Mastering Delegation: How to Align Time, Prioritize Roles, and Scale Your Business Like a Pro

Entrepreneurship is hard, but the process can be simplified. You can achieve success faster, sooner, and easier. I'm Mike Michalowicz, and I'm on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. My goal for this episode and every episode is to serve you on your journey. Let's start right now on Entrepreneurship Simplified.

I have a question for you.

What's that?

What's your social media appetite these days?

Oh, you know, it's changed dramatically.

Yeah.

So I was all into Facebook. That was my primary thing. And I was checking it, I think, every day, particularly when going to bed or something. And then I was talking to my daughter about 6 months ago. She's like, "Yeah, I don't do this stuff anymore at all." Yeah, I think that's really popular among the 20-year-olds and teenagers. I hope so. So I stopped, I removed Facebook. This is my phone that's recording this. I removed Facebook from my phone, from my iPad. I deleted everything, everything, Instagram, all that stuff.

Right, all your personal stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I don't miss it at all.

No, no.

I did have a funny situation though. I was sadly at a funeral for a friend who died way too early in life. And it was like a high school reunion, I was telling you about this. One person came, was like, "Hey, it's good to see you." I'm like, "I do not know who this person is." And once I ultimately found out who they were, I never really knew them anyway.

Right, you didn't have a real connection.

And she goes, "Oh, I Facebooked you." I'm like, "Oh, I haven't," or Face— book message you. I'm like, I haven't been on Facebook in 6 months now.

Yeah.

So I said, sorry if I didn't— I didn't respond because I haven't seen it. So I went on there and it was one blessing because I— then now I know what her name is.

Yeah.

Um, and I didn't know her. And there's this queue of all these messages on there. It was interesting.

Did you go down the rabbit hole into these messages?

That one is like, no.

Yeah, no.

And then the other thing that was interesting was, um, there's still posts on my page when someone tags you.

Yeah.

So there were still posts like in the last week or so.

That's crazy. So they're still coming. I'm noticing too, though, that my appetite for it is definitely diminished. I always loved it as sort of like a family journal, especially Facebook. Like, I love going back to the memories and like, oh, this is what we were doing a year ago. This is what we were doing 4 years ago. This is what we were doing 8 years ago.

I feel like that too.

I love that. But yeah, I'm kind of losing the energy for it. But the thing that keeps me on there is connections to people who I genuinely love, but I can't see regularly. And you kind of wouldn't be in the know about what's going on in their lives or their kids' lives if you weren't on there. Or I feel guilty for not wishing that person who I went to high school with happy birthday on their birthday.

Yeah, because you're so socially connected and that's who you are.

And that's the kindness and that's the connection. That's like, how do you not do that? But I am also feeling like—

I wonder, is Chris on there ever?

Not. Chris just got an Instagram account and he's— He checks it maybe once a day and he's pretty good actually about commenting on things. But I find like Instagram, I scroll sometimes if I'm in a mood to, or if I'm in a waiting room kind of a thing, I'll see myself scrolling, but I don't follow a lot and I don't get myself to it.

Yeah, not on Instagram. I don't know how to work it. I don't know how to, people are like, "Oh, I'll message you on Instagram." Like, you can? I didn't even know that.

But I won't find it.

But the irony is they say, "But Mike, I see you all the time." 'Cause we have a social media team and that's what I don't, I think most, many people might recognize. So Jenna, Andrea, and the team are facilitating that. So there's constant content, but I'm not using it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hear you, I hear you. Speaking of social media.

Yes.

I saw a post on Instagram from Sir Richard Branson, and it said, "If you wanna be a successful entrepreneur, you've got to learn to delegate." Yes. Not brand new news, but definitely falls into the category of easier said than done.

You know, what's interesting about Richard Branson is I think he's grown over, started over 100 businesses. I think it's maybe over 200. I don't know.

Incredible.

Incredible.

Incredible.

And it becomes so obvious this one person can't be running all these businesses. Technically, if he was, if he has, say, 100 businesses, that means he'd only have 3 days per business, you know, or 4 days per business that he can work on these businesses. So clearly he can't. And yet I think so many entrepreneurs think that they have to and should do everything, and that's a big mistake.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, today I want to ask, I want to dig in and find out, you know, how do you, um, not only figure out how to delegate but know what to delegate. But before we do that, I want to introduce you to our audience. Mike, you are our business author guy, and something people don't know about you is that you have owned or invested in 17 companies.

Yeah, currently I'm in 17 businesses. And I— yeah, so I think people know our author business, that's a business. Prop First Professionals, some have absolutely heard of. Then I also have Run Like Clockwork, that's with, uh, Adrian, um, the All In Company with Danielle, Pumpkin Plan Your Biz with, with Donna. These are businesses that, um, I have an interest in in through a licensing agreement. And then I started Prosper Group, um, about a year ago where we started investing in businesses. And instead of infusing money into these businesses, it's usually they simply need a new perspective, uh, new ability. And so what we do is we hire those people, we pay for it in return for a share in the success and profitability. But we only do it for a short period, about 5 years. In that business we have right now, I think, active 15 companies. Somebody's actually now over 17 Cumulatively. Wow. Yeah.

Wow, that's great.

And it's a little bit, for me, like a Richard Branson thing, is that I, you can't be involved in that many things and be actually actively running, operating all those things.

Right.

Forget it.

Right.

I would argue more than one business, you start diluting yourself. So in each business, there is a full-time operator. In Prosper Group, there's Greg Echler who's overseeing those relationships. Prop First Professionals, there's Ron Saharian, there's also Billy and Greg who are the operators and integrators, you know, and that's how I've been able to do that. So yeah, it's a little-known fact.

Right, right. Well, a couple episodes ago we talked about the queen bee role.

Yes.

Right? So we have to define the QBR in order to most effectively deliver on our big promise. So my question is, how do we align our time to reflect our QBR.

Mm, yeah, so the QBR, so going back to that episode, we were talking about the queen bee role, which is a role designated in the organization. Do you remember what the QBR is for our company?

