How to Work ON Your Business, NOT IN IT!

Hey everyone, it's Mike Andes and you're listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. Today is Christmas day when I'm recording this, and today I'm giving you five gifts, five tips that are going to help you get out of the day to day operations and the minutia of running your business. Before we get into today's show, a big thank you, today's sponsor, which is Gusto. If you haven't already, go to gusto.combootcamp so you can try out their software completely free for an entire quarter. That's right, 90 days to use their their software completely free. As we end this year, you start thinking about taxes, you start thinking about submitting your W2s for your employees. This is why Gusto exists and what makes it so easy for you as an employer to not only run payroll, but give Your employees accurate W2S and tax information without having to take hours or a bunch of calculations. It's very, very simple. Check it out Today, go to gusto.combootcamp and find out the best way, the best solution to for paying your employees. Today we got five ways to step out. Get out of the minutia of running your business on a day to day operational level. All right, so this is something that I've had to work on for the past year or two as I've stepped out of the day to day operations locally at our shop at Augusta Lawn Care, to the point where I just kind of go in the morning for moral support. And that's mostly it. And so how did I do that? Wasn't easy. These are some of the things that I would suggest. This is not an exhaustive list. I'm sure there's like 100 you could come up with. But these are the things that I had to work on, the things I'm still working on to make sure it's a smooth process when the owner, the founder is not there. And for some businesses, if they don't do these things, this is why their businesses fall apart when they're not there for a day, or when they're not there and they go on vacation or they get sick and they can't be there for a week. That's why businesses, small businesses fail, is because the founder has to be there all the time. And even worse off, they get run ragged because they're running around trying to fight 100 different fires, trying to do 100 different things. And really just being an operator within the business on a day to day level, running around doing a million different things without Actually doing one or two of the things that are going to actually move the needle forward and move the business in a positive direction. So these are the things that I've had to work on. I'm not very good at most of these things. These are just the things that I knew I had to do if I was gonna step out of the business. You know, Augusta Lawn Care locally, it can run without me anytime. Fitness, locally, it can run without me. What do I do? I then use my time to go focus on the businesses that are growing, the ones that are not yet to the point where they can run without me. You know, the franchise. I'm actively scaling up Augusta Lawn Care, the franchise side of things, as well as Ketosis cups, which is a food working on that side of things. So that's where my time is invested and I'm able to do that because these other businesses are running themselves. Now you might be saying, well, I don't want to have four, five, six different companies. I only want to have my one business. And I'm happy with that. This is still valid and very important information for you to know because you can live your life on your terms. When your business can be run with or without you. Obviously when an owner and a founder is there, it's usually going to be long term, much better. But you need to be able to step out of the business. You need to be able to make sure it's not susceptible to your health or you feeling in a good mood or whatever it might be, your family situation being a positive thing, whatever it might be. You not want your personal, your personality, your physical presence being the dependency of the company. Especially when you start having employees and their livelihood and their family is dependent on the business being successful, you don't want the business to then be dependent on, on you so much that you're always running in a hundred different directions. You never have other people to be delegating things to. So these are the five things I have to do and I'm still working on trying to perfect so that I can build businesses and then let very capable people run them. And I just give strategy, direction and more of a higher level view of what's going on. So number one thing is let people make mistakes. I'm not very good at this. This is one I'm the worst out of all. Five of these is letting people make mistakes. Even. Even when you know that things could be done better. If you're going to step out of the quote unquote minutiae, which is not to Say that they're unimportant things. It's just things that are not going to necessarily change the outlook of the business in the long term. It's more of this, like the things that have to get done. For example, if I am selling light bulbs, the minutia is actually making the light bulb. Now making a light bulb of high quality, high standards, safely is very, very important. Not to say that, I'm not saying minutia is unimportant. I'm saying that building one light bulb is not going to make that company a multi billion dollar light bulb manufacturer. Alright? So you've got to have the founder be able to step away, delegate to people who do the minutia. That is very important work called actually making the light bulb. But the founder needs to be able to step away to figure out marketing strategies and hiring strategies and building the factory and making it more efficient in order to make the business successful and grow and thrive. So number one though is let people make mistakes. If you're building light bulbs and you're the best light bulb builder in the world, guess what? If you're going to step away from the minutiae of building the light bulb and start focusing on the hiring and the sales and the marketing and the factory. If you're going to do that, you've got to realize that.

