MBA1517 How To Move From Working In Your Business to Working On Your Business + Free Ride Friday

Gas, snacks, tolls. This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood.

What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Text and data detour to Metro. Get that more for your money feeling only at Metro by T Mobile just bring your number $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past 180 days ready to save on New Tech? It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell Rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, Today is Free Ride Friday, so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free Ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. We're giving away easy course, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. It retails for $500 over at EasyCourse co. Or you can win it for free. Just leave us an iTunes rating and review. Then you enter our weekly random draw we call Free Ride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. All right, let's jump into today's episode. Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, the business podcast that gives you what you need to build a business you want every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's episode, you will learn how to move from working in your business to on your business. This is one of the most challenging transitions any entrepreneur can make. In the beginning, you're bootstrapping your business. You're working on things, you're building things, you're doing all the dirty work. At the start, you're pretty much doing every single role. But slowly you start hiring and delegating some tasks. But often we never make the full switch from working in our business to on our business. As the leader of your company, your job is to make decisions, to steer the ship and do the essential work as a leader that any other person can't do. You need to fill that role. Everything else can be hired for. Often we don't make time for leadership because we're working in our business too much or too busy with tasks. And it's usually the tasks that we feel most comfortable with or in our area of expertise, whether that's sales or marketing or web design. So in today's episode, we're gonna talk about how to make that transition, how to make sure that that the day to day tasks that keep your business running is done by employees, by team members, by people that you hire, freeing you up to lead and to grow your business as a founder. So let's get into it, let's get down to business. If you want to control what you work on, how you spend your time, you need to take a look at your time management, and that's your calendar. Look at your calendar. If you have an empty calendar, that means you have no allocation to your time. That means your time is free to be used any way you feel or how other people feel. So your calendar needs to be filled with tasks that you should be doing as a leader, as the founder of the company, as the CEO, as whoever is actually steering your team. So your job as the leader is to lead, is to manage, is to motivate, is to build for the future, is to have your vision and to also communicate that vision on a regular basis to make sure your team is actually getting better in terms of talent. And of course that your overall growth financially and in terms of your market share is trending upwards. This is your job as a leader. Okay? As much as you want to fiddle with your website or answer customer service tickets, those are really not in your job description. Now, that doesn't say that you don't do any customer service tickets ever, just means that your responsibilities are not customer service tickets. I jump into customer service conversations from time to time, once a week, once a month, and just get a pulse of what's going on, answer some questions, try to see what's going on there and that's okay. But I'm not responsible for doing that. If I don't do that, there's somebody in place to make sure that it's done. Now, there's one exception. In terms of responsibilities. You should have one area of expertise that you may want to contribute to on a regular basis. Now, you might be the brand of the business, the face of the business. So doing interviews, doing marketing, maybe you are a host of a podcast. The point here is that you are the face of the brand and you are contributing to the business in your special area of expertise that no one else does. For example, if you look at Reed Hastings, who's the CEO and founder of Netflix, he does a lot of interviews, he's on talk shows, he meets with innovation leaders. So this is his area of expertise. He's the communicator of the business. So outside of leadership, he's also doing that stuff. So your calendar should be filled with activities that fulfill that role. This means you're carving out a job description for yourself. You're carving out a set of responsibilities of things that you need to do and measure your performance against. Yep. You gotta make sure that you're performing too, not just your team members. So say, for example, I say to myself, part of my job as a leader is to build a great team that understands our vision and are motivated. But if I look at the last few years of my business and I have a lot of turnover and not many people have stayed in my company more than a year, I'm not doing a good job. I need to make sure that whatever I give myself, I'm actually measuring myself against it. So I know that, hey, I'm actually doing these duties that I put on myself. If I'm not performing, that means I'm neglecting these duties. And then I need to spend more time on those things. So this is why you need to kind of make a job description for yourself. List your responsibilities. I named a few on today's episode. And then I need to say, what kind of tasks do I need to do to fulfill these responsibilities? And those tasks go in my calendar. And I literally mean making boxes on your calendar Monday through Friday with tasks to do to fulfill your job description. But you might be saying, but Omar, I have things I need to do the day to day of the business and I don't have anybody to do them. And they're not necessarily part of my role. What do I do? Well, number one, you need to have an action plan to hire for those jobs. Whether it's one person or two or three people that you can split those responsibilities. If you can't afford a hire, a full time hire, make sure you make a part time hire or a freelancer. Just because you can't take all the things off your plate doesn't mean you can't take some. Some is going to help you perform better. Okay? If you can't afford anything at all, which is a reality sometimes when you're starting out, then you need to plan out. When will you be able to afford? Don't just say, oh, I can't afford it. That's it. Not gonna think about that anymore? No. Where are your profits going? When are you gonna get to the point of you can afford this? Like, at what point, what month? Look at the trends of your profits, of your growth, and pencil that into your calendar. I need to start hiring for somebody a month before we can afford it so that, hey, I can go ahead and make that higher. So when we can't afford it, if you're still a little bit confused about, like, hey, what I should really be doing, look at some CEOs, some founders that you really admire and see what do they work on, what did they work on when they were CEOs or founders? And they don't have to be in big name companies. They could be people that maybe are just a few years ahead of you. Small startups, people that, you know, ever met in, in, in a meetup, you can call them up and say, hey, tell me about your day, tell me where your responsibilities are. I'd love to be in your position sometime soon. It's always good to kind of have some examples to work off so you can carve your own job description. But of course you can look at your heroes, the big time CEOs you heard of. If you look at Steve Jobs, for example, he was a big time leader. He was the communicator of the business, but he also had his finger on the pulse when it comes to product. He didn't create all the products or design them, but he had a say in what they worked on and what they would work on next. So he was kind of the visionary and the communicator of the business. If you look at the late Jay Carpenter, who was the founder of Burton, Burton Boards, he was a longtime snowboarder. And even though he grew his company to a massive size with hundreds upon hundreds of employees, he still was involved in the culture of snowboarding. So maybe he didn't try every snowboard they created, but he had his finger on the pulse and the trends. He was very much big on supporting snowboarding competitions and he was a big part of some of the snowboarding teams that competed in the Olympics because in a way, he created snowboarding culture with Burton. So on top of his leadership skills, he just also had this little area of expertise that he was a part of. So you could Take a look at your heroes as well. Now, the key to this is once you have your description and you have your calendar and you have everything filled out, is that you stick to it. You don't fall behind or fall back on old habits. And one of the best ways to make sure that doesn't happen is to have some accountability and to have a mastermind group to help you with that. Mastermind groups are great because it allows you to hold each other accountable. And it could be a group of three, four, five people. Usually these are five, you know, entrepreneurs that are in the same kind of stage in their journey as an entrepreneur. They meet on a regular basis, whether it's once a month or maybe even once a week. Some people meet that often and they hold each other accountable with what they're doing and their tasks and the challenges they're going through. And that way, when you face your mastermind group every month or so, you can either feel good about what you've done or you can feel like, wow, I gotta improve, I'm falling back on old habits. And they can hold you accountable. And you could tell them, hey, let me know, put my feet to the fire, make sure that I actually do the things I set out to do as the leader of my company. Also find things that motivate you to stick with it. It could be something like understanding that I need to be there for my team, my team needs me. I don't want to let them down. And if I'm a good leader, if I'm a manager, if I steer this business in the right direction, it benefits everybody and they're counting on me. I gotta make sure I do that. You can literally put a post it note on your monitor and say, my team is counting on me. And that can just motivate you to stick to your plan, stick to your job description.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired. Expired in 2012. Dang it. Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico Gas, snacks, tolls.