The QBR for our company is to simplify entrepreneur— Well, that's the promise.

Promise, well done, yes.

That's the promise, to simplify entrepreneurship.

Yeah, and what's the activity that most simplifies entrepreneurship?

Our books.

Books, bingo, nailed it, Amy.

Thanks.

A+.

A+.

That was a pop quiz too. I hate those.

I hate those. That was horrible.

Remember those in school? Oh my God.

Yeah.

That's exactly it. So we promise to simplify entrepreneurship. How we deliver on it most, that's the QBR, is by writing books that I intend to be extraordinary. It's always the determination of the client if it is or isn't. So I can't say they are, but that's my intention and commitment. The QBR does not need to and should not necessarily be served by an individual single person because that person becomes a linchpin. If I leave this planet, the books are done. Unless we build redundancy. And what we've done is we've introduced AJ. So she's a co-writer with me. But we also have derivative authors. I think a collective now of maybe about 20 other authors. So when I leave this planet, there's an opportunity that the message continues on. And that's what a QBR is. The more I extract myself as the owner, originator of doing the QBR, and, and put more, uh, individuals and more capabilities in place to do it, the healthier the business is. So we have to realize it's not an individual, and it shouldn't be. If it is right now, the first thing you need to do is start determining how can you bring about, um, other individuals supporting it so there's no dependency on a single person. Some businesses are easier than others. Like, if you're in manufacturing and your QBR is the quality of the— your promise of the quality of the product. And the thing that most represents that is the assembly. You don't have one person assembling, you know, in something that's more creative, like books or painting, it's more difficult. But I wrote a story about this guy named Pieter Lely from the, I think, 1600s. He was a painter. He painted portraits. Like if you go to those old medieval dungeons, castles, castles, yeah. And you see on the wall that portrait that's like 18 feet tall of a person. Most painters painted that by themselves. Pieter Lely would sketch the elements and then go back to his—

Studio.

Studio. Thank you very much for filling in the blanks. And his colleagues would finish it. He became prolific. He painted thousands of paintings, whereas contemporaries did maybe 100 in their lifetime. Even in these kind of artistic, creative spaces, you can build a QBR. So devoting time is the question. Step 1 is remove yourself or having a single person do it. Step 2 is it has to be the primary function. And so for most businesses, we first assign those tasks and then assign other tasks around it.

You're giving me an example now 'cause I need one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, okay. So let's talk about manufacturing. We make, I got markers here, right? So we make these markers.

Yeah.

And it goes through a sequence of things. And what our big promises to our customers that we have the highest quality marker, that it is, maybe we'll say to an extreme of ruggedness. So this is military applications. You can run a—

Waterproof.

Waterproof, run a truck over it.

Gotcha.

Right? So not your ordinary marker. Well, then we have to ask ourselves, of all the things we do in our manufacturing process, what makes it the most rugged? Is it the ink and its ability to be waterproof? Is it the encasement around it? All those things are important. We have to pick of those things, what one is the most important? So a technique I use is I'll put a sticky note out for each element I think is of critical importance. The ink quality, the encasement or packaging strength. Right. Right. And maybe some other elements. Then through deductive logic, I say, if I, if, if I could only have 5 items here and say only 4 could be the most important, which one would I remove for now? And I delete it and I have 4 left and I go through that same process until there's one left over. So it's deductive logic. And maybe I'll say it's the casing that's most important because, you know, uh, it's gotta withstand a truck rolling over it and, and, and soldiers running around the field and falling on it. And so the, all that stuff is important, but the casing's the most important. So when I look at my manufacturing sequence, I focus in on the casing and saying, is that, is the sequence allowing it to be the best encasement? And for example, one thing I may notice is that, you know, prior we were, uh, the case for the pen would come, we would spray paint it in our spray paint machine, bake it nice and hot, and then we'd insert the ink. But we've noticed that by baking it, it reduces the strength of the encasement. So then I say, well, we're gonna maybe change the sequence. First assemble it, and then we spray paint, but we can't heat dry it. And we have to consider every element of the sequence once we know what the most important thing is.

Gotcha.

So Step 2 is what is the most important thing? I'm not saying the other things aren't important. I'm just saying they can't be the most important. The definition of most is one. Then we revolve our sequencing around it to make sure it's protected first. As an author, the most important thing is writing. Erin is my assistant. She does my schedule. One thing she knows—

God bless her.

God bless her.

God bless her.

Because you're handling it in her absence.

Yeah.

Sheesh. She knows when she's scheduling me, that there has to be book time, particularly during the in-season, and that gets scheduled first. There was an old analogy that supposedly happened at some college. A professor went in front of the students and said, uh, he had rocks— maybe you've heard this before— pebbles and sand. And he, he fills the bucket with sand. He goes, sand represents all the day-to-day stuff, pebbles represent the bigger elements of life, and the rocks are the most critical. He goes, let's talk about the daily elements. And he pours into this jar all the sand. Then he tries to add the rocks and pebbles, and you can't because it's filled with and he goes, this is how most people live their lives. They prioritize every small issue.

All the minutia.

All the minutia, and then the big things will never fit in. He goes instead, and he puts a new jar. He says the biggest elements of life are these rocks. He puts them in and they fill in, and then he takes the pebbles and they fill in the crevices in between, and then he adds the sand last, and it fills in perfectly. And he goes, now everything's been addressed. So what are the big rocks? That's what the QBR is. It has to be prioritized first in scheduling or in sequences, So it's cared for most, and the other things fill in the crevices around it.

Cool.

That's how you do it.

Okay. Now I want to move on to the 4 Ds you talk about.

Yes, please.

Can you tell us what they are?

Yeah.

And what, what they mean?

