How to GROW your business and INCREASE REVENUE by replacing yourself..

What is up? In this video today, what I want to talk about is how to grow your business and replace yourself simultaneously. Now, this topic came forefront of mind, uh, because I had actually my quarterly meetup with one of my companies last week. And in that quarterly meetup, um, we were trying to figure out why we weren't able to increase sales in this last quarter to reach our goal, right? So sales had increased, but it wasn't to the amount that we needed it to. And so as we were dissecting and trying to figure out what was going on, It came back to actually my new head of HR, who's fantastic by the way, but there's only one of her. And she said something to the extent of, well, I can only recruit so quickly when there's only one of me and we're, you know, trying to get this many roles. And at that exact moment, I thought to myself, oh, it's not the inefficiency of the sales team. It's not what's going on on the sales team. It's not even the closing percentage, not the selling percentage, nothing, because it's all great. It's literally the bottleneck is recruiting. For that sales manager, what Alex and I had to explain to him is that his main focus needs to be recruiting his team. Because especially when you're scaling a large sales team like ours is, the ability to continuously recruit and replace yourself is what's going to lead to the success. And so I wanted to share that with you because it's so funny that the entire quarter we're trying to figure out why we're not able to reach that goal, and then in passing when my head head of HR says, well, I'm only able to recruit so quickly. And then we break it down, we're like, oh, she's only able to take, you know, a couple interviews a week. Whereas if we passed it over back to the sales manager, gave him a little more autonomy, taught him how to do the recruiting, he would be able to take 20 a week. Figuring out that bottleneck was one that is so common when it comes to people trying to figure out how to replace themselves, how to replace other people on the team. The bottleneck is usually recruiting, right? And that is actually what is so important is that Being able to recruit and replace yourself is equivalent to being able to sell, acquire, and retain customers. That is how important it is to the vitality of your business. And a lot of people don't focus on it. They don't focus on recruiting and they don't focus on replacing. It's the two Rs. Those are what are needed to replace yourself. Literally, you recruit people, you replace yourself. That's how it goes. As a CEO, you have to remember that's the one most important thing that you can do And then as you level up, like I'm in more of an advisor position now in that company, I can look down and say, oh shit, now other people aren't doing it, right? And it's funny because a lot of times, you know, there is HR, which you should rely on, but what I explained to my head of HR is that she should be teaching leaders how to do this rather than doing it herself. There's certain roles which I would like her help with, and I would like her to lead the way more when they're executive level roles, but in terms of roles that are more, they're going to come and go more frequently, or they're a little lower level, I want the managers to learn how to recruit and replace for themselves. And so that was a big focus of our meeting, and I feel like it was a huge takeaway and it's a huge win for the company. And I hope that if you're at that point with your business too, you can maybe look and say, it's a numbers game. It's just like, why do I not have more clients? Oh, because we can't take this many sales appointments because there's only 2 sales reps, right? It's the same with recruiting. It's like, why can't I recruit faster? Why can't I grow my team faster? Maybe you have a bottleneck on how many interviews you can take. It's the same numbers, right? It's external versus internal. And so if you want to grow your business, that is one of the places you have to look. The reason this is so important is because if you look at the biggest people in the industry, if you look at the biggest players in the space, where do they spend their money and their time? It's recruiting, right? If you look at, um, I want to say it's Amazon, for example, or if you look at the people that are at the top of the AI right now, okay? So I was looking at this stat, it basically said that companies that are going after AI are spending between $600 and $700 million per year on recruiting talent. That's fucking insane. Okay? But what I want you to understand is that if you want to have an amazing company and you want to play even a hundredth of the level of playing field that they're playing at, you have to be able to put your money where your mouth is and put it on the recruiting as well. You look at someone like, uh, something like the NHL, uh, right? So if you look at— or the NBA, the NHL, NFL, all of them, right? I think Penn State, for example, Spends about $1.3 million per year on just draft, okay? Like John Wooden says, the game is won in the draft. And so why would you not spend your time, attention, money in that area? I tell people all the time, they're like, where are the best investments you've made in the business? I consistently say recruiting. Recruiting high-level talent, interviewing high-level talent. That's the best use of my time, that's the best use of my money. And for some reason, people just don't get this. They're like, there's a bottleneck somewhere else. But half the time the bottleneck is literally recruiting and the fact that you, once you recruit, you don't know how to replace yourself. There's a quote that I read recently that said, "Success without a successor is no success at all." And I think that that goes for yourself in business. If you are constantly growing, you're constantly learning, and yet there's nobody that you can teach it