MBA1977 Are You The Bottleneck in Your Business? + Free Ride Friday

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Hey O. Welcome to the hunt. Because building a business can be lonely. That's why we got your back every single 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 Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014. And today's free Ride Friday. On Free Ride Fridays, we give away a lifetime membership to one of our programs. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday. Just like today, we'll be announcing this week's winner a little bit later in the episode. In today's episode, you will learn are you the bottleneck in your business? As business builders, sometimes we're going to have to face some harsh realities. The one we're discussing today is that often when your business starts growing and then plateaus, a big reason why it's plateauing is because of you. Yeah, you. You're stopping it from growing. And you might be thinking, omar, what are you talking about? I want to grow at all costs. I'm ambitious. I want to take over the world. That could be true and all, but the way you're managing your business and Your team is not allowing you to do that because at the end of the day, the numbers don't lie. In today's episode, we're going to identify if this is true for you. Are you the bottleneck in your business? And if so, how can you stop this from happening? How can you improve this situation? How can you make sure you're no longer the bottleneck and your business continues to flow and grow rapidly? This is a reality I had to face in my own business. Yep, I was the bottleneck of my business. I'll tell you all about it and how I got over it in today's lesson. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. USAA knows dynamic duos can save the day like superheroes and sidekicks or auto and home insurance. With usaa, you can bundle your auto and home and save up to 10%.

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Get a'@usaa.com bundle restrictions apply. When you start a small business, it's often just you or maybe you and a few other team members. Things are moving fast. People are making quick decisions. You're implementing, you're taking action. Things are moving. Things are happening. You're closing deals, you're making sales. But as your business starts to grow and you have to start making more and more bigger decisions, one of the things I realized is as my business grew, the number of decisions that needed to be made just multiplied. Let me give you a very simple example. Let's say I own a pizzeria and I just opened this pizzeria. I have a set of decisions I need to make that are manageable, like who do I hire? What are my hours for the restaurant to be open? What kind of pizzas do I serve? In the beginning, things are pretty simple. But as your business starts to grow and you start to innovate and you start adding to the menu, start realizing, okay, what are some things I should be adding? What happens when I start serving a pineapple pizza but my pineapple supplier does not send me the pineapples? Do I have a backup plan? I'm starting to delivery now, but my delivery drivers are all sick. What do I do? Maybe I go with Uber, but Uber takes a huge cut. Does this affect the service of my dine in customers? How do I mitigate that? So as you can see, we're just talking about a pizzeria and we're talking about multiple pizzerias. We're just one store. We haven't even branched out or franchised or became A global brand. But as we improve and grow and become bigger as a business, more and more daily decisions need to be made. And in the beginning, as the founder, as the business owner, you're making all the decisions. And it's okay, because there's not that many decisions to be made in the beginning. But after a while, as you start growing, you start having more decisions than you have time, right? There's only a certain amount of decisions you can make every single day and give those decisions the right amount of time. You know, especially these are big decisions that will affect the trajectory of the business. You got to give it its fair due of time, of time for you to research, to understand what the problem is, to come up with different solutions. And eventually what you start realizing is there are so many decisions that are on my plate. It gets overwhelming. And things start to slow down in your business in terms of the progress, in terms of the growth, because things can't get implemented without a decision. And guess what? You're the only one making decisions. So as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we're very comfortable outsourcing work. We're very comfortable with outsourcing labor and making hires in that regard. But we got to get comfortable outsourcing decisions. We got to hire people to make decisions for us so that not everybody in the company is coming to you to make a decision. For example, if I run a pizzeria, I don't have a general manager. Everybody's coming to me to ask questions, to make a decision. The delivery person's going to come to me and say, hey, I got a flat tire. What do you want me to do? How do I deliver your pizza? Should I rent a car? Should I invoice you? While you're dealing with that, somebody else is calling you up or sending you a message and saying, we got a problem here. We need a decision. This is the definition of being the bottleneck in your business. Now that we established that, as your business grows, you make more and more decisions, and you can't make all the right decisions all, all the time with the number of decisions you have. Otherwise, things are just going to slow down. This is what happens to a lot of businesses. All these great ideas and initiatives never get implemented because you're just inundated with a lot of things you already have to do in terms of work, plus the time you need to dedicate to make decisions and answer questions and help people out. So we want to outsource our decision making. We need other people to have ownership over certain areas of the business. To make decisions. This allows your business to be really autonomous. I learned a lot of these concepts from John Maxwell over the years. He's a great author, great business mind. And actually I was reminded of these concepts and how important they are by a buddy of mine, Ayman Abdullah, who is the president of AppSumo, who brought that company to $100 million in revenue a year. In that discussion, there are two takeaways I want to share with you that really allows you to shift your mind to be able to do. Number one is you got to stop believing that you're the best person for the job, meaning you're the best person to make these decisions. What I found is it's actually really hard to be responsible for all the different kinds of decisions in your company. It's so much easier to make decisions only for one specific area in the company, for example, like sales or marketing or engineering or customer service. If you have one person that's just in charge of one department or one type of decision making or decisions for that department, it's so much easier for them to make decisions because they're not overwhelmed and they don't have to brain shift or, you know, content shift all the time. And therefore they can make better decisions than you. So that's the first concept. Just let that sink in. There are people out there that you can hire that could be a lot more efficient and actually at the end of the day, make better decisions for the company because of their focus and because of their expertise. The second concept is really important because as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we are addicted to hard work. We think the reason why we were successful is because we worked so hard. And there is a lot of truth in that. It got you to a certain level. But at a certain point in your business, just hustling and working and putting 16 hour days is not going to make a difference. You got to work smarter. And the reason why we work so hard is because this is how we perceive our own value. We think I got to hustle hard. I got to show my other team members what, what hard work looks like. And believe me, I myself fall into this trap all the time. But what Ayman shared with me was a great little mindset. And that's your value is measured by the results of your team, not how many hours you put in or how many decisions you make or how many problems you solve. It's what your team produces. That's what makes you valuable. If you can cultivate a great team that makes great decisions and produces results, many of us think that when it comes to business, we're like the star player on a team. Or maybe we even think we're the coach. Hey, I got my players on the floor. I'm going to coach them. But in fact, you're neither. You're the team owner. You're the person that owns the team, that hires the general manager, that hires the recruiters and hires the coaches and the players to make this team work and allow this team to be successful and win championships. You put the pieces together, and your value as a business owner, or as a team owner in this metaphor, is how successful your team is. I got more on today's topic, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor.