Yeah, I wrote about this in Clockwork, um, and I enhanced it in the Clockwork revised and expanded edition, which is the current edition now. What I discovered is businesses have 4 functions effectively that go on And this is true for the holistic, the entire business. So at our company, we have doing activities. That's the first D. And doing is anything that is a deliverable to the client or is an administrative or some kind of support to deliverable. So the work you do, like, uh, special projects, shipping gifts and books, those aren't a deliverable on an invoice, something that we build for, but it does support the client experience. So any of that stuff is what we call doing. The next D is what's called deciding. And it's necessary on a very limited basis, but it's ultimately the biggest trap. Deciding is where if you and I are just working together, just me and you, and you come to me, I'm the boss man, you say, Mike, what should I do next? I say, oh, you know what, can you go please ship those books? I've made the decision on your activity. So deciding is where a person in a superior titled position is assigning out work through what I call task rabbiting. I'll tell you to do, you don't really think, you just do, and you come back to me.

And then you come back.

Yeah.

Gotcha.

And so a lot of businesses get hamstrung by this.

Yeah.

Because imagine you're the boss, I'm the employee, and then we have 10 other employees. Now you're in your office trying to work on the project, and I'm like, hey Amy, what should I do now? And you're like, go package the books. And the next person walks in, hey Amy, what should I do? Go wash our vehicles. Like, all you can do is be stuck in these decision-making for everyone else.

Right.

It's a trap because, A, you can't do the most critical zone of genius work that you're capable of. Secondly, the employees aren't empowered to think on our own. And in fact, I'm served better by coming to you and simply asking for instructions and then following instructions because if the instructions don't get the outcome that you wanted, not my fault.

Right.

You told me, you said ship the books. I did, Amy. If it does get the outcome you want, I'm the hero because I can follow instructions. So it becomes this trap where employees are served by following the instructions set. And the owner's served through ego. So it's a trap. It's necessary, but in small tastes. The next level is delegation. Delegation is not the assignment of tasks. It's the assignment of outcomes.

This was really interesting to me. The assignment of outcomes. Big shift there from assignment of tasks to assignment of outcomes.

Yeah, and I ain't perfect at this, and we have challenges with it, but an example is we have a client who, it's like a customer who bought 100 books and we wanna thank them for it. The assignment of an outcome would be me meeting with you and saying, hey Amy, we have a client that just bought 100 books. We wanna thank them in some way. Do you think that makes sense? And you say yes or no, and say, great, would you please be of service to that? Giving you the freedom to determine how to do it.

Right.

As opposed to saying, Amy, this person bought 100 books. What I want you to do is buy this gift, do this thank you note, and so forth, which is common for me to do. That's my default. But the better mechanism is just for you to take it on.

Right. Own it.

Own it. What this does is, A, it alleviates me, the boss man, from controlling scenarios so I can focus on things that I need to focus on. It gives you a sense of empowerment. You get to determine direction and so forth. Now, the risk, of course, is, What if I do it wrong?

Yeah, or what if, right, or what if it doesn't get carried out the way you would really like it? You really wanted a ribbon around that and that wasn't even in her mindset to do. So that's a tricky.

It's very tricky. And it's the onus of the boss man. I'm just using it as a person in a superior role. Is you achieved outcome that you've determined is the best outcome. And that is the best outcome. Just because one person, the owner, thinks this is the way we should do things, it's just one person's opinion. And many business owners say, "Well, my opinion is the best opinion." No, it's just your opinion. And if you think it's the best opinion, you've now, again, hamstrung the business to be a clone of you. It's not a representation of the holistic community. So the right approach is for the owner to bite their tongue and say, "Good job, no ribbon." Not because that was right or wrong, it was simply the way that you saw it best served. And if I stop that correcting of you, 'cause it's not really a correction, it's just my opinion, you'll be more empowered. It's like, good. And you'll be more likely to repeat and continue forward.

I know there's more to do, but like, how hard is that to do?

It's stinking hard for both of us because we've lived this, right?

Yes. Yeah.

It's hard for you not to say, is it my doing this right? Because you're expecting the affirmation. You've been trained and raised on that. It's hard for me not to say this is the way to do it because I've been trained and raised on that. But it links us on forever. It simply says, we have to repeat this process again and again. And it doesn't break that freedom or bring that freedom back.

What about something like in this instance, something like a form? Say we had a form and every time you needed me to ship something, there was a form and it had all the checkboxes. So I knew exactly what you were looking for. That kind of is a little bit of a crutch though, right?

A little bit of a crutch, but it is the right also approach. 'Cause if I simply said, let's freewheel it every single time, now we've anarchy and we don't know. So there is best practices. So here's the best approach for delegation. I go to you and say, Amy, we have a customer that's bought 100 books and I want to thank them. What do you think? So, you know what? We should thank them. And I think a gift is the best way to do it. Great. Then I can say, we do have a best practice. Historically, we've given gifts and here's the sequence. I'm going to give this to you. And if you find that there's a better way as you move along this path, follow the different way. Use this as a guiding, just to know our history, but not necessarily the proven way. And when you find a better way, I want you to document it next. So now we have a best practice that's evolving and improving. Here's a great example. We had Stella Grisant, she's a fellow author, who by happenstance moved into a neighboring town, like literally—

So crazy, such a small world, man.

Yeah, biking a distance from here. And so, and she's been such a great supporter of us from 15, 20 years ago. So when I heard she was moving to town, I said, hey, we have a great friend, a great ally as a company, let's do something. And I had just a theme and we kind of agreed to it. And you modified the theme because some of the stuff that I was thinking, you're like, I can't do this, but here's a better way of doing it. And it became a better outcome. What it was was all this gear for the town she moved into. I was thinking including other stuff. When she saw it, broke down in tears. Husband came running over, he's like, this is amazing. She had her daughter there and said, we filmed a open— what they call an unboxing video. She was blown away. If we followed my strict rules, like, this is the way we're going to do it, and Amy, don't do what you're thinking, just do exactly what I'm thinking, it wouldn't have been as impactful. So it's proof that expanded. Now the opportunity, of course, is for us to record this. And now, to spend an hour recording the step-by-step stuff for something that happens once every eon is ridiculous. But record in our mind that, that there is at least a better way to to do this so the next time this comes up, we can do it again.

