Why You Need to Remove Yourself from Your Business

Today, we are going to talk about why you need to remove yourself from your business. But before we do, Neil, how were you in the early days? Let's say, let's go back to ACS Consulting or whatever you used to call it.

Yeah. So back in the day, I was very involved day-to-day, not just operations, but actually doing the work. And what I learned throughout the process, not necessarily during my ACS days, but a few years later, More so like 10 years later, it took me a long time to learn. You're not going to really grow a business and make it big unless you create systems and processes in place. The second thing I learned is if you're not hiring people who are smarter than you and better than you, you're only going to get so far. But if you can create systems and processes and you hire people who are better than you, eventually you can start replacing yourself for all the roles that you were doing. And the new people that you put in place won't just be able to do it, but they'll be able to do it better than you, which is going to create a bigger business. And in the long run, you're eventually replacing yourselves. Like, as I learned when I raised venture capital years and years ago— I haven't raised since— the number one lesson that I was taught by investors is your only job is to hire really talented people. That's it. Go hire people to execute on your vision, and they just need to be better than you. Cool.

So, you know, there's this one quote I remember from David Cancel tweeted this years and years ago, but 90% of the time when there's a problem, it's usually a process problem. 5% of the time it's a people problem. Because think about, like, when you think about your recruiting process, that has to do with bringing on amazing people, right? So it directly affects that. And so what I noticed over time too, to Neil's point, the CEO or the leader has 3 jobs. It's the vision, and Neil mentioned the vision. It's recruiting and it's financing. So financing could be getting cash from customers, it could be raising money from angels, VCs, revenue-based financing, whatever you want to be doing, right? But, you know, at the end of the day, when people say recruiting is the number one thing, it's because hiring is one of the highest leverage things you could do. If we think about what Naval Ravikant says, you have 4 forms of leverage. You have code, capital, media, and labor. Labor is the oldest form of leverage you can have. We've done this since the beginning of time, right? It's leveraging other people to help you. And even if someone can do it at 70% to 80% of your ability, you're still getting a lot of leverage because you're buying back that time so you can do other high-leverage activities. So an example of this might be when you're getting to a different level, it's trying to do deals with other companies, or perhaps one of the highest leverage things you can do is create content if you have millions and millions of people that see your stuff, right? So you're trying to ultimately take the 10% to 15% things off your plate constantly over and over and over. And, um, it's gonna be super helpful. One thing that I really like, uh, from, from Dan Sullivan, uh, he talks about the task prioritization chart. And imagine this chart. So open like a Google Sheet document, and for one column you have $10 an hour, for the next column you have $100 an hour, and then you go $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, and then maybe $1 million an hour. This is how much you're making per hour. So a $10 an hour task might be, uh, scheduling. It might be, um, you know, prospecting. Right? So these might be $10 an hour tasks. $100,000 an hour tasks might be building a cross-functional management team, might be recruiting, might be negotiating deals, things like that, right? So you got to constantly be looking at every single quarter, what are the things can you be taking off your plate? Who can I hire? Because those things, those things that you want to be taking off, those become responsibilities, which become a job, right? And so I think what held us back in the early days, Neil mentioned, trying to do everything on your own because In the very early days, same thing for me too. I thought I was Superman. I thought I was the greatest thing and I should be doing everything. And it doesn't matter. Even if you're the best, you're only one person, right? So you have to constantly be thinking about, okay, what can I take off my plate? Who can I hire that's better than me? And then when you're interviewing these people, by the way, one of the proxies I look for is I'm asking myself constantly, do I think this person's smarter than me? Would I work for this person? And would I like to hang out with this person as well, right? The 3 things we look for out of any type of hires, are they humble? Are they hungry? And are they smart? So anyway, that's, that's my long-winded answer. Neil, you want to close it out?

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