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To wrap up today's lesson, this is a really tough thing to swallow, and it took me some time to think about and rethink about it and let it sink in. And I started to write down some stuff like, what can I do different to start moving in the right direction? And I started to look at who am I hiring? Am I hiring workers or am I hiring decision makers? And I realized I got to hire some more decision makers. I need to start offloading the decisions. When somebody comes to me and asks a question or asks for a decision or asks for anything, I really just start writing notes down. Do I need to answer this? Is there somebody I can hire that can do this job that can answer these questions? And I just write little notes down. And then by the end of the week or end of the month, I start to realize, okay, I have all these notes. What are these tasks mean? You know, who can I hire? What are these, are these, are these positions I can hire? Right? Like, what are all these responsibilities or tasks in terms of making decisions or answering questions? Is there a position here? Is there somebody I can hire that can step in? And therefore, I no longer need to be the person they need to ask every single time they want to make a decision or get something done. This keeps things flowing because what I realized is I'm pretty busy, right? And sometimes they can't get ahold of me or I don't answer them immediately or they have to wait a couple days to get a decision made. Because I'm not just making one decision every week. I'm making, you know, lots of them. So sometimes I need a bit of time to think about all of them. And that's not fair. That's not a fun place to work where everybody is waiting around for a decision to be made. So that's kind of how I moved closer to where I need to be, is just noticing what are some of the things I am required to do to get things moving in the business? How can I remove myself from the whole equation and stop being the bottleneck? Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love it, you hear hit the follow hit subscribe on your favorite podcast app. Today's episode's not over though. It's Free Ride Friday. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is. Super Robbie. Super Robbie says outstanding. Five stars. Omar gets it. And why wouldn't he? He owns his own software company. Not every episode applies to me in my situation, but without exception, there's always something I can take away from the episode. Do yourself a favor and listen up. Just great. Thanks, Robbie, for that great review. Your mission is to email me over at Omar at 100 MBA NET so we can hook you up with the free ride to the Automated webinar challenge, our 30 day course on how to build a whole automated system with automated webinars to sell your products. This is one of my favorite courses I put together and it's gotten so many people, so many results. So congrats, Robby. And if you want to win a free ride, just leave us an Apple Podcast rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday, just like right now to see if you won. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Even if you right now don't have the budget to hire any decision makers. This is not an excuse not to go through this exercise of jotting down the things that you are constantly doing that you shouldn't be doing, the decisions that you're constantly making. Who's coming to you asking questions on a daily basis. Who can do that instead of you? Why? Because this is going to allow you to start cultivating a position, a job description, and then when you can hire somebody, you're ready to rock and roll. You're not behind the eight ball, you know, These are your next hires and in this order. And this is how much they're going to cost you. You can do some research on salaries and all that kind of stuff. This is your job as a business owner, is to prepare for the future so that when the opportunity is there for you to fill that gap and stop being the bottleneck in different parts of your business, you're ready to take action. This is a process. This is not something that happens overnight. It's going to take a few hires, it's going to take some time, but it's going to be well worth it. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you on Monday's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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