Gotcha.

The last thing I want to share on this subject is there will be a day that you choose not to work with us any longer, including myself. There'll be a day I choose not— we're going to finish the business 100 years from now or 5. I don't know, but the day will come. The risk is you're going to leave the organization with all this knowledge, including how to wow someone like Stella, and that's going to walk out the door. So our job is to capture that, to record it in some capacity. So as we evolve and new people come on board and people transition on, that we can continue that unabated as a best practice. And they can improve on it.

Gotcha.

So that's delegation.

Okay. What's our fourth D?

Okay. So we did doing, which is the activity, deciding, which is control, delegating is the assignment of outcome. So it's a subtle but significant difference. It's empowerment versus a control scenario.

Gotcha.

The last one is designing. And designing is the— as former first president George Bush would say, strategery, which I'm sure he never even said that, but it's the strategic thinking and envisioning for the company. It's the intentional and deliberate extraction of yourself from doing the activity and envisioning the outcomes and then empowering your team. And your team is, maybe it's individuals, but it's also technology, it's vendors, it's the collective. To achieve that outcome that you envision. Most entrepreneurs who start a business spend a lot of time working in the design leading up to and including the day before starting the business. Like, I'm going to— I can see this and it's going to be amazing. And the day they start the business, they're thrown in the fire. They go to the doing level themselves and they stay there for the eternity of the business and they never again really envision. It's a lost dream, right? So that design is is seeing the dream, but it's seeing it in a dynamic way because where we are today, we have a lot more information about the business than we did the day prior and the day prior. It's morphic. Things change. And we need to, as leaders for organizations, understand how are things changing. When we started our business, the author business 12 or 15 years ago, I don't even remember when we started, you weren't here yet. Kelsey wasn't here yet. AI didn't exist yet. But now we look at today and the skills we have with yourself on board and Kelsey's on board and Andrea, who just joined us in the last 2 years or so. And these, the towns, the vision of the business changes. There's external influences and internal. And so part of the job of the design capacity with that, that I serve and Kelsey serves is seeing where we are. And then how do we take the clay we have today and morphing again?

And what's the next best step with that? Yeah.

And the best way to do that is through what I call jawbone time, where it's just, you know, Kelsey and I will grab lunch, Andrew will come, and it's just, let's just talk through what we're facing.

Gotcha. Yeah.

Sometimes it's those quarterly retreats, which I think are the best.

Yeah. The brainstorming sessions.

Dumping out ideas. I love that. There were some genius thoughts that came out of that last meeting we had at Jenna's. And I'm not even sure who voiced them, but it's because we were together. Just talking about the future. That future thinking came out.

Yeah, that ping-ponging off of each other.

Yes, that's all design time.

Yeah.

And you got, you got to schedule it. Ironically, I'd say at the end of the day, that big rock we're putting in the jar is design time.

Gotcha.

One thing I want everyone to understand though, listening in, is that we don't just become these thinkers and dreamers and that's a go nowhere. There has to be action. The kind of the dispersion or the weighting is businesses I see optimize around this spend about 80% of the business time doing. So if I'm a solopreneur, 80% of my time better be delivering to clients or supporting the work that delivers to clients. If I have a few colleagues and I look at our collective input and time, maybe all of your time is in doing and maybe 70% of my time is in doing, but it balances out that collectively it's 80%. So we want to target that 80% of the company is doing.

Doing, okay.

And maybe even upwards of 90%. The design time should be about 10%. So, if we look at a year of an organization that there's about 2,000 work hours per person, about 200 hours, if you divide that by days, that's roughly, what, 8 hours into 10, so about 20, 25 days of design time. And we do it through retreats. We have quarterly retreats. That's 4 days plus we do an extended one. So, we do about 6 days alone just together as a group. Me and Kelsey meet once every 2 weeks for lunch, and that's a couple hours. And so collectively, we're spending about 10% of the organization's time on design and so forth. The rest then is divided up between delegation and deciding. We're just trying to move more and more toward delegation and less and less on deciding.

Right. So great. So now I know what's happening at those lunches across the street. I love that.

Yeah, it's amazing. And what's so interesting is Kelsey will come back because we know the meetings are coming, And she'll say, you know, I was just searching the web and I found this tool, or I saw this happening from another provider and stuff like that.

Do you know what boggles my mind? You guys leave the office, no paper in hand, no pen in hand. So all of that is happening. You guys are just doing this. Oh, wow.

Yeah.

You're making changes. You're strategizing. You're coming up with new ideas for shifts that we're going to have within the company. And you guys do all that without pen and paper.

Yeah. I mean, there will be some action items taken on a phone at the end. Do you sometimes?

Sheesh, incredible. I'm so old school, pen and paper.

Yeah, I think it's actually good. I will lean toward bringing pen and paper. We do have a checklist when we go. It's on our phones. But the goal is more conversation than task assignment because that's actually deciding.

Yeah.

Yeah. Another example is Kelsey and Andrea went down to Nashville last month or two months ago to Don Miller's place. Yeah. A warm, wonderful organization they are. They invite us in. They said, we're going to show you everything we have going on.

Yeah. Open books.

Open books. Everything. And we ask questions and they said, here's where we're struggling as an organization. Here's what we're finding. And they say, you know, take what you can. Same is available to you. Just take, take all of it so we can elevate each other. That's all design time.

What's the life expectancy of a company that doesn't—

That's a great question.

Do this. I mean, how quickly Or how long can you go without doing this? I guess there are some out there who struggle along doing it all the time.

It must be shorter too, because how much the industry is changing.

Yeah.

You know, 100 years ago, uh, if you think back 100 years, that's 1923.

Yeah, right.

It was funny, my wife and I were talking about beds. We're thinking about buying a bed, and my dad was born in 1928. I'm like, did my dad sleep on a, what was it stuffed with?

Did he have straw mattresses?