Joe blow or Sally Jr. Is not going to be able to make that light bulb as good as you. They're going to make mistakes, they're going to break some, they're going to make the filaments wrong on some, they're going to weld things together wrong, they're going to, they're not gonna be as good as you. They're going to make mistakes. And that was and is hard for me because I'm more of a perfectionist. I wanna see things done right. I don't like to see flaws in myself or other people. And so for me it's okay for me really hard on myself or whatever and try to always be trying to get towards being perfect, which is never a possibility. But like for me as an employer to think that my employees are gonna be perfect is absolute insanity. And then secondarily it's how do I create systems to get them as close to.

When I'm not there. But the first thing is you gotta let people make mistakes. I'm still learning this one. And that is they're not gonna do as good as you. They're going to make mistakes and drop the ball and maybe you have to clean up things or you have to fire someone. But like let people make mistakes and try. I'm still trying to do this myself. Try not to jump in every time you see a flaw. Sometimes you want to, you need to let them make a mistake and then come in and constructively give criticism to how they can improve so that when they do it again, they themselves can determine the difference in what happened before and what happened after, and then make their own conclusions as to what they should have done wrong, what they did wrong the first time, and what improved the process the second time. Okay, number two, so the first thing is let people make mistakes. Number two is let the numbers do the talking. Alright? So if you're wanting to step away from your business, you need to know your numbers. This is not an option. This is not something that you can do, you can do. This is something you must do as a business owner. And if you're trying to step away from the daily operations of your business, you better know your numbers. Because it's the only measurement, the only tool of measurement for you to distinguish and know if your business is even being successful while you're not there. Because if you're not going to be there on a day to day basis, if you're not gonna be in the minutiae in the middle, in the center of the activity within your business, if you're not gonna be there, you can't keep a pulse on everyone, that's all the customers and all the phone calls coming in, all the communication, you can't because you're not in it. So if you're going to step away and you're going to try to stay out of that and you're gonna try to start delegating, you better know the numbers so you can track whether or not the business is doing good. Because no longer can you be there, involved in every single interaction between customers and employees, and employees between other employees. You can't be there for all of that anymore. So you've gotta know numbers that give you the data necessary to make decisions within your business without being in the minut. So knowing your numbers and then letting those numbers talk for you, in other words, when you go to your employees, when you go to your managers and you want to make a decision in the business, you want to change the strategy, you want to change the product, you want to change the way they're advertising, the website, whatever, you should have numbers and data to back up your decisions, to back up your plans, to back up your ideas so that you don't just come in and you start working over other people and doing their jobs for them. You actually have data to prove that this is a better process. We're going to try this out, I'm going to give, here are the reasons, here are the numbers and actually have data to prove it. That leads right into the second part of this, which is you need to share those numbers with your team. If you've delegated to someone and said, look, I'm going to give you this responsibility, I'm willing to let you do number one, that is make a mistake. But in order to really give them empowerment, you've got to give them information, you've got to tell them the numbers, you got to share them profitability, you got to share efficiency, numbers and percentages and things that are relevant to their success in their role. Alright? So number one, let people make mistakes. Number two, let the numbers do the talking and have that data given to all of your team. Number three is align workers, pay your employees pay with profitability. Don't align it with everything else beside that, don't align it with number of units sold or average ticket size or number of customers or response time. Those are all great metrics. But the end of the day, the reason you're measuring those things is because you want to become more profitable. So the closer, I know it's not always possible, but the closer you can get the pay of your employees to align with profitability. That is where it's very, very key and very important for you to have that in order for you to step away from the business. Because if you step away from the business, you and the day to day operations, the inner workings and minutiae of what's going on every day, if you're stepping away from that, the one thing you care about is the profitability of the business. Profitability is like the heart rate of a human in a business sense. You can tell a lot about someone, their health by their heart rate. You know even more if you actually see the electrocardiogram and see the waves of their heart rate going through in their heartbeat. It's the same thing for profitability. If you know the profitability margins, if you know the profitability in terms of just dollars of total profit, net profit, if you know those things about a business, you can make a lot of implications about the health of that business. So the closer you can align your workers with the overall health of your business, the more they're going to be working towards your goals. And that is profitability. What you're trying to do is not have perverse incentives by incentivizing your people to have more of something or less of something that is not actually directly correlated with profitability. For example.

