Elevate Your Role as a Business Owner

How do we only focus on the things that really bring joy, meaning, impact into our lives, into our business, into our family's lives, and then elevate ourselves out of the other roles that need to get done, but someone else can do them. I'm super excited today because this is something that really helps me just have clarity on what it is I'm supposed to be doing with my time, right? What is my job? If I'm going to tell myself, louis, go out there and do your job, and everything else will follow, well, I've got to get clear on what that is. And for me, I really believe that when we take something that is just feels like I've got so much to do and I've got a business to run and I've got a life to run, and we just kind of separated out into different components. It allows us to really just get clear on what we want. So I'm excited to have you guys here today. Let's talk about your roles in your life. You've got three different categories of roles. You've got your personal roles. Okay? These are, you know, this is, look, first and foremost, you're the CEO of your health. You know, you might have a spouse or you might have somebody around you that, you know, tells you what you should be doing, you should be exercising, you should be eating. You might have someone around you, but you're never going to do anything in your, you know, take care of your health. You're the one that's going to get on the exercise machine or go to the gym. You're the one that's putting food in your mouth or not putting food in your mouth. Right? You're per one of your personal roles as CEO of your health. You know, another personal role is you're a father, you're a mother, you're a husband, you're a wife, you're a son, you're a daughter. You know, you might be a community leader, you might be a church leader, you might be a dog father or a cat mother, right? Whatever your personal roles are, we want to identify these. And I know this might sound simple here at first, but it's important that we are doing our job in a balanced way in order to truly feel fulfilled and let that fuel other areas of our life. All right, so we've got our personal roles, then we've got our household roles, right? You've got your household roles. So, you know, I consider family to be part of personal roles, meaning, you know, the type of father I want to be, the type of husband, I want to be the type of son. I want to be the type of, you know, cousin. I want to be like, whatever it might be, those I consider to be personal roles, but household roles are things like, you know, who's the CFO in your household, in your family, who owns that role? It could be. You could be your spouse, or it could be totally up in the air, but someone needs to be managing the finances of the household, period. You know, and the thing with roles is that for most roles, we want to identify one person that owns that role and is responsible for that role. You know, another thing is, you know, housekeeping, right? I mean, just taking care of cleaning the house and groceries and, like, whose role is that? You know, we've really got to start identifying things because when it comes to. I could tell you just from my own life dealing with, you know, unnecessary, you know, discrepancies at home. When you clarify roles of like, hey, I'm responsible for this, you're responsible for that. Let's work as a unit, and let's just handle what we need to handle. Instead of things falling between the cracks, it resolves the majority of household conflicts, right? Things about. Think about how many times or how many stories or how many people, you know, that just, you know, they're in a battle at home. And it might have started over, like, who's going to take the garbage out, right? Something simple like that. Defining the roles of who's going to do what is critical. And then you've got your business roles, okay? So in your business, your CEO, you might also be, you know, phone sales. You might also be the bookkeeper. You might also be customer service. You might do a lot of different things in your business. You might have many different roles in your business, but we've got to identify these three different categories of roles. Okay, so you got personal, household, and business. So here's what we need to do to, you know, not only own these roles, but then elevate ourselves out of some of these roles. Because the first step is to identify, hey, these are the roles, and these are the roles that I want to own. Not just, like, I do them, I'm okay at them, but I own them, I'm taking responsibility for them, and I'm going to own them and do them really well. But then we need to also look at it and say, how do we only focus on the things that really bring joy, meaning, and impact into our lives, into our business, into our family's lives, and then elevate ourselves out of the Other roles that need to get done, but someone else can do them, right? We don't have to do all the things that need to get done in our life. And by first taking the step to just identify everything, we can then start to figure out where we can move ourselves out of. So let's start by, first thing you want to do is create a roles list. Okay? Again, stick with me. If you're like, louis, I know this, do this, okay? This is really, really important. To help you get clarity on what it is that you need to be focused on on a day to day basis. Create a roles list for yourself. Separate it out into personal, household and business and you'll realize, wow, like, I've got a lot of roles, right? I've got a lot