Straw, yeah, was it still straw? I mean, George Washington was straw. And then how quickly did the bed advance? When did they go from that to this box and spring? And the box and spring was horrible. It was better, but it was horrible. And when you were a kid, when I was a kid, it was still box and spring.

There was that one spring, 'cause you got the mattress handed down to you from your older sister.

My sister, yeah.

Yeah, and me too. And so like, you had to sleep in a certain position to avoid that spring.

Exactly, poking the back. My mother still has one of those beds. So when I visit, she's like, "Okay, you can stay over." I'm like, "Oh no, no, no." No, no, I don't wanna stay over. Don't make me. Maybe, right? But how long did that box spring last? But what happened then is then comes out these hybrid things like Tempur-Pedic and so forth. And now, look in the last like 5 years, the bearings—

Boxes in a bed.

Yeah, boxes in a bed. And the advancements in beds that cool, beds that heat, beds that— The technology is advancing. If you're in the bed industry 100 years ago, You're probably good for like 50 years doing the same thing.

Oh, that's such a good point.

If you're in the bed industry today, you got about 6 months before someone's gonna—

Say your technology's outdated and you've gotta do something new. Yeah.

I don't know what's next. So I think today we gotta spend more time designing because the change is coming faster and faster.

I gotcha. So what's the reason entrepreneurs try to do everything themselves? You mentioned in the past the superhero syndrome.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's that?

You ever watch superhero movies? Do you have a favorite superhero?

Oh, it was Wonder Woman when I was a kid.

Did you see the new Wonder Woman?

No, I haven't seen it yet. Oh my God.

So good.

Really good.

So good.

Okay.

Because it harkens back to the ones when we were kids with Lynda Carter.

Yeah.

I love Wonder Woman. And when I watched the new rendition, this movie, she's fighting some evil entity. She's defeated. In the process, she destroys everything. Like the whole cities are blown up. There's destruction everywhere. Cars are flipped. Humanity's running, but she saves the day, right? She saves all the people, but destroys everything. And that's what I call the superhero syndrome, is us, the every common day human becomes dependent on the superhero to save us. And they swoop in and sure enough, they defeat the big evil enemy, but in the process, they lay destruction everywhere. And some of it's irreparable. So the rest of the movie that they don't show is humanity, us cleaning up all the damage, right? And then becoming more dependent. My favorite superhero as a kid, um, was actually the Batman, the Adam West Batman.

Yes, yes, yes.

So great. But it was the exact same perversion as, as Wonder Woman, in that Gotham City, the, the commissioner was dependent on Batman. So the Joker was coming. Well, we can't protect ourselves. Call Batman, he'll save the day. Then the big fight breaks out, they destroy all these things in the process. And they thank Batman for stopping the Joker, but it was all his destruction. That's the entrepreneurial syndrome. It's the superhero. We have a problem at the office. Mike's gotta swoop in and save it. I'm like, of course, I'm a hero. And I see myself this way. And I come in and I circumvent all of our systems. I don't follow any processes. I fix the immediate problem, but then there's this cascade of issues.

Then you get the other issues, right.

And then so what happens behind the scenes, I leave and then you and Andrea and— Jenna and whoever, you know, just sit behind scenes like, oh my God, I gotta fix all this crap now. Mike was here.

Mike was here.

Yeah, he didn't do it the right way.

No.

And that's like, oh, that's the superhero syndrome. The perversion, if that's the right choice of words, becomes the business becomes more dependent on the superhero, the entrepreneur, to fix these situations and less capable of fixing itself. So the business actually becomes more crippled and more damaged. When I go to conferences, I tell the entrepreneurs in the audience, when you leave this conference and return to the office, I want you to know your colleagues have been preparing for your return. They call it the hurricane. You come back with all these ideas, all this genius, and the team's gonna sit there and say, listen, the entrepreneurs are gonna come in and just throw all this stuff at us because they're the superhero, they have the big fix, here's the magic. And it's gonna last maybe a day, if it's a miracle, 2 days. And then they're gonna revert back to the old self, and there's gonna be this wake of all this stuff. The best way to navigate this is just ignore it. Just let the hurricane tear through, and there's gonna be all this damage after the fact, but then we'll have to repair it. And that's kind of what happens. We come in with this big wake of crap behind us. So that's what we gotta be aware of. The best thing an entrepreneur does is they remove themselves from the doing, and they go into design mode, and they observe the doing, and they give guidance to the organization to improve the organization. The last thing I want to share on this subject is there's kind of this homeostasis. The perception most entrepreneurs have, including myself, is, oh, here's my standard. And here's what the organization's performing standard. And it's less than I expect. Therefore, I got to come in and keep pulling this up. That's the superhero, fly in with my cape and pull us up. But the best thing an entrepreneur can do is actually remove themselves and see where does the business settle in naturally? That's where the business standard is. Then the entrepreneur's job is to build Infrastructure, a hill, a mountain below so that the standard gets raised.

Naturally raised.

Yeah. Stop trying to pull it up. Build below to the standard you want to achieve. But first, you have to know where the natural standard is.

I love that.

That's TikTokable.

Even though I'm never on TikTok. How do you know it's time to transition from doing to deciding and so forth?

Yeah. The doing stage, we're going to use that metric of the 80%.

Okay.

If 100% of your time, your business's time is doing, you're in trouble. If 100% of your time is in the designing stage, your business, you're in trouble. So the goal is to build this balance and, and let's just follow the 80/20 rule. Measure your business's performance on doing, uh, and, and you can just do it through time tracking. We do inherently, you guys fill out time trackers. So we know basically what time is being spent where, and you don't have to write down I shipped out books for 5 minutes. I then call customers. It doesn't matter. We know that your work, Amy, is about 100% in the doing stage. So we measure how much time is Amy doing. Andrea, for example, is about 90% doing, but 10% in the design. Yeah. And in delegation too, she'll sign out work. So she's probably like 80/10/10. Kelsey is 50/50. I'm 50/50. You know, writing is my doing work. And so we just kind of see where people measure in. And if it's out of whack, then we make the adjustments.