At the gym, I could give my employees a percentage or a bonus for every member that they sign up. At the gym I could do that. And back when I worked there five or six, seven, seven years ago, was it seven, eight, something like that? Anyways, when I worked there, we were paid based upon like if I sold the membership, I'd get a certain amount of dollars depending what type of membership I sold. The problem with that is I was only given a bonus based upon when I made the sale. What it incentivized is selling, which is great, but it didn't incentivize me keeping that customer, that is cleaning the gym and making sure that I was friendly to the members and making sure that I kept members from canceling and I kept the rate of attrition down in the gym. So I highly recommend, instead of basing your pay in this example on selling and getting new members, I want to be able to incentivize someone based upon, yes, getting members, but then keeping them to make sure that they're actually going to make sure that the member experiences a positive thing and the customer's gonna stay on for many years to come and not just leave after the sale because that's all the employee cares about. And because I as the founder cannot be there to sure that the customer experience after the sale is good. Guess what? Customer experience goes down because the employees aren't being paid for that longevity of the customer. So making sure that the incentives that you outline in your pay for performance model is very key to make sure it's aligned with profitability.

Number four is step back, get perspective, think bigger. Sometimes you gotta step away from your business and realize that the minutiae of the things that you're dealing with on a day to day basis are very small in comparison to other businesses, other decisions and other moves that other people are making. So one of the things that I love to do is look at a larger business like I'm talking like a Fortune 500 multinational hundreds and millions and billions of dollars in revenue. And they have thousands of employees, hundreds of thousands of employees. They have massive amounts of real estate. You look at Facebook and Google this, go into New York recently, and both of them are buying like hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space to hire thousands of more people. Like, it's insane. And so the reason I like to step back, think bigger, get perspective, is because then it makes that one hiring decision that I made a mistake on seem less relevant. When I step back and think about it from a larger perspective of a business that is hiring thousands of people, probably making hundreds of mistakes on hiring, probably have to fire hundreds of people, and yet we get so locked down in our small little box called a small business because we have five people and we work within 150 square feet and we're in the same desk every day and we get locked in this small mindset. And so I'd really encourage you to look at these big businesses. What are they doing? What's the size and scope of the decisions those business owners, those CEOs, those founders are making? And then comparatively, look back at what you're doing and realize it's not that big a deal. And realize that the opportunity you have is so great and so enormous. And so instead of getting locked up or caught up or getting slowed down by some decision or a customer leaving, you just realize that there's a bigger fish to fry, there's bigger ponds to go fish at. Instead of trying to stay in the same, like, oh, I've got to like, you know, keep casting in this tiny little pond, realize there's a massive ocean, there's a whole lot more of opportunity. And your business is small, yes, but you can grow it and you can get to the place where you're not thinking about whether or not you need to add too more offices and with two more computers, start thinking like a Facebook or Google and thinking in terms of thousands, like, what is their mindset? It's a different mindset, it's a different perspective of business. And how we can utilize that is to make sure that in order for us to get out of the minutia, out of the day to day that we take into perspective the actual scope of the things we're trying to delegate. You know, emails like, you know, I can't let someone else answer the phone. They're never going to be able to answer the phone like me. How do you use this point, how you use someone else's perspective to eliminate that sort of mentality? You go look at a company like Apple that has hundreds and thousands of people answering the phone for them every single day for customer support, for sales, for their developer program, all of these different avenues, and they're trusting thousands of people to answer the phone for them. And yet we in our small business, small business comes out of having a small mind, a small mindset, a small perspective. And so in order to go from small Business to big business. You have to have big perspective, big goals, big perspective of what's happening in your business. Instead of getting so locked in on, I have to answer the phone, I have to do that myself. I'm the only one that can make sales calls. No, no, no. There's companies out there that have thousands of salespeople. Guess what? That's a founder that had a perspective that's like, look, I can't, I'm not the best, I'm not gonna be the one that is going to be able to sell every single car. Like if Chevy or GM or Ford were like, you know what? Only the CEO can sell. Only the CEO. Guess what? It doesn't matter how great he is, he's never going to be able to outperform the thousands of salespeople that are on the floor every single day. Alright? So think in terms of scale and perspective. And to do that, get out, go to like a massive metropolitan area, go to where there's skyscrapers, step back and realize that that hundred stories of a building is literally one company and that's their customer support center. Like that will fry your brain, number one. Number two, it'll open your mind to the perspectives and the opportunity that is in front of you and to be able to realize that what you're dealing with, the little things in your business aren't that big a deal. Get perspective, get a bigger picture and think bigger. Number five, this is like super tactical. I still remember when I did it and I wanted to throw this in here. Probably the most tactical thing to do that you can do today.

Don't get your work emails to your phone. Okay? This is like a very, when you're going from very small to kind of getting to like a few employees and things like that, there's this medium in between where you don't have an office person yet, and yet you're getting all your emails, your work emails to your phone, every single contact form from your website, every single recorded voicemail from your phone, your business phone is going to your cell phone. Your email is going right here. There's a massive unlock when you take your email, your work email and don't have it come to your personal cell phone. The reason for that is because when you get emails, you have to make the decision to react or not to those emails. And guess what? If you're getting your work emails to your cell phone and you are the office person, you're taking care of the administrative side of your business, you are gonna become very reactive. In other words, you're going to react to whatever's in your inbox. If it pops in at 4pm and you're all, oh my goodness, I gotta do this, I gotta do this, I gotta do this. Guess what? You can leave that in your inbox. It'll be there tomorrow morning when you come back to the office or when you get back on your computer. And you. Cause when you get on a computer, you're opening that up knowing, okay, I'm going into my work and I'm going to be, I'm going to, I am making the decision to now work on my business.

In comparison, when an email pops into your cell phone and it's 7:30 at night and you should be with your family or you should be focusing on something else, all of a sudden you have to be reactive to that customer, you have to be reactive to that complaint, you have to be reactive to that bad online review and it starts developing this nature of when there's a problem, I have to do the firefighting, I have to do one and go fix it. And that's fine. When you're really small like that, you'll get away with that. But if you want to think about scaling your business, making it bigger, making it more successful and you getting out minutia in the day to day, you can't be fighting fires, you can't be going from one thing to the next and the next email's about something else and next opportunity and a supplier and then a customer and then an employee and an ad went out. Like all of these things all coming through this device makes you reactive. If you want to be able to actually get out of the minutia and actually delegate what you want to be focusing on is when I am going to be doing something in the day, when I am going to be building the business, I'm going to be very intentional about the things I do and do not want to be thinking about. And the worst way to defeat that, to be intentional. The greatest thing in my mind of being of the opposite of being intentional is being reactive. So instead of being intentional on going to work on these things today, these are the most important drivers in the business. These are the things that are going to move the needle the most. I'm going to intentionally focus on these things. The number one way to eliminate that from happening is to be reactive. You go into the office, something happens, you oh, I gotta fix that. And oh, this. Well, guess what? The best way to be reactive has all your work email coming to your cell phone and you constantly popping into those notifications and you're just reacting from one issue to the next issue. And guess what? There's always gonna be issues. Alright, so those are the five things I'd recommend if you want to get out of the minutia of operating your business. Number one, let people make mistakes. Number two, let the numbers do the talking. You better know your numbers. Number three is your workers pay with profitability. Number four is step back, get perspective and think bigger. Number five is very, very simple. But I highly recommend you do it as you grow your business from really small to actually becoming several employees. Don't get your work emails to your phone. You don't want to be reactive. Be intentional. You may listening to the Business Boot Camp podcast. I'm Mike Andes. Until next time, be great, because nothing else pays.