How to Build a Business that RUNS WITHOUT YOU!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. We're talking about what is required to make your business where it can run without you on a day to day operational level. Before we get into the show, a big thank you. Today's sponsor, which is Gusto. I so appreciate them supporting the podcast and everything we're doing here. They stepped up for another year of supporting the podcast here on the show and it's a real testament to the hundreds, if not thousands of users have gone to Gusto. From this podcast and all the listeners that are small business business owners. I have yet to hear a single person that switched to Gusto and then decided to go back to another different type of software. Their level of service as well as the price is well worth the few dollars you spend per month. Go check it out today. Try out 90 days completely free. As a listener of the podcast, go to gusto. G-usto.com Bootcamp now today we're talking about an analogy that I used when speaking last week at the conference and I wanted to talk about a little more in depth today. And that is about getting out of the day to day operations level as you, the founder, the owner of the business, how to get out where you don't have to be there every single day. You have management in place. You have employees and staff and a team in place that run the day to day. You're still involved, you're still running the strategic level of the business. Maybe doing hiring, sales, marketing, making the strategic moves within the business to move the company forward. However, you're not there on a day by day basis. You're not there, you know, 10, 15 hours a day. You are strictly making the decisions at the higher level. And it's not necessarily about how long you're working there. It's more about what tasks you're actually associated with. And you're less involved in the actual manufacturing, the good or the actual delivery of the service. And more, there's a team in place to do those things and actually produce and deliver your product or service. But then you are making those higher level strategic decisions. And the analogy that I used last week was it's like building a house. And the reason I talk about this is because for a lot of you, right now getting out of day to day operations seems like hundreds of years away might seem impossible because right now you might be the only person in your business. You might have one or two employees or you're going the business to a place where it's so dependent on you, you can't even fathom not being there on a every single minute basis within the company. And so I made this analogy of it's like building a house. And that is assume you wanted to build a house and put a steel shingle roof on the top, on the top of the building. So instead of using like asphalt shingles, you wanted to use steel shingles. And I don't mean like just like steel sheets, like metal tin roof kind of thing. I'm talking like the thick half inch shingles of metal that come in on like massive pallets. They're super, super heavy, but they last literally 50 to 80 years. They're far, far greater in quality than asphalt shingles and far far greater quality than shingles or sorry, than clay shingles. And so they're extremely expensive, they're extremely heavy. And when you're building that house, you have to keep in mind that that's the end goal. You're going to build the house somewhat differently because the amount of weight that's going to be on the roof, the load bearing of and of all the framing and things like that. So my analogy was this, and that is taking the owner out of day to day operations in a small business is similar to putting that heavy, heavy roof on the top. Okay. And what that means is that throughout the whole process of building that building, you've got to be thinking about the end goal. You gotta be thinking about the last thing you're putting on this building, the shingles. The steel shingles is going to put a huge amount of weight on this building. And you've got to build it from the ground up to, to support that weight. What I was referencing is if you're just starting out even your business, knowing what you're, you want to have the end in mind to know that you want to get out day to day operations, that you want to delegate things to your team, that you need to find positions and have systems and procedures in place to run the day to day operations. Knowing that early on in the life cycle of your business is extremely important because you're going to start setting up your business in a different way than if you were expecting just to be there all the time. Because if you were expecting to be there all the time, you wouldn't have to make sure that the foundation is a little bit thicker. You wouldn't have to make sure that you're using two by sixes instead of two by fours in the framing. You wouldn't have to make sure that there's perhaps some cement posts that are there when a big storm comes or when an earthquake happens. Making sure your building is earthquake proof, having those supports in place, it's very much like your business. The same way you look at the house. If you're planning on one day getting out of your business, the sooner you can start building the systems and building the structure of your house as you build the company to support the weight of you one day leaving, that is putting the roof on. If you're going to plan on doing that, you have to start building the systems now. You have to start building your business as like, one day I'm leaving. One day I'm going to put this massive weight of me not being here on a day to day level and I have to build the systems, the procedures now. And I brought this up because like I said, so many people, they'll work in the business 15, 20 years, then realize they don't want to be there on a day to day level or they want to do something else part time or there's family obligations or health issues or concerns, and all of a sudden they realize that they've built their house, they've built this building, they've built this business. But yet they can't just leave now because if they did and the weight was put on the top of the house, the thing would literally fall apart. And so I really was challenging right from people who are just starting their business to start thinking about, okay, if I'm getting out of this business one day, what systems in place need to be to support this building and support the weight of when I leave. And when I started Augusta Lawn Care Services way back when, and I was the only, you know, only person doing the work, I was doing everything in the business, including installing and doing the service myself and doing the sales, doing everything. When I was at that level, I still knew what the end was in mind. I knew that I was one day going to franchise. I knew that one day I was not going to be there on a day to day level. So right from the beginning I was already trying to think like, okay, who can I train to do what I'm doing now? Who can I make this simple enough so they understand they can pick this up? So literally for my first employee, I would take him out on estimates occasionally just because I felt like one day I might not be here, one day I might. That employee's not even with us anymore and that's irrelevant. It was the fact that from the beginning I had the end in mind. I knew that One day, the weight of me not being there was gonna be placed on the business. And that in order for that to happen, I had to the systems from the get go. Like, if your foundation is not going to support that weight, you got a big problem because you got to deconstruct the entire building if you're going to actually get out of daily operations and put that massive roof on that heavy weight. So the last thing you want to do is get down, 15 years down the road, a sizable business. You finished all the drywall, you finished all of the decor, you finished all the carpeting, everything's painted and the furniture's moved in. And now you come in to put the roof on because you want to upgrade the roof on your renovations. And it's like, oh, wait a second, you can't step out of day to day operations. You can't put the steel roof on because your foundation is literally not going to support the weight. And what happens is people then have to literally sell their business for pennies on the dollar, realizing that, oh, I can't actually step out of day to day operations because I've built this entire infrastructure on something that will not support the weight of me getting out of day to day operations. That is, it's so dependent on my personality and me being there on a day to day basis that I cannot leave. That's a very sad place to be. And so regardless of where you're at in your entrepreneurial journey and the size of your business, the size of your building, it's time to start thinking about systems that you need to implement now so that you can one day step out of the field. So that one and maybe, maybe one, you know, maybe you want. I want to be in my business all the time. I always, I just love coming to the store, I love coming to the office. And I just, I want that to be always part of who I am as the owner. And that might be fine, but it's still not putting your business in the best place. That is, you're putting yourself in a vulnerable position by not at least having that as an option because you don't know what tomorrow holds. You don't know if there's a family calamity. You don't know if there's an illness, you know, if there's something that's gonna keep you from physically coming into the office. And so you need to be able to put your team and your employees, their livelihoods are at risk if you do not have systems in place to support you not being there. And so I think think about like a house, like when you're building this house and you're building systems and you're putting up things, you're building this infrastructure, building the team.

It'S very risky to have a subcontractor come in and build the very vital systems of your business. Like if you look a lot of general contractors, they will be very, very involved at the beginning of a house project like foundation and framing. And then they'll have a lot of subcontractors come after, do drywall, electrical flooring, et cetera, cabinets, things like that. But to actually subcontract, to give the reins over to somebody else on the very vital parts of your business, that one day when you're putting the roof on, it's too late to figure out when you want to leave day to day operations because of a sickness or a health issue. It's a very, very risky place to be all of a sudden, like, oh, now I need to put this big weight on. And I'm just crossing my fingers, hoping that I have systems in place that is a sturdy foundation and great framing and infrastructure that's actually going to support this weight. And so I see time and time again people that they just don't feel confident in certain areas of their business, for example sales or hiring, the fundamental pillars of their business. And so what they do is they subcontract those things out, they try to get like a hiring agency to come get them people, they try to outsource their sales or their marketing and they just give it up completely without restriction to somebody else, without trying to figure out doing the hard work, actually putting in the labor and the time and the effort to out figure, figure those things out. Cause they're fundamentally so important to the business, they're fundamentally so important to the infrastructure of building a business that can support the absence of the owner one day. And so I'd highly, highly encourage you to not give up the reins on those fundamental things within your business. Is it okay if you have someone you know? Do you start delegating? You start outsourcing things that are less important your business? Absolutely. But as a small business owner where you have less than 15, 20 employees, you need to know these things. You need to know how to hire great people, you need to know how to communicate with customers, you need to know how to generate sales on need to know about marketing. You need to know about these things because those are the fundamental aspects of your business. The same way that a foundation and the framing and those core concepts of A house being built, it's the same thing for your business. Don't subcontract those things out. Because if those things are done shoddy, if those things are done poorly, if there's poor workmanship on a house and a foundation is not poured correctly and there's a crack, guess what? If you find that out a month, two months, three months down the road, after all more money and time and energy and resource have been put into this thing, this structure, guess what? It's all for void. It's all for nothing. If you have to, if your foundation was poured incorrectly and you're definitely not going to be able to step out of day to day operations if you haven't