to, there's nobody to delegate it to, then there is no success at all because the ball stops with you. If you die, if you disappear, if you get sick, who helps you, who takes it on, how does your business continue? And so what you want is continuity. What you want is for consistency in your business, and you don't get some consistency without drafting a great team and then learning how to replace yourself. That is how you get consistency. If every time— think about this, right? There's two different ways that you can look at the trajectory of a business. If someone quits or you fire someone, you can get someone the same Worse or better? Which company do you think will thrive? If every time someone quits or you fire them, you say, I need someone just 10% better, do you think your company is more likely to grow? Yes. That is why the draft is so freaking important. Not to mention that every person that you hire that quits or is fired within the first year costs 6 to 9 months of their salary. And that's on top of whatever the fuck you already paid them. So I feel really passionate about this because I just don't think people get it. And the reason that people don't get it is because I see how they're trying to recruit and how little effort is put into finding talent for your team. Your team is everything. And so that is what I want to focus on today. I put together, in spirit of my husband Alex, who has lots of equations and such, my equation for replacing yourself. Okay, so when you're looking for a replacement, right, you understand the draft is important, you understand you need to recruit,, but you need to know how to replace yourself. There is an equation for this. It is skill times culture divided by experience. Okay? That is going to be how you replace yourself. So if you want to replace yourself, so skill times culture divided by experience equals replacement. Okay? You want somebody that has the right skill that fits the role that you're trying to replace. You want someone that fits the culture because skill without culture isn't going to work in the company. And then you divide that by experience because the greater the experience in your relative field, not in totality of years of experience, but in your relative field, is going to dictate then how much amplification there is around their skill and around their culture. Because you can get someone who has, you know, relative skill set and they fit the culture, but they have no experience and so they cannot foresee, they have no foresight into what's going to happen. And so they can't actually replace you because you have more experience than them. There's a lot of roles that end up like this. And so you have to have the discernment to understand how much experience you need, right? And so if I'm looking at an executive level, I'm not going to hire somebody who has lots of skill and lots of culture, but very little experience because my ROI on that replacement is going to be very low. If someone's on an executive level, I need them to have seen what I do not see yet, right? Somebody has to know how you cross the playing field. Somebody has to know how to get the ball across the line. And if it's not me, who's the CEO running the business, then who the frick is it going to be? Right? I have to hire somebody who's got that. So skill times culture divided by experience, that's your replacement. And you have to be able to say how much of each of those you need. Once you understand that principle and you understand that you have to get the recruiting and you have to get the draft right and you understand how important this piece is, there are 3 steps to replacing yourself and they are simple. It's just that most people don't do them. Okay. The first one is that you have to audit your time and tasks and figure out what are your highest strengths, what are your lowest, you know, say, skill, utility, whatever, time constraints. And then you have to be able to say, okay, whatever I am best in the world at, only I can do, and it is my strength, is what I should be doing. Anything that is not that, I need to go figure out what role can take those on. That's the first step. So you have to be able to meticulously audit what you're doing. What I see a lot of people do is that they can take guesses, but they don't actually audit. They don't look at their calendar, they don't make lists, they don't write it down, they don't do time studies. And I get it, it sucks, it's hard, it's annoying, but you have to be able to insert that discipline on yourself. You can ask your team to do it, but if you're not going to be willing to do it yourself, you're not going to be able to replace yourself. Your team's going to be better than you are because they're actually doing the time studies and actually auditing the tasks that you tell them to do. And I see a lot of people that are founders that can't do what they ask their team to do, therefore they can't replace themselves. But their sales manager can, their head of operations can, their CFO can, right? It's for that simple reason. The devil is in the details. And so you have to understand what are the little things that you're doing day in and day out, and then looking at that list. And so whatever you suck at is low value, right? It's not worth technically like your dollars per hour. And you really hate doing, those are the 3 things that you want to delegate first. And so what I would do is I would audit my time, then I would put those into that bucket, and then I would look at the similarities and think to myself, okay, how am I now going to tackle this? Which leads to step 2, which is automatically what most people say is, okay, I need to hire a person to go do these things, right? But here's the biggest thing is that, yes, I'm talking about how to replace yourself right now, but there are multiple ways to replace yourself. If you are the CEO or you're a leader who has a multifaceted skill set, there are going to be lots of