of different responsibilities, I've got a lot of different jobs that I'm responsible for. So create your roles list then with that list. So there's going to be a little like homework here, right? You're going to have to spend a little time working on this stuff with that list. You then look at it and say, who do I want to be in each of these roles? Not what do I need to do, but who do I want to be? When we focus on, you know, who it is we want to be, who it is we want to become, you know, if we're like, hey, as a father, this is who I want to be. I want to be somebody that, you know, my daughter knows is there for her, you know, that she knows can count on me, that she knows if something's wrong, that I'm there like that, that, that she could feel that unconditional love, that unconditional support. You know, as a husband, I want my wife to feel the love. I want my wife to feel the passion, right? I want my wife to feel supported in business. Who do you wanna be as a leader? Who do you wanna be as the CEO of your business? You know, meaning when we talk about who do you wanna be? Think about if someone had to describe you, if it's your funeral and people showed up from different areas of your life. I know people get a little funny talking about death, but, you know, the reality is this puts, puts it in perspective really, really quick. And people showed up from different areas of your life, how do you want them to describe you? The people that worked for you, how do you want them to describe you as a leader? The people in your community, how do you want them to describe you? Your family, how do you want them to describe you? Who do you want to be? You know, too many times we're focused on what do we need to do, what's our to do list, what's the next thing we need to check off to get done. But a lot of the decisions on what to do get answered when we decide who we want to be in that situation, in that role, right? Think about that moving forward. Like, whenever you've got a tough decision and you're like, what do I do? Think about, who do I want to be? Right? How do I want to represent myself in this situation? And what to do follows, who do you want to be? Then we've got to do a weekly roll score, okay? I do this every week. A weekly roll score. You'll have your list. Now you made your list. You're going to decide, write a little description, one little couple sentences on who you want to be for each one of those roles, and then you're going to score yourself every week on how you did. You know, too often people get to the end of their life. You know, I'm not trying to go dark today and talk about death, but I want to put this in perspective because it just helps us get there much quicker. And they look back and they say, man, I just wasn't the father I wanted to be. I wasn't the leader I wanted to be. I didn't participate as much as I wanted to in my community or in my church or any organizations that I'm a part of. And so by evaluating yourself every week, you're able to then make adjustments. So every week, rate yourself in each of the roles I like to do one through five. It makes it easy, right? One, you were terrible. Five, you were fantastic. Three, you were average, you know, two, you were a little below average. And four, you were a little bit above average. But you've got room to improve, right? Won't take you much time. Pick a day, once a week, maybe Saturday morning before you head into the weekend or whatever day works for you, and just do a weekly roll score, all right? If we're not, you know, in business, in business, what. What you, you know, measure what you. What you measure gets managed, right? And we need to measure our own personal activities, and we need to measure how we showed up that week, how we did, right? We're going to talk in a little bit on how this all translates into your business. Specifically. This part right now is more geared towards you personally because you can't manage your team and manage your business until you first manage yourself. But you've got to rate yourself weekly, right? You could keep a little note in your phone, go through it. What would I do? How could I make it better? And, you know, as you give yourself the score, why did you give yourself the score? Don't just give yourself a score. Why did you give yourself the score, whether it's a 5? I gave myself this 5 because I was on fire this week. I was fantastic with, you know, with my spouse, with my kids in business. I was just killing it. I was the person that I wanted to be, right? I wanted to be. Because once you describe who you want to be, then you could rate yourself to that. And then what adjustments are you gonna make for the upcoming week? Right? What adjustments are you gonna make for the upcoming week? And one of the main things you want to do with that list is you want to identify the gaps. Identify the gaps. I mean, you should have anywhere from five to 20 different roles, right? And when I say 20, it's because maybe you've. You're doing a lot of specific things in your business and you want to identify the gaps. Meaning, okay, where am I? Where am I rating myself every week as, you know, as a one or a two or even a three? You know, no one wants to be average, right? That word drives me nuts. People say, well, what's the average this and what's the average that? Like, no, no, stop. You don't want to be average. You know, the masses are average. You guys aren't the masses. Or you want to be in a program like this, you know, you're striving for extraordinary. So anything that you're falling