How to grow a business - The 5 things you need to stop doing yourself

5 things to stop doing yourself. So as entrepreneurs, we end up doing a lot in our business, right? When you're first starting up, you are everything from the janitor all the way up to the CEO. And when you look at companies who grow, entrepreneurs who really take off, it's when they stop doing all the tasks that are beneath them, focus on what they're best in the world at, and become a super successful entrepreneur. And so In today's video, I'm answering a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Michael Carmichael. Love you guys, who wrote in to say, hello Evan, by way of introduction, here is a photo of me and my lovely wife Odie. I've been a general dentist for 37 years and a hard money lender for the past 12 years. This year became a licensed lender here in Florida and my customers are house flippers and real estate investors. My 3-year plan is to slowly phase out of my dental practice while I conservatively grow my lending business to $4 million in loans outstanding. These are all short-term, high-interest-rate first mortgages on single-family homes. My question for you involves exactly how to grow my business. Oh, I could do it all myself, but that won't leave me much time for my other passions—OD, exotic travel, photography. I struggle with the sequence of steps needed to grow, along with an innate inclination to do too much myself and delegate too little. So what is a typical sequence? Marketing, building a recognizable brand, hiring an employee, buying computers and set up an office. Currently, we operate out of my existing office space, my dental building, use a part-time bookkeeper, and I'm hiring a marketer to set up automated workflow. I think I'm on the right path, but I have trouble visualizing the end result, a company that can function without me doing everything. Many thanks for your thoughts, Michael. So there are 6 layers in a typical company, and if you want to get to the highest level, which is CEO, you have to eliminate the 5 in front of you. And those 5 are administration, production, marketing, business development, and general manager. So I'm going to go through each one, talk about it a little bit, and then explain how it applies to Michael's business. And hopefully you can understand how it applies to yours as well, for those those of you watching and learn a little bit along the way if you feel like you're doing too much in your business. So number 1 is administration. You need to eliminate the admin from your life. This is the, the low-level data entry, bookkeeping, even accounting, which is higher level I guess, but still on the administration side. You don't want to be doing that stuff because you're not great at it, you never will be, you have no interest or passion in it. And if you can hire somebody at minimum wage to come in and do data entry for you, that frees up your time to go and do the bigger picture CEO work and, and the 5 other steps kind of in between. So, you know, the first person I hired in my first business was for 1 hour a day to come in and do admin work for me on the computer, and that saved me an hour a day. He did it from home, but it saved me an hour a day from having to do it myself. It saved me actually more than an hour a day because he was better at it than I was. And again, the more you can free up your time to focus on the bigger picture stuff, the more your business is going to grow. Where if you're tied down by all the day-to-day admin stuff because you can't delegate it out, then you're going to be held back. So Michael, in your business, you've already hired that part-time bookkeeper. That's great. I'd encourage you to look at what other admin tasks are happening on a regular basis that somebody else should be doing because you're doing it right now and it's preventing you from focusing on the bigger picture stuff. Number 2 is production, and that's when you're actually making something, right? The The business of making a product or making a service, if you have an actual good, and if I have these lint rollers here, how are these actually made? Do I have to make this by hand? Do I have a machine to help me? Am I still assembling it somehow? You want to remove yourself from the lint-making production as much as possible so you can again focus on the bigger picture stuff of the marketing and the business development and the general manager and the CEO time. That's where you want to be spending it. If you have a service-based business, then it's removing yourself from the delivery of the service as much as possible. So I'll give you an example. In my business, a brand might hire me to make a video, and in that video I'm explaining, you know, whatever topic they want me to talk about. And I'm still the guy on camera making a video, right? They're hiring me, and I guess I could delegate that away, but I, you know, I still enjoy doing the videos. But everything else I'm not a part of anymore, right? I don't edit the videos, I don't publish them online, I don't promote them on our social media channels. I don't do any of that work. I don't do the transcription of the text. You know, for me to sit there and transcribe my video, if it's 5 minutes of me talking and I gotta time it all out and transcribe it, that's not a good use of my time, right? So it's better to delegate that to allow me to focus on the best you. So Michael, in your business, I don't know what, what's involved in the delivery of your loan practice. It may not be a lot, in which case you can totally skip this step. But even if you think about how do you qualify a loan, right? What's the steps that people have to go through? Is that always you doing it? Are you spending a lot of time on that side of the business? And if you are, then that could be something that you have somebody come on And even if it's a part-time job, somebody who wants to learn the real estate business or the financial side of the business, that could be interesting for them. So they're getting paid a wage that's fair for them, and it frees your time up to again move up the ladder and focus on the bigger picture stuff. Number 3 is marketing, and this is where a lot of entrepreneurs get bogged down. You're so buried in the marketing that you can't move up to focus