Double Your Profit Day #23 Why Over Delegating Can Hurt Your Business!

Welcome back to Double Your Profit. Topic today is don't over-delegate. Critical decisions stay with you. When I was growing the business, I remember reading E-Myth Revisited, and there's a version of that for contractors. And the story in E-Myth is it's a baker, and she went and launched a bakery, and it turned into kind of like this living nightmare. The whole concept is you're having an entrepreneurial seizure, right? Like you like this thing and you have this like seizure and you're like, I gotta go start a business. I remember early on in my career reading this book and being like, wow, like, this makes sense. If I'm a plumber running a plumbing company, the act of plumbing is only one of like 7 important things that are happening inside that business. So in E-Myth, what they really focus on is delegating. Now, where this gets dangerous is a little bit later on where delegation turns into abdication. Now, abdication is like washing your hands of something like, hey, I'm not going to deal with this. A lot of the early skills that you learn as an entrepreneur is to delegate, how to make yourself as the owner replaceable. Where it gets risky is when you start stepping out of the things that you shouldn't be stepping out of. Are you stepping out of watching cash? Are you stepping out of controlling margin? Are you stepping out of vendor negotiations? Are you delegating these strategic profit-impacting decisions? Your job is to drive the business forward, and that could be profit, that could be growth, that could be some dabbling in marketing, that, that could be a lot of different things, but your job is to grow the business. And if you're not doing that, then you're not doing your job. Between that $3 and $5 million mark is the first time that owners sit there and think, well, I have fully replaced myself from the day-to-day. So then they get a lake house, they get a boat, and they just sort of like piss off during the day and they abdicate their responsibility. Whereas what they should be doing is, hey, my tactical day-to-day responsibilities have been delegated. How do we now focus on the strategic forward-moving decisions. For wherever you are in your business journey, if it's just you riding around in a truck or if you're running a $100 million shop, the lesson is the same. How can I focus my time on the highest impact activities and how can I remove the day-to-day administrative work that is not necessarily moving the business forward from my time? Wherever you are, whether you're that one man or that $100 million, you're going to go through this repeatedly, this cycle of strategic versus not strategic. What should I be doing? The important lesson to keep in mind is don't over delegate, critical decisions stay with you, and make sure that you are always focusing on the radically important inside your business. Make sure you like and sub.