figured those things out. And if you all of a sudden come to the place you need to step out of day to day operations and the foundation is cracked, it's literally a deconstruction project. Tear the business down completely, rebuild, start in a new industry, start a new business completely fire all your staff. And that's literally what people have to do if they don't start thinking from the very beginning. So I don't care if you have one employee, two employees, five employees, if you're just starting your business now, if you have the end goal in mind of you one day stepping out of day to day operations, being able to not be on a day to day level, being able to do two or three or four businesses, or being able to travel and your business does not fall apart. If that's what you know, if you, what really turns you on is the strategic moves and the planning aspect of your company, which that's for me, I love that aspect of the business. Like if that's what is your passion and you know, one day to get to be able to do that more, you're going to need to step out of daily operations. You need to start thinking about these things now, what systems you have in place to allow you to one day put that roof on, that steel roof, that's much more hardy, much more long lasting. A business that can run without the owner is much more, much more, much less vulnerable to economic weather climates, much less to hiring climates. A business that can run without the owner, that is have a very strong roof on at the very end of the construction project. It's like a stamp of approval that everything below that was built to quality, it was built to standard, it was able to support that stronger or that heavier weight of the business owner not being there. And so that like a business that doesn't need the owner is in a much better place to win and succeed and get through economic times, get through personal issues of the business owner, get through times when, you know, maybe management doesn't get along if they can build the building the systems in the business to the place where it supports that. It's like the stamp of approval from the economics and the hiring the team. But all those things have to be in place. You cannot get. This is what's so interesting, and after last week that I found so interesting, people wanting to implement systems like pay for performance or like open book management, and yet they have forgotten that those things are like some of the final touches. Those are some of like the, that's like literally putting the plywood on the, on the roof. All right, like before you, the owner leaves, you need to have open book management, you need to have pay for performance, you need to have certain systems in place. But before you can even get there, you need to have much more fundamental values implemented within the business, like the foundation trust. Like if your whole business is not built on trust within the organization between the employees and the owner, and the owner and the employees, if that's not there, I don't care what systems or what tricks or strategies you try to implement from listening to people like me, it will not work if trust is not at the bottom with your employees, if a great team culture is not holding up the weight that building, it does not matter what kind of things you start to implement up top. And so I truly believe that a great business is built on a great team. And I believe that is the foundational piece of your building. So if you're talking about the roof and you want to get out of day to day operations, you better make sure that your foundation is super solid. You better make sure that the framing is you have systems and people in place that are going to support you, support your vision, support each other. Because one wall can be super strong. One person within the business can be super strong. But if it's not supporting other walls, it's not supporting other rooms of the building. Guess what? Your building's still going to fall over. That one wall might stay standing, but the building, the business, the organization will fail if they're not supporting each other. And so it's something that I think a lot about. I could probably talk about this for two hours about the different implications of a business owner leaving the weight it puts on the business and the fact that in order for that to happen, you have to have systems, you have to have people, you have to have a culture you have to have trust, you have to have these fundamental things that will support that weight. And I promise you, you need to start doing that now. And if you're already building a sizable business and now you're listening to this, start now. It's much easier to start now than in one year or in two years or next week. In fact, if you can just start now and even if you have to deconstruct a little bit, even if you have to go back a little bit in the building process, maybe scale the business back a bit, like we had to do that at Augusta in order for me to get out of day to day operations so I could run the franchise. In order for us to run the franchise, I like, I knew I had to be working that 100%. I could not be tied down to the daily operations of Augusta in Whatcom county at all. So what do we have to do? We had to scale back a bit. Like we had built the business so big and now I was like, wait, we gotta like go back and put some support teams in. We have to take our time a little bit here. And we actually contracted for a year, took out services, we took out big revenue generators that were not going to support the weight of me not being there. And so these are things you gotta think about. Do it now. It doesn't matter if you gotta deconstruct a bit, wind back the tape, take down the size. Maybe instead of building a 40 foot tall house, you just go, you know what? We're gonna do a two story building and it's only gonna be 35ft tall, it doesn't matter. But we'll be able to get that roof on, we'll be able to get the business out of the owner out of the business day operations. And I truly believe that's most sustainable way to run a business. So hopefully that helps someone out there, regardless of where you're at in their business life cycle. Start today. Start thinking about the end in mind today, what you want that goal to look like. And I promise you it will pay big dividends. Thank you so much. You've been listening to Business Bootcamp podcast. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great. Because nothing else. Pay.