Ryan Shank shares how leaders become bottlenecks when they insert themselves into every decision. Empower teams to collaborate directly, set clear deliverables, and delegate spend approval thresholds so small purchases don't need leadership sign-off.
Chapters
What up guys? It's Ryan from PhoneWagon. Here we are, day 34, morning update coming at you hot. Coming in hot, some regular, actually there's a new coffee place at the bottom of the building here. This is the last day that we're in this office. We're moving from here, which is 38th and Broadway, down to 24th and 7th, which is even better 'cause it's closer to my apartment. That's good. So today, wanna talk, wanna quawk, wanna talk, wanna quawk, and talk about the importance of not letting yourself be the bottleneck in your business. Right now, I am all over the place, but I'm managing a bunch of different teams. Even if you're not in tech or service business or technology or SaaS company, if you're in a service business or whatever, you're going to be managing different teams. For instance, if you're a doctor or if you are a plumber or you're someone that runs someone into the field, you're going to be managing your field techs and then you're going to be managing your office staff and then you're going to be doing customer service for your customers. It applies across a bunch of different businesses, but the thing that I want to talk about personally is when you're managing different teams and you are going to be the point of contact, you're going to be the decision maker ultimately in a lot of that stuff, but you don't want to be the bottleneck in a lot of those scenarios. What I like to do is try to empower my guys and my team to be able to work together, or if they need to reach out to another person in a different org or a different team, for instance, I don't want it to have to go through me and to me be the middleman. One thing that I'm talking about is like For instance, my WordPress developer needed to get something from my backend, my software developer, and it felt like I was the middleman. I was like, "Hey guys, you guys go and you figure it out. Ultimately, at the end of the day, we just want it to get done." For instance, if your designer needs to pass something off to someone, or if you have a marketing team and they're creating a video and they need to go to a copywriter, it's like, "I don't want to be the middleman." You want to give your team the power to be able to go out there and figure things out. At the end of the day, you have a deliverable for them, so you set set that date and you say, "Hey guys, like figure it out. I can be your resource. I can help you out, but let's deliver this by 5 PM next Tuesday or end of day on Friday or whatever." And it's up to them to kind of go out and wrangle in the resources and wrangle in the people that they need to get the ultimate thing accomplished. And I kept finding myself in these situations where it's like I would be the person they would come to, or for instance I have someone managing like a very, very, very small AdWords campaign and they kept telling me me to like, "Hey, you need to set up conversion tracking. You need to drop this on the site. Did you set up conversion tracking with your live chats and with your phone calls and all this stuff?" And I'm like, "You're the one that's doing the marketing campaign. You do it all. Come to me. Let's go over it. Let's look at the metrics, but you're the expert. I want you to do these things and I want you to guide me. I'm the dumb client," for instance. I was like, "Talk to me like I'm stupid. How are you going to talk to a client and tell them to do all of these super technical things?" I want full service for that person and it's like I don't want to be the bot. I'm like, "I don't want to be the middleman. Help me help you," is sort of the scenario that I'm saying. The point is, especially when you're dealing with a ton of different teams and you're working across a lot of different people across the organization, everyone's sort of reporting up to you, you don't want to be the middleman. You don't want to be the bottleneck. You want to empower your team to be able to make decisions, to be able to go out there and to get things done. You want them to know that they can go out and they can reach across and they can reach out to other people for help and things like that. That's what we're doing. It seems to be working well. I do kind of find myself in a situation where it's like, you know, I will be this middleman bottleneck. Sometimes I like it because it's like I'm able to at least get eyes over things, especially when money is getting spent and things like that. You should ultimately have some type of process in place where it's like if anything is over a certain dollar amount, it has to go through you regardless, but if it's little small things, "Hey, I need a $30 thing here, $20 thing here just to get the job done," it's like, go ahead Do it, figure it out, and then come to me and then let's talk about it. You know, it's like, you don't want to get, at a high level, you don't want to get too caught up in the details because then, you know, it's like you're going to be in the middle of everything and nothing is actually going to get done. So, that's what I want you guys to think about. Don't be a middleman, don't be a bottleneck. Empower your team, let everyone, you know, kind of run with it and let them own something and then they're going to be, you know, like, they're going to be ultimately responsible for that deliverable but then they're going to feel a sense of ownership and they're going to like it and they're going to want to, you know, like show you, hey, Hey, this is what I did. They are going to be proud of it and all of that. That is an amazing thing when the team starts to come together. Everyone sort of owns their little piece of it, whether you have your sales guy that is owning it and they are setting a ton of demos, whether you have your account executive closing it, your marketing guy who is generating a shit ton of leads and their cost per lead is low, your devs are coming out strong features, customers are loving it, marketing team, the design is beautiful, you are getting a lot of reviews. Everyone is sort of going to love their part of this larger puzzle and then all you are doing is you are just kind of helping everyone out. That's tech. Again, it can be applied to services. It can be applied to corporate stuff if you're into that. Whatever it is, but have an amazing Friday, Memorial Day weekend. Hope everyone has a safe, healthy, happy, fun weekend and think about your business throughout the weekend. See you guys on Monday.