Gotcha. Is there a number of team members you need to transition from doing to deciding?

Great question. Amy, these questions, like they were handed to you.

It's like they were handed to me.

Like I wrote these for you. Like I wrote them for you. Yes, Amy. So there is and there isn't. As a single entrepreneur, a business of one with not a single colleague you're working with, you still can use this system. You have to still work on designing. You still have to have that envisioning. Now, delegation, don't worry about so much. You're the only one deciding. You decide for yourself. So it's, it's an 80/20 split or 90/10 split works too.

Okay.

This doesn't have to be every single day or every single week, like 90% of today will be working. There's times where there's demands on you and clients need stuff and then you got to be all in on serving them. Yeah, but then we need to break from doing and reevaluate what's worked, what hasn't worked. That's design time and change. As a business gets bigger, it usually is less of those pendulum swings from like, I serve a customer, now go back to design. So a larger organization, there is a team always working on strategic work. I just had a call with Relay Bank. By the way, if anyone's looking for a business bank, I swear to you, they are the best.

They are the ones.

They support Profit First directly. Um, we use them for our banking. We even set up a link called banklikemike.com. Um, that is because I do support them. I am affiliated with them, but God, I believe in them tremendously. So if you wanna check 'em out, go to banklikemike.com. I had a call with them and they are growing leaps and bounds because of how good they are. The people, uh, Eleni, uh, is one person I speak with there. Uh, the people are transitioning. She was, in some of the doing stages and more and more is moving to delegation and design work. So as the business grows and morphs, people's roles may shift too.

Okay, all right. They got it nailed. Say that again?

They got it nailed. I mean, it's interesting. You know a company is doing appropriate design and execution doing balance when you see rapid growth that's sustainable. Some businesses—

And what's sustainable, Mike? What defines sustainable?

Sustainable means that the customer in every single stage of the company's growth continues to have the same degree of—

Satisfactory experience with them.

Happiness, exactly. There'll always be the one offers that said, this didn't work for me and therefore you suck. But the general client enthusiasm or satisfaction score remains very high while the business is also accumulating many clients. That's when you know they struck that delicate chord.

Yeah, great. Let's talk about the double helix trap.

I love this thing. So I got to give attribution to the guy who I heard this from. I think the inventor, his name is Barry Moltz. He wrote a book called Bounce. He's written many business books. That's just the first one comes to mind. That's one of my favorites. I also want to acknowledge Barry Moltz was one of the first people to step up and support me when I became an author.

He's one of your mentors.

Yeah, I would consider him a mentor.

Consider him one.

Consider him a mentor. Yeah, he's an author. He's out of Chicago. And there's another guy, Barry Kaplan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That, that is a mentor and coach. But Barry Moltz, um, I reached out and said I've written a book, The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. He didn't know me from Adam. He endorsed the book, read the book, subsequently came on and supported me in many ways. The double helix trap, he said, is a, is a trap that small business owners fall into where it's this oscillation between delivering to your client and then trying to sell the next client. So when, if it's just, say you're just running a business and say you sell You're wearing a pair of glasses. You sell glasses.

Yeah.

And you, but you make them, you, it's just you. So you've assembled them. You get an order for a pair of glasses. Well, you can't be in the front desk saying, who wants another set of glasses? You got to run back now and make the glasses, prepare the frames, all this stuff. You're back there. Customer walks in.

You got no backup. Place is empty.

They leave. Glasses are done. You deliver to customer. You're now out front again. There's no glasses to make. You're out selling again. So that's this kind of visual for, for flip-flopping between selling and doing.

Gotcha.

What happens in all businesses, that if I sell computer systems, once I sell it, the installation, now I have to do the installation. And he goes, for most businesses, they'll have these big swings of selling, collecting money, delivering, now delivering on the promise they made, which there's no money being collected, so they become starving for money, so they have to go back to selling. And so they just kind of keep on shifting their energy back and forth like water sloshing in a tank. That's moving around. So it's a trap because you'll never escape it until you can sustain the sales without— while also doing the work, also doing the doing. So the question is, how do you do it? For most business owners, the best way is to find other people to do. It's actually easier to train the do than the sale, yet most business owners think selling is—

yeah, and they put salespeople there.

I need to hire a rainmaker, someone that sells. Oh, they suck, they can't do it. They don't suck, they just don't get how you do it. They don't have your knowledge or experience with the business.

That's most entrepreneurs' experience, you think, Mike?

Yeah. I need a rainmaker. Someone to sell. They can't sell. What's their problem?

Nothing.

Nothing. They just don't know all the—

They don't have the product known in—

Yeah. Or the enthusiasm for it. Or the understanding. You know, people buy from a salesperson because they believe in that person.

And the owner's gonna know what can truly be delivered. They can't—

Yeah.

They establish more faith with their product because they are going to actually deliver because they know what can be delivered, basically. Yeah.

I mean, just think about it. Say I'm the person selling glasses. I make the glasses. I own the business. I'm the optometrist or whatever the title is.

Right.

And I just hired a salesperson that's gonna sell glasses. We both walk out. Who do you trust more is gonna be able to deliver what you need?

Right. The optometrist.

Optometrist, right? Yeah. So that's why the owner inevitably has a better ability to sell. So to get out of the double helix trap is we need to orient ourselves more and more to our sales, which means you need to hire someone to start doing. And the number one hire to make that almost no entrepreneur does, and it's the least expensive, the most important, is a scheduler. It's a personal assistant. What Erin does is the most important work to get me out of doing work. It gets rid of time-consuming, important, but minutiae work. It allows me to do work that is more technically oriented, harder to hire those type people, but now I have the time to do it and avail time time for selling. So if you're listening right now and you don't have a personal assistant, you have a problem in your business. I can tell right away. Hire a personal assistant.

You met up with Michael Gerber years ago. What did he say about his book, The E-Myth?