under that three or under, identify the gaps and also identify the gaps between the areas where you're a five consistently and the areas where you're a three or below. And that's how we start to bring our lives into balance, okay? That's how we start to say, wow, like, I'm so focused on my, you know, maybe my business and maybe my health, but my relationships aren't what I want them to be, you know, or I'm being a great father, I'm being a great husband, you know, or a great mother and a great wife. But I'm not taking care of my health, I'm not taking care of my finances. All of this goes together. In order to live an extraordinary quality of life, you can't be extraordinary in one area and suck in another area. How you do anything is how you do everything. So we want to bring it all up, right? So just. It gives you that weekly check in to say, where do I need to put a little more focus. Where do I need to put a little more intention? That's it. That's it. There's no. This isn't about big, major. You know, you've got to go do something major to fix things. It's. No, no. If I. If I check in on it weekly and I rate myself and I describe why I'm rating myself that way, and I write down what I could do to make some adjustments, I make those little adjustments. That's how you build habits. That's how you build character. That's how you become the person that you want to be, Right? And I'm not here. And nobody should ever tell you the person you should be. You know that. You know the person that you want to be, right? And when you're acting and taking actions based on the person you want to be, that's called congruence. You're congruent with what you do and who you are is congruent with who you. The identity that you have for yourself. That's when you feel on fire. That's when you could feel joyful. That's when life feels meaningful. That's when you feel confident. And when you feel confident, you could crush anything else you want in your life. So we've got to start being more congruent with the best version of us that we want to be, okay? And then the last step here is delegate and elevate, you know, whatever does not contribute to, you know, meaning in life and joy and fulfillment and excitement, you know, whatever somebody else can do, let them do it. Right? Let them do it. You've only got so much time in the day. You've only got so much time in your life. And, you know, maybe because a couple months ago I turned 40, you know, now I started thinking, man, I might be half. I might be halfway there, right? How do I want to spend this time? And I don't want to spend it doing meaningless stuff. There are things that need to get done. But you could delegate yourself and elevate yourself to a higher role, to a higher level, right? So we don't want to be afraid to do that. And so what I want to do is I want to jump into how we do this in our businesses now, right? How we take the same concept and idea of assigning roles and becoming accountable for those roles, owning those roles, and elevating out of those roles into our business. When we talk about, you know, creating systems and creating processes and we talk about we don't want people to run the business, we want processes to run the business and then we want the people to run those processes. What we're really talking about is we want roles to run those processes and we want people to fulfill those roles. I'll give you an example, like too often, and I used to do this early on too, is we'll have somebody in our business and we'll try to craft a job description around that person, right? We'll take that person and we'll try to kind of create some special thing for them. And that usually does not work out very well, Right? It leads to frustration with you because they're not doing what you need them to do. They're wearing too many hats that aren't in alignment. They're all over the place. So it's hard. So they're feeling frustrated that they're not doing a good job. Where if we look at it, we say, okay, in my business, what are the roles that I need for this thing to run? You know, even if you're a one man show, you know, we were talking to Santiago earlier, he's like, look, I'm doing everything. And the reality is it's not Santiago's doing everything. It's Santiago's owning many roles in the business. And again, it goes back to the same theme of if we just clarify and separate things out, it becomes much easier for us to address how to deal with them. So when you look at your business, what, what are the roles that you need? They'll give you a fun little exercise. Let's say you had an unlimited budget to hire, right? You had like these gift certificates for hiring people that, you know or, you know, the government just gave you a bunch of money and said, use this for payroll, right? What would you do with it? Let's imagine that happened. And so you got this money and you could hire whoever you want. Okay, what would that look like? What are the people, the roles that you would hire? You'd be like, okay, I need somebody for customer service. Okay, actually, I need a customer service manager. I need customer service reps. I need a sales manager. I need sales reps. You know, I need an operations manager. You know, I need logistics or a dispatcher. I need a bookkeeper, I need a marketing manager. You know, I need, you know, movers, I need a warehouseman. Right? You need all these different roles to run your business. And for me, when I started my first business, when I started my first moving company, I basically, if you think of those roles as hats, people say, you know, you wear all the hats, you wear all those hats. So with roles, you need to start, like with Santiago, start taking off some of those hats and handing them to somebody else. When we define the roles in our business that it's going to take to run that business, you might have 20 different roles in your business and you might be a one man show. It just means that you're wearing all the hats. That's okay. But it gives you the clarity to know who to hire next, who you really need, as opposed to just looking at it and saying, I've got all this stuff to do. All this stuff to do that just gets mixed all together. You're able to identify when you're able to step in and be in each of the roles that you need to be in. So I want to run through this process with you of how to do this in your business. So the first thing you want to do is identify the roles, okay? Identify the roles that you need in your business. Literally the easiest way to imagine it is just to say, you know what, I've got free. Hire anyone. I need coupons, right? Who would I hire? Who do I need? You know, I need. Again, we went through the list, like whatever you need in your business. Write those down. And once you write those down, what you're going to want to do is write the role descriptions for these. Okay? Write the role descriptions. This is the stuff right here. If you do this in conjunction with the one and done process creation that we talked about last month, if you haven't seen it, go watch the replay. It's in your members area. This is the stuff that will start creating a model business for you, right? It'll start to have things run predictably, systematically, and without your input, of course. It'll run smoother as well because you started to define things. So you write a role description. So now I don't write a role description for the person. I might have a person in mind that I'm thinking about giving this role to. Meaning if I need a customer service agent. Write the role description of what a customer service agent does in your company. Write that down. You know, if you need a sales rep, write the role description of what a sales rep does in your company. Write that down. Okay. Don't worry about. You might say, louis, what's the format? Doesn't matter. Just write it down, right? Just get it done. Don't worry about perfection. If you wait on perfection, you're never going to get stuff done. Get the momentum, get it going. Right? I'd rather see you write this all on a napkin. And then figure out how to make it pretty later than wait to figure out how to make it pretty first. Once you write the role descriptions right, you've got those written out for every area of your business. Then you assign and have them accept those roles. And so what you're doing is instead of saying, I've got this person, let me craft a job around this person. You're saying, what are the functions? What are the roles that are necessary for my business to run? And then once you assign them, right, let's say you've got three people in your company, but you've got 20 roles. Well, you've got to say, who do I assign this? Customer service. You know what? That's going to be you. Let's see this one. Sales. Sales rep. This is also going to be you. Bookkeeper. This will be me, right? Head of marketing. This will be me. What did I miss? Dispatcher, Logistics. This is going to be you. So what you do is once, like, imagine you just had like a little card like this or a piece of paper with all the different role descriptions, one for each, right? And you just kind of like pass them out to each person. Hey, this is. You're responsible for this role now. And those three, those five, that one, whatever it might be, role that you assign to that person, that becomes their job. Their job is to facilitate all those roles. Now they have a written explanation of what that role, what your expectations are for that role. They take that, they sign that. I understand that. That's my role, okay? And if you're one, you know, it doesn't matter how small or large your company is, if you have, if you're one person, you're gonna have all of these for yourself. But what that does is it makes you realize the same way when we were talking about roles in your. In your life, it makes you realize where you're lacking, right? Where you're not doing the things that you need to do. And it helps you to get clear on like, wow, nobody's handling that. Because it is something in my company that needs to get done, even though I don't have a physical person for it yet. And that will allow you to start crafting your next hires. That will allow you to look at it and go, wow, there's all these roles. Here's what I want to, or here's what I should be based on my abilities, be handling. Here's the stuff that someone else should be handling. Now you could start to calculate, okay, what's it going to cost me to bring somebody in and am I bringing somebody in for just one role or do I bring somebody in and I could assign them these four roles, right? And that's how you start justifying your additional hires, right? And get really clear on who you need and what they need to be doing. Then once you've got that. So now what you've done is you've identified the roles, right? You've written the role descriptions. Maybe you could sit down in an afternoon and write all the, or in the morning and write all the role descriptions out. Maybe you say, you know what? I'm going to write one a day, here's a list of all the roles and one a day I'm going to sit down for 10 to 30 minutes and just write out what, what I want