on the bigger issue things. So you're working on your website, you're working on your business cards, you're working on your flyers, you're working on your social media campaigns, you're working on a YouTube project, you're spending so much time in the marketing of your company. And yes, it's important. And, you know, if you're spending so much time doing the data entry and doing the production, you can't focus on the marketing. But if you're already past that and you're spending all your time in marketing, again, you want to— that's the next thing you want to give up so you can move upstream a little bit more. Because again, if you're spending so much time working on your website, then you're not spending the time thinking about the bigger picture stuff to grow your business. So Michael, in your case, you know, you said you're hiring a part-time marketer. That's awesome. Again, I'd be examining where you're spending your time. Are you spending so much time thinking about your social media campaigns and your brochures, and do you need business cards, and what are you gonna write on your website, and are you gonna do a blog, or are you gonna do a video series? All of that takes a lot of work. That forces you to be in the business. And if you have a tendency to want to take on a lot yourself and do everything yourself, like a lot of entrepreneurs do, then that can chew up a huge chunk of your time instead of letting you focus on the bigger picture things. So that's the next person to bring on, is helping you with your marketing. Number 4 is business development. And this is where you're actually out closing deals, bringing in new business. And this is where a lot of entrepreneurs should be, but they're not because they're spending too much time in the admin, in the production, in the marketing. You want to be out making contacts and bringing in deals. So in Michael's business, if he's trying to find new loans to be able to give out to new homeowners, what's the funnel? How does that look like, right? I don't want to necessarily rely only on people finding me on a website. I want to look at who can I partner with, who can I talk to that if they understand what I'm up to, they could spread my message to a lot of people instead of me having to go one by one by one by one by one. So look at first-time homebuyers. Who are they talking to before they're buying a home? So can you make a deal with a real estate agent? Can you make a deal with insurance brokers? Can you get in the local media, right, where anybody covering real estate in Florida would kind of know about you, right? That's business development, where you're out negotiating deals, and you can, you know, you want to build it to $4 million, that's not a huge portfolio, right? If you think about how much a house costs or condo costs, that's going to get chewed up pretty quickly. So you don't, you're not, you're not trying to build this ginormous organization. It doesn't take that many deals to be able to fill up your portfolio, and the right partnerships with the right real estate agents and mortgage brokers and insurance brokers and mentions in the media can, can give you all the business that you'll need. And so that's where you should be spending a lot of time as you grow this thing up instead of the stuff lower down the funnel. And as you continue to grow, as you want to step out, and as you want to do more traveling and photography and enjoy your wife, then you can give that role to somebody else to be able to manage for you. Number 5 is general manager, and here you're running the whole business. So you're, you're making sure everything gets out on time. You're, you're delivering everything on time. The money's flowing out, you know, you're getting paid back properly. All the deals are happening. All the meetings are set up, right? You have your goals, you have your targets, and you're running the business. And this is where most entrepreneurs aren't, but really should be. You want to be in that general manager role, but you're spending so much time downstream that you can't afford the time. If you want to continue to grow, that last step is CEO. CEO, that's number 6, is CEO, where you hire a general manager. And if you think about most entrepreneurs, we're creative, we're big thinkers, we, you know, we want to change the world, we have dreams that we want to go out and accomplish, we're the ones out there kind of inspiring people. That's the role of a CEO. You're setting the future direction of the company, where the general manager is running the company based on the goals and criteria that you set out, right? So the CEO would tell the general manager, here's where we're going. Here's what we want to accomplish, go out, help me make it happen. And the general manager would be the one taking care of everything. And so ideally, you know, your concern is how do I get this thing up to the point where I don't have to manage everything? Ideally, you can get up the ladder high enough so that you could be the CEO and not have to worry about anything else in the business. But that takes money, right? It's expensive to hire all of these people. And so as you work your way up, you're making sure that they're paying for themselves, you're making sure that the business is growing. But I don't know where you are yet. Right now you're kind of sounding like you're, you know, you've got the admin person, production may not be a huge issue, you've got the part-time marketing person, so next thing is going to be business development. And that may be you out there hammering on the doors, talking to those potential referral partners for you, eventually giving that to somebody else so you can step up to general manager and eventually CEO. So those are the 5 things that you need to stop doing yourself if you want to become a mega successful entrepreneur. I'd love to hear where you are on that path. Leave a comment, let me know where you're at. And if you have any questions, thoughts, or even advice for Michael, put that in the comments below. If you like this video, you want to see more, subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I'll see you soon. Every week I share inspiring and motivational stories that really mean something to me that I hope you'll check out in my newsletter below.