I gotta tell you about that meet-up first. So he and I met for dinner in Mexico, Monterrey, Mexico, or Monterrey, Mexico. I hope I said that right. We were down there. I was keynoting on The Pumpkin Plan. I just authored that book. He's the book of the famous book, The E-Myth Revisited. He's the opening keynote. Guy Kawasaki's there. They're closing keynote. I'm sandwiched in between in a breakout room, you know, way down there. And, um, as good fortune presents itself, I go out to dinner and it's me, Michael Gerber, and a few other folks. I'm sitting next to Michael Gerber. I look at him. I'm, I'm thinking about clockwork and stuff. Uh, bu— building efficiency. His core theme for his book, The E-Myth Revisited, is don't work in your business, work on your business. This transition from doing, doing to design. Design. Yeah. Yeah. So concisely and well put. And if you have not read this book and you're a business owner, read The E-Myth Revisited. My God, read it now. I asked him, I said, is there any problems that are presenting themselves? He's a quirky guy. He likes to throw an F-bomb every now and then and stuff. And he says a couple of choice words and then he looks at me and goes, you know what? He goes, yeah, there's a major problem in how people are consuming this book. They think that when you read The E-Myth that one day magically you'll be working on the business. If you work in the business long enough and hard enough and you really grind it out, One day things just pop in place. And that's, he goes, that's not the truth. It's the total opposite. I was like, oh my God. And that's why I wrote Clockwork. He was so kind to endorse it. And he says, I wish I wrote this book. Because what it did is it, what I try to do is show the throttle or transition. There has to be a deliberate extraction process from working in the business to be able to work on the business. It's not going to happen overnight. You're not going to work hard enough that one day it just happens. You have to have a deliberate practice of removing yourself from doing the work. That was the aha that Michael shared.

That's awesome.

He was good. Yeah, he was good. What a great dinner too.

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, one thing that's interesting, this is, I hope not too private. There was many speakers and they all had the same hotel. And I was walking to my room and we were all put in the same floor, same area. And one room had a guard out.

A guard?

A guard. Michael Gerber had a 24-hour guard, guard outside his door, armed guard. I did not know. Security guy. Security guy. I don't know if he was armed, but my guy Kawasaki was there. Other people were there and he was the only one. He was the only one. And I'm like, isn't that interesting?

That's interesting. That makes you curious.

Yeah. I don't know if he had a bad experience in Mexico before. I don't know what happened. So there you go.

Good stuff. Good stuff. Why do most entrepreneurs never break out of the do stage? Did we?

I think. Yeah, I think we did that. Yeah. So most people don't break out of the do stage because of the ego addiction. So let's tackle that. It's this kind of bipolar kind of experience in that we say we started a business so that we can have financial freedom, so that we have personal freedom, do what we want when we want, so we can have impact and not have a business that's dependent upon us. It was the reverse. I want the business serving me. And yet on the other side, we— our ego is satisfied by us doing all this work. It's a demonstrative of how effective we are.

Right. And what a hustler you are.

Yeah, hustler. And it shows importance. So we got— trapped by this. I'm more impressed when I go to meet entrepreneurs and I ask them, how's business going? Like, oh great. I'm like, oh, what are you doing? I haven't been there in a few weeks. Like, like someone that's not there. I'm impressed by the retail store owner that is not in the retail store working yet, but they're not there. And yet societally we say that retail store owner has got to be in there working and grinding it out. And that's not, that's not the truth. That's a lie. It's a shame that we choose to judge others that way, but gosh, we really should start judging ourselves. It's the removal of ourselves from being in the business. It's the empowerment of other people to work in the business if that's what they want to do. We talked about that, I think on the first episode. I don't know if we'll release that episode. We may re-record it, but nonetheless, I believe the number one job of an entrepreneur is not to do the job. It's to create jobs and empower other people to have the opportunity. If you're doing the work, you're blocking other people. So get your ego out of that's impressive that you're working, right? Give the opportunity to other people or a mix of other people.

Yeah.

And I'm not saying we're milking other people or make them work super hard. Give people the opportunity to express themselves the way they want to. In our company, everyone minus Kelsey's part-time. And I mean, right, you're part-time.

Yeah, I'm part-time. Andrew's part-time. Jenna's part-time.

Corde is part-time.

And Corde is part-time.

And Aaron's part-time.

Yeah. And Daylan.

And Daylan is full-time.

And Kelsey.

I think is we set an environment where everyone has an opportunity to do what they want to do.

Yeah.

I remember you once coming into work once and the task was, was unpacking all these things and like, you sure you want to do this? You're like, Mike, sometimes I get mind-numbing work. I got a lot of stuff going on. Your father was ill at the time and you're like, I gotta take care of all these things.

Actually, it's meditative.

Yeah. It's meditative just to do this stuff.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh yeah. So And also shame on us entrepreneurs who judge that if we're giving other people work, that that's demeaning or we're putting a liability that we see as a liability on someone. No, it's an opportunity for someone to express themselves in their own way or to benefit in a certain way.

We should ask, right?

Do you enjoy this? Do you like this? We should set that environment, but never judge someone else based upon your determination of value.

Right. I wonder if it's— do you ever get to a point with your company where you are at risk for your company changing in a way that you weren't prepared for it to change because you've got— you've given so much autonomy to your team members. I mean, has that ever happened with us, with our, with our book writing company? Has it ever gotten to the point where like, this is not exactly what I— this is good, this is working, but it's not exactly what I intended?

Yeah, it surely does. It surely does. Me myself, I'm less rigid about intentions and expectations. I have a very global thing. I really want to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. I believe in the entrepreneur so much, and it's the hot dog stand and the retail store that I have the most love for because they're the most entrapped in most cases. The belief that they need to do everything and other things. That global thing, as long as we're scratching that itch, I feel satisfied. The way it presents itself is, is different than I expected. Um, I didn't necessarily even expect us to do this podcast, right? But this came about. Um, there's products and teachings that we've delivered. I, I didn't even know we were doing that. Um, how Fix This Next came about and we built our advisory thing, um, is great, but I'd never anticipate that. I thought it'd be a licensee. So, so things definitely shift, but I think it's representation of the best of Design. Design.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Thanks for saying that. That's exactly it.