in that, right? You're designing your business the way you want it, in a proactive way. You're truly building a business. When people talk about building a business, the way you build a business is you build systems, you build processes, you design roles. That's building a business because that's the stuff that creates a model that will allow you to step back, that will allow you to expand, that will allow you to franchise. Without that, you stay on the hamster wheel and you keep doing the same thing and keep doing the same thing and keep doing the same thing. This is the stuff that the majority of people will not do. This is the stuff that because they don't do it, they're going to get burnt out. Even if their business is running fantastic and it's making money, they can only do it for so long without this. And the day where they decide that they want to step away or they need to step away or it's time to step away, they're not going to be able to. So I know this is very proactive and I know you might be like, hey, I'm doing just fine without these roles. That was me, right? That was me for many years. And when I realized like the level of scale that I was trying to get to the business that I wanted to build, I could not get there until I got this stuff in place. Till I established the roles, created the processes, documented them. It is what will set you free in your business. It is what will get everybody in alignment on the same page and working towards your ultimate goal. All right, so identify the goals, write descriptions and then assign them then self rated weekly role score. We talked about giving yourself a scoring yourself every week on your roles. Well, you're going to have your team rate themselves on the roles that you gave them, you know, they don't have to turn in their personal and household roles to you, but every week, right, they're going to send you a list. They'll either email it to you. You could have, you know, automated tool in Slack or Asana or, you know, whatever, Do a prompt and say, you know, hey, here's your roles. How do you rate yourself this week? 1 through 5 in each of these roles, right? So say somebody does some sales, they do customer service, and they also handle marketing, right? In each of those areas, they rate themselves. And it's the same questions that the same prompts for you. Why did you give yourself this score? And what adjustments will you make in the upcoming week to improve it? People aren't gonna like this at first, right? You're causing people to take a look at themselves and rate themselves. But what this does is it takes the burden off of you. Who feels about one employee or all employees? Like, man, they're not doing. They're not doing anything. I don't know what they're doing. I don't know. Like what. Like, what are they really doing? Who feels that way about one or all your employees at any given time? Okay, why have all that burden on you? Why should you have to constantly evaluate them? Let them take a look at themselves and come to the table with how they're doing and how they could be doing a better job. Let them also be thinking about how to do it better, how they did last week. Otherwise, they just, you know, the weekend comes, they're out, they don't care. They go, they live their life. They're. They're gone, right? Nobody wants to do a bad job. The people that don't care will weed themselves out through this process. You'll have them rate themselves. They're not gonna like what they see, and they'll, you know, may leave because they can't take looking at themselves. But those are the people that aren't bringing you up anyways. You know, you'll have some people that are gonna, I'm a five in all areas. I'm a five. And, like, they've got no real justification on why they're a five. But you want them to, you know, you really want them to assess that, all right? It's a powerful tool. Then from there, you transition roles as needed. You know, if you think about each of the roles, like, if this was, you know, let's just say, you know, this was. Let's say this is a role, right? This is like an envelope, and inside there, there's the description for a customer service rep and you only needed one. Well, if one person, you decided, hey, I think this individual over here would be a better fit to own this role. Just take it and give it to them. Right? Here's the role that you're. Do you accept this role? Okay, here's what we expect from it. Here's where you could find all the processes for this role. Right? Here's the quizzes to make sure you understand those processes. We talked about all this last month. Again, if you guys missed that. So you could transition roles as needed. And you could do that for a few reasons. Number one, you could do it to get different perspective from different people in your company. Like if you took somebody out of sales and put them in operations or out of operations and put them in sales, they'll bring a different perspective to the table. And they're also cross trained. You know, it's great to have somebody cross trained when you lose somebody in another area or if they're just not the right fit. You know, your job as a leader is to identify the strengths of your people and get them in the right seats. Right? You want the right people in the right seats. You might have the right people, they just might not be in the right seats. For years I tried to force people into like what I wanted them to be doing. And I'm like, why am I going against the grain? Like where would they be really good based on, you know, what I know