Working hard is kind of a very kind of 1970s Protestant work ethic, right? Work hard, keep your nose to the grindstone. Instead of saying work smart, find the cheat sheets, find the hacks, find the shortcuts, find— as two of my friends, Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy, wrote in their book Who Not How— find the people that know how to do that so that you can get them plugged in so that they can actually get your how. But this whole like work harder, work harder, work harder doesn't scale any company. You know, even Elon Musk said the other day, and I thought this was really insightful, If you don't know the one big thing, the one big problem facing your company today, you're the problem. And if leaders are so focused on busy, right? Jim Collins in the book Good to Great said it's about working on the critical few things versus the important many things. Being busy doesn't necessarily mean being productive. Working hard doesn't necessarily get you the same results of working smart. Taking pause and saying, hmm, maybe I can sharpen the saw. Maybe I can work on the flywheel approach. Maybe I can get a little more focused. Maybe I can say no to 80% of our projects that aren't driving gross revenue. I worked with a CEO in Austria a few years ago that I was coaching. They've got about a $60 million company. They had 960 outstanding customer service requests, and she was really nervous because they were going to go from 4 full-time people to 8 in customer service over the next 12 months because they were doubling the company. And I said, I want you to set a goal that you're going to go from 4 full-time people to 1. She goes, that could never happen. I'm like, well, why don't we look at what all the customer service requests are? 90% of them were the same 7 problems. So we spent $50,000 and we fixed 5 of the 7 problems, spent another $100,000 and fixed the other 2. She was spending $200,000 a year for 4 people. She went from 4 down to 1. So she's now saving $150,000 a year. And instead of having 900 outstanding requests, they were down to 30. So their business got simpler, their customers were happier, but they spent time on the right stuff instead of just working harder. Most companies would just go out and hire more people and hire more people and hire more people instead of fixing the problem, right? At the end of the day, we only have a customer service department because of 4 reasons. Either our customer, uh, was overset with expectations, right? We promised them more than we can deliver. The product sucks. Our service sucks, or the FAQs on the website aren't clean enough and clear enough for people to solve their own problem. If you can actually make your FAQs on your website 2 sentences each in 20-point font and very visible with no phone number and no email address, people will solve their problem. If you fix the actual problem, if you fix the actual product, if you— like, I had a customer that I was coaching and they told all their clients, phone us 24 hours a day. Here's our cell number. I'm like, that's terrible. Like, no, it's great. We're giving them 24. I'm like, you're not going to pick up the phone if you're sleeping. You're not going to pick up the phone if you're going to the bathroom. You're not going to pick up the phone if you're having sex. So you're literally, there's going to be times that you're going to miss that expectation. Why don't you say, here's how to solve your own problem and fix all the problems so they don't have problems. And then maybe say, if you email us, we promise to get back to you within 24 hours, which is pretty darn good. And then live that promise by wowing them and getting back to them within 6.