things that are going to replace you. You could probably, you could probably would need, I don't know, 5 to 7 people to replace you. But here's the thing, you can also mitigate that and lessen the load of how many people you need to hire by looking, is it a process, product, or person? And so a lot of the times we're looking at replacing ourselves, we're looking at doing exactly what we're doing currently and what we've been doing. And just giving it to different people or giving it to one person. But the reality is things change all the time. New softwares come out, new ways of doing things come out, you learn new things. So the first thing I'm gonna do when I have that list is I'm gonna say, what in here is not a person but a project or a process that needs to get put in place? That's the first thing because I don't wanna pass on inefficiency to anybody else. So first I'm gonna say, is there a project in here? Do I need to hire a contractor? Is it a one-time thing? Secondarily, is there just a process missing, which is the reason I'm doing this all the time and it's not a good use of my time? I don't want to give that to somebody else. Most of the time, no. So if I don't need to hire somebody to do those things, that's the first thing I want to get off. And then what's left are the things that are done on a continuous basis and are not process-oriented, but they require creative thinking, deductive reasoning, etc. Those are the things that I'm going to say, okay, now these are for a person. And now I've really distilled that list down. And now I'm looking at it and I'm saying, okay, and I'm going to think to myself, what kind of role does this need to be to fill these responsibilities? Now, the third piece from there, which is the last step, is that most people can compile the list together. They can kind of cut it out, say that's a project, that's a process. All right, here's what's left for the person I need to replace myself with. But then they think, okay, now I'm just going to give them this list. And what we do with our employees and what we do with our teammates and what we do with our clients is we say, can we need documentation? We We need you to meticulously write down how you do it. We need you to make an SOP. But we don't do that for ourselves because we're like, well, I'm the founder, I don't need to do that, right? We don't hold ourselves to that standard. And I've been guilty of doing this in the past where I've said, I'm just going to delegate it to them. I'm going to let them figure out their own way. But here's the thing. You want somebody to understand how it's done current day before they iterate on that process, right? How can somebody come in, they have no idea what's going on, they have no context, and you're like, build a new process. They're like, I don't even know what pieces I'm connecting. And so you want to be able to then say, now I'm going to document how I make these decisions. I'm going to document how I'm doing this currently. I'm going to make a Loom video on how I do this one. I'm going to send that all to them and let them know, as long as the outcome is achieved, figure out your own way once you get comfortable with the role. And that's the third step. And so the first one is auditing your time and your tasks, figuring out which ones are your biggest strengths and which ones aren't your strengths. And are a waste of time, they are low value. Those are the ones that you're going to put into the pile. Then from that pile, you're going to say, what in here is a project? Meaning it's like a one-time occurrence. What in here is a process that's just not in place? And then what ones actually go to a person? And then from that, you're going to put together training on how that person should do that thing. And that is how you successfully replace yourself. It is not magic. It's not some big finding the, like, perfect absolute person. There's no perfect person.. But you can put the work in to make sure that you set them up for success. And then it's more likely to occur that you will think they're the perfect person because you have done your work on your side. I think a lot of times we think that because we're the CEOs and we're the ones running the company that we don't need to do that. But in reality, I think that's when it's most important because usually what you're handing off is something more important than other people on the team. It's probably strategic, it probably involves a lot of critical thinking, probably something that you've been doing for a long time. It's very important to make sure the company continues to go. And so understanding those two things, you recruit and you replace, that's how you grow and you delegate and you are able to grow the business, but while replacing yourself at the same time. Like, it's not magic. You have to know how to do these things. You have to know how to find the right people, and then you have to know how to replace yourself. That's it. There's no magic. That is it. And so I hope that video is useful to you. If you're thinking about growing your business and how to make sure that you're not feeling like crap every day, because I think a lot of people, they think, in order to grow my business, I have to feel shitty all the time. I have to put in 14 hours a day, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have people on the latter side, which are like, oh, I should barely be working. I think it's in the middle. And I think you also have to know when you got to put your head down, you got to work 14 hours a day, you got to work 18 hours a day, whatever it takes, versus the times maybe you need to step back and let other people learn how to do it for themselves. Themselves. But I hope this video is of value to you so you understand the two R's. You need to recruit and you need to replace. And that is how you grow a business while replacing yourself. It is really that simple. Follow those three steps. I promise you they work.