about them, based on their skills, based on their likes, based on a conversation with them on, hey, this is what we do here. Here's all the different areas. Where do you think you could provide the most value and then put them there. You know, you don't know what somebody's like when you first hire them. I mean, it's very rare that you bring somebody in and how you think they're going to be from day one when you interview them and hire them is how they actually are. But we get so frustrated because they're not doing the job that we want them to do. We've got to look at it and say, is there a different spot for them that they would do better? Now don't confuse this with moving somebody around because they're just not a self starter. They're just not organized, they're just not on top of stuff. They're not responsible, they're not a good employee. You know, don't take the the bad egg and just keep moving them around and moving them around like, oh, you're a problem here Let me put you here. You're a problem there. Like, fire them already, right? Like, if they're not good in any area, they've got to go. It's just part of business. And a lot of times what will happen is. And I say we, because I went through all this, we won't do it because it's uncomfortable to fire somebody. We feel bad. We might like them as a person, we might understand and know what they're going through. Like, ah, wow, they're just trying to buy a house. I know they got this going on and they've got that going on. And because of our compassion, we'll keep moving them around and causing ourselves grief and stress, not to mention the negative effects on the business. Okay, so let's say you do let that person go. Okay? So it's almost like, you know, you think about the role descriptions, right? And again, you're not going to really write these on cards. I'm just trying to give a visual example. But you think about the role descriptions. It's like when they leave, you take back those role descriptions, you bring them in, you're like, okay, I need someone to handle these. Now this, I got customer service. Who am I going to get to handle this? And you could either disperse their roles amongst your existing team or, you know, you need to hire. But when you hire, you've got it written out. You know, the role description becomes a major part of your employment ad. Right. And what you place out there to find somebody new. So to be able to replace a person, you know, when you look at someone, you're like, I can't. Like, they. They do everything. They know how to do everything. In the business, you've got to define what everything is and separate that into different roles. Because then you're never. You're never held hostage by somebody who's not doing what they're supposed to do. Right? But more importantly, this is not about just, you know, firing people. It's about giving your team the clarity they need. Can we all agree that when we have clarity, we operate better? Does everybody? Are you guys with me on that? Your team's the same way. I've been guilty of it, you know, many times where I know I'm not giving the clear direction that I need to be giving. But those gaps of time are much less because I'm rating myself weekly. So when I'm rating myself as a leader and I see that I'm not being the leader, that I want to be the person, I want to be the person I want to be remembered as the person I see myself as, my higher version of myself. And I'm not being congruent with that. I can make the adjustments. I might not be able to make them that week. I might have a realization that there's something that I need to do and adjustments I need to make that I just can't make for three, four weeks. But I'm aware of it and the mind can start thinking of solutions for it. Your team's the same way, right? Give them the clarity on what it is your expectations are, what their roles are, and watch how you reactivate some of your people. Not everybody. Not everybody. But I would imagine you've got some pretty good people, right? You probably got a few excellent people. When you give them the clarity, watch how it reactivates their sense of purpose within the business. Nobody wants to feel like they're not doing a good job. We all want to feel like we're doing our job and we need that clarity on what our job is. So start with your roles. Get that lined up first. Start rating yourself weekly on those roles. Just as a checkpoint, right? This isn't to put ourselves down or to celebrate ourselves. It's just a checkpoint to make sure we're not leaving anything behind. Then do the same for your team. All with the focus on leading you towards that ultimate life and the ultimate business targets and goals that you want to hit to get to that life. Implement what we went over last month with the one and done process creation, and this will all start falling into place. It's these things, the things that require you to be proactive. They require you to set aside block time to sit and do them right. No one's going to reactively. Like this isn't a reactive thing to sit and establish roles for your business. It's proactive, right? You've got to be able to carve out the time. You've got to be able to make it happen. We've got to be able to, you know, delegate and elevate ourselves to other areas that are less tedious on small tasks and more impactful on what really matters. Hey, my friend, before you go, you've got to hurry and watch these next few videos over here. They will absolutely help you take your moving company to the next level. Go watch them now and I'll see you over there.