That's it.

Yeah.

Nice.

Okay. I think we covered everything.

I think we did.

Did we pull in news topics for today that were exciting?

Yeah. You know, I wanted to ask you about this one. I just want your thought on it. Yeah. They are talking about an article in, I think it was in CNN. I don't have a budget. Why people are going into debt to travel. So there was this trend prioritizing travel. A significant number of Americans are willing to go into debt for vacations, with many using credit cards and installment plans to finance travel. This trend has intensified since the 2000s financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, which I think I would imagine has to do with that feeling like, hey, life is short. You don't know what you're, you know, and I'm really torn on this one because in my opinion, God, my life is short, you know?

Well, you've experienced that.

I'm watching, so I'm caring for my elderly mother. She's very, she's much more immobilized than she used to be. And she's never traveled. She's never been to Europe.

I didn't realize that.

I mean, she's traveled in the States and she's had a wonderful life in the States, but she's done some amazing travels. She was one of only two women in Montana's forestry school in the 1950s. And like, she's a pioneer in a lot of ways. She's had wonderful experiences, but she's never gotten out of the States. And like, part of me is like, I gotta make this happen for her, wheelchair and all now, I've gotta make this happen for her. But, and with cancer too, like, I don't have any, and nobody does. We're all playing with house money. But, you know, once you experience cancer, you're like, yeah, I'm in remission now. Am I gonna be in remission next year? I wanna do everything I can while I can do it, as opposed to my mom who is no longer going to be able to hike that mountain or, you know, whatever. So I kinda get blowing the money on these experiences, but I don't know. I mean, what kind of debt are we talking about here?

Right. And what's the consequence for the next vacation or the next year?

Yeah.

Right.

You can't keep building on that. You can't snowball that kind of debt.

You can't snowball. There's a book called Die with Zero, which is this concept.

Right. You were telling me about it.

It's a really interesting book. So what the author's argument is, is that at the end of life, the perfect execution is where there's not a penny left. That means you've maximized the use of that money. I want to give a different perspective because the thing is, we don't know when that day is coming. I'll give you a counterstory. Wife's grandfather was a multimillionaire, died destitute in a trailer because he blew all the money. And what he started doing was he went back to his children and said, you need to support me now. Exhausted those relationships. So they didn't only just die destitute, he died without relationships. Oh, it was—

which is the bigger poverty, really.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I saw the opposite. Um, what I believe is, at the end of the day, we're all seeking stories. Because you and I have stories back from our relationship through high school, through our older years, and me, you, Mark, and Kristen hanging out, right? There's certain moments that are, are significant stories, and the recounting of the stories bring about this emotion. I think— this is my opinion— when I travel It's a collection of new stories. Oh, I went— we went to Stonehenge. I had a speaking gig out there and went to Stonehenge, and it was amazing. But also last week, Chris and I, we have this little area we set up deep in the woods, not even our property, it's the state property, but you can go on a path.

Yeah, and nobody knows you're there.

Yeah, and I was drinking my kombucha and she was drinking her wine, and we had great conversations about life and what's the meaning of life and stuff. Like, oh, that's a, that's a great story. It's memorable. So I think what maybe some folks are experiencing is, is they're trying to create stories or, or something that's memorable experiences to share in the future. But the, the expression of it is, oh, it's got, I got to spend money to do this. And I wonder if the costs in the future, I lived with debt for a decade and is it devastating to every night go to sleep saying, I don't know how I'm going to pay this, the worry it put upon me. So I just, I think it's dangerous and I think there's going to be costs associated. I understand I understand people are starving for stories and experiences. I don't think you have to ever do outside your budget.

But are they starving? Is it all a matter of perception and social media images make it all seem like everybody's doing it everywhere. How could I possibly not be able to have these experiences?

Oh, that's an ego. Yeah, you're right. That's an ego thing.

Yeah, I think we really have to question the reality of like what we need and what would really make a difference because, There's gotta be trips you've forgotten. You've traveled so much. There's trips that barely hit a blip on your screen and somebody else might be getting into debt for that kind of thing.

That's a shame. But there's moments I'll never forget. That one night in college, I stayed with my roommates through the night and we just had this amazing conversation.

Was it Maya Angelou who said, "They'll forget what you said, they'll forget something else, but they'll never forget how they feel." You'll never forget how they made you feel.

My God, that's it. We're seeking out, I think we're— maybe a better way to say is we're starving for the feeling.

Yeah.

And, um, I 100% agree. It doesn't need to be traveling because you saw on social media. Yeah. It could go into your backyard with your best friend, uh, and just talking.

It's the moments.

But I just reconnected with Billy Yoder, who's my childhood friend, um, this weekend. I'm gonna be texting him and say, dude, we're getting together to build the story.

Yeah. You know, to have a shared experience and rehash the old one because that's always good too.

That's so joyful.

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome.

Good. Hey, this has been a blast. Uh, I think this is our best episode of the 3 we've recorded so far.

I think you're right.

We're maybe we got something going on here. As a listener to her show, first of all, I wanna thank you from the bottom of my heart for being an entrepreneur. It is a big effing deal. And I don't even know if you're hearing that from your loved ones, uh, your friends, or maybe even from yourself. You are a big effing deal. You're contributing to the economy. You're supporting yourself. You're supporting your family. Uh, you're supporting our globe. Even if you feel to a minuscule level, you are doing it. So thank you for taking on that risk. Um, secondly, I want you to subscribe to our podcast, and this is a selfish ask. I want you to do it because it supports us. It's the greatest way for the word to get out. More subscribers, more people discover it. So I know it takes time. I know it's, I'm putting a little onus on you, but if you click on that subscribe button, um, thank you. If you've already done it, thank you. Uh, and last and least, I am wishing you tremendous success though. The world is starving for successful entrepreneurs. So keep at it and we'll see you in the next episode.

Bye. Bye.