Phil Risher describes a furniture-refinishing client hitting $1 million in revenue but unable to take a day off because he was doing all sales, operations, and marketing himself. Risher used Dan Martell's delegation framework to systematically hand off tasks, starting with admin work and moving up to sales, so founders can build a business someone would actually want to buy.
You could be hitting record revenue, but you still might be building a business that no one wants to buy. One of my first clients was a million-dollar furniture refinishing business, and he was growing 20%, 30% year over year. The problem is that he was the number one salesperson in the business. He was the operations manager and he was the marketing director. And every time that I would meet with him, I'm like, dude, yeah, you're growing the business, but you can't take a day off because you're out running the sales calls. You can't market your business without you because you have to see every single thing and you have to be the face of the company. And on top of that, you're the one that's making sure that everything gets done and you're troubleshooting every single thing, making sure that goes through quality assurance. Like, that is not building a business that someone else wants to buy. That's owning a job and it's owning 3 jobs in 1. It's brutal. So, I actually went through this in my business where I had the season where I called fire Phil season, where I laid out all the jobs that I was doing and I started to chip away and fire myself from these jobs. And Dan Martell has this really good framework called Buy Back Your Time. And it's a buyback ladder and it's basically admin tasks, Then it's delivery, then it's marketing, then it's sales, and it's management. So, I did a time evaluation and I said, OK, what admin tasks am I still doing and who can I give that to? Or what do I need? Who do I need to hire in order to do this job? And slowly, I chipped away at it and started to fire myself. If you're in this, if you're in this season of your business, then you need to start thinking about who, not how, and start buying back your time. Because when I started to buy back my time, I started to grow my business even faster because now I could focus on what I was really good at.