This trip is draining my wallet.

Yeah, but we'll be with family.

You're in a good mood. What's your deal?

What's my deal? I saved at Metro with no activation fees and I got one line of 5G for just $25 per month. Kept the phone I love and a 5 year price guarantee on my top.

Tuxt and data Detour to Metro. Get that more for your money peeling.

Only at Metro by T Mobile.

Just bring your number $30 first month and $25 after with autopay not available. If with Metro or T Mobile in the past to wrap up today's episode, you need to be really disciplined about what you work on every day. You need to clearly define what you're supposed to be working on as a leader of your business, how to make sure you're working on it instead of doing things that you can hire for. And one of the things that really helped me in this transition is understanding there are a lot of people out there that can do all the other tasks I've been doing way better than I am doing it. They can take my business to another level. They can produce the better results in those areas. So why not get those people to do it for me? And I can focus on the things that only I can do, which is the leadership, which is the vision, which is the growing the team, which is making sure we're going in the right direction, all that stuff. And that's plenty. Okay? Part of the reason management C level people in big corporations get paid big bucks is because of the responsibility, because of the pressure, because of, you know, to be quite honest, the stress and you the time and the space to make the right decisions when they're so high stakes. Especially because you're making big decisions as the leader. I hope that helps and I hope you enjoyed today's episode. But today's episode's not over because it's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is Terry in Fairhope. Terry in Fairhope says Awesome. 5 stars. I loved your interview with John Lee Dumas, Focus and opa. Awesome. What a great teacher. Well, thank you for that awesome review, Terry from Fairhope. Your mission is to email me over at Omar100- MBA-NET so I can hook you up with the free ride to easy course. I was on John Lee Dumas podcast, Entrepreneurs on Fire. Check it out. Great podcast. John and Kate, who run Entrepreneurs on Fire are good friends of Nicole and I and the show. If you also want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw we call Freeride Friday. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. Thank you in advance for that. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the best ways to understand this transition from working in and on your business is to read the biographies of great entrepreneurs that maybe you haven't learned about. This is why I love reading Biographies A Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, which is one of my favorite books of all time. Phil Knight is the founder of Nike and he chronicles his whole journey building Nike and he talks about all this in that story I mentioned Steve Jobs and his biography written by Walter Isaacson. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. A great book on this topic. Also, the Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. Biographies is the fast forward to where you want to be and give you a roadmap to get there. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon but forget about it and suddenly it's expired. Expired in 2012. Dang it. Fortunately, by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico.