Evan Carmichael explains why founders must delegate instead of doing everything themselves. Ben and Jerry hired a COO to handle finances they were bad at, which turned their struggling ice cream shop into a global brand. Spend your time only on what you do best, and outsource the rest.
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Build a team. If you want to have success as an entrepreneur, you need to build a team. You need to build beyond yourself because you cannot do everything yourself, and you shouldn't be doing everything yourself. One of my favorite stories is about Ben Jerry's ice cream. They were founded by two friends, Ben and Jerry, who in 1977 decided, hey, we want to get into the food business. These guys were lifelong friends. And they thought the bagel business was too expensive, so they said, "Okay, let's go into the ice cream business." And they spent $5 to get this correspondence course on how to make ice cream. And so they set up shop. They learned how to make ice cream. They invested $8,000 of their own money and $4,000 in borrowed money. They took over this ghetto gas station and started Ben Jerry's Ice Cream. The problem was they started losing money. These guys were the prototypical entrepreneur doing everything themselves, making the product, driving the truck, doing the sales and marketing, balancing the books, everything. And they realized, we're not great with numbers. We suck at numbers, we're not good at this, and we're losing money. And they had to put a sign up on their door to close down the shop one day to say, we're closed because we're trying to figure out what's going on. Talk about being authentic. And it started to change when they realized, hey, we're not good at the numbers, We shouldn't be focusing on this. If this company depended on us knowing our numbers and this being our core competency, we're going to fail. So they brought on somebody to help them. They had a friend who was a local nightclub owner named Fred Lager who came on board and he became their first COO. And the company started to turn around. He watched the books, he did all the numbers, he handled all the money, and the company finally started to make a profit. And it helped put the company on track to what it is now, a global brand with tons of sales. But it may not have ever gotten there if Ben Jerry tried to do it all themselves. And this is the important lesson for you as a business owner. You can't do everything yourself. There's, there's so much that you have to do to run a business, and this is, this is why it's hard. This is why so many companies, so many entrepreneurs shut down, because there's so much stuff that you have to do. and you end up spending so much time doing the stuff that you hate, doing the stuff that you're not good at, that you spend so little time on the stuff that is actually high value, where you're the expert. And you want to focus as much time on that. I call that CEO time. As much time on that as possible, and not all the other crap that still needs to get done, but shouldn't be being done by you. So whether that's bringing on somebody part-time, full-time, as an employee, as a consultant, as a partner in the business, your business will never be great as long as you are doing things that you are not great at. Does that make sense? You want to focus on what you're really good at, what you love doing, where you add tons of value, where you really help people, where you know by doing this you could change the world. And everything else should be given to other people who are great at that and let them run with it. That's how you build a quality organization. You have to start building a team and stop trying to do everything yourself. Believe. For those of you watching, I'd love to hear what you have to think. I'd love to hear how you're trying to build your team up. Leave it in the comments below or ask me a question in the comments below. You can click on the link in the description to support me in these videos. Give the video a thumbs up, click on my face, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much. I'll see you soon.
