Eric Edmeades argues that business owners often become bottlenecks by holding onto tasks they dislike or are no longer best placed to do. He emphasizes the importance of saying no and delegating to enable growth. Through a personal anecdote about repeatedly fixing company computers despite having an IT manager, Edmeades identifies an "addiction" to recognition and significance as a psychological barrier to delegating, and shows how reframing that need frees time for higher-level work and allows staff to improve.
Chapters
Very often we are willing to do jobs that we really don't like. We're willing to do more jobs than we have time for, and then we become the biggest single constraint on the growth of the business. You see, the challenge is, is that for a lot of people, the more successful their business becomes, the busier they get. But you see, you only have a finite amount of time, and once that time runs out, that's it. And that's as far as your business can grow. And so your success in business has a lot more to do with what you say no to. There are jobs that we all have to do when we start our businesses, because when we start off, maybe we don't have a lot of startup capital, maybe we haven't found the right people. And so we end up having to do some of the jobs that we don't really like all that much or that we're not the best one to be doing. In my case, that might be, say, accounting. I really don't like doing that, but I had to, because when you're in startup mode, that's how it is. That said, there comes a moment where you need to give those things up. You're going to need to give those things up, and some of us are going to struggle with that. And because we're addicted and we don't even know it. What do I mean by addicted? I mean that we are emotionally addicted to certain aspects of doing some of those jobs in our company. And if we don't break those addictions, we won't give up those jobs. If we don't give up those jobs, we won't be able to grow our business any further. I'll give you a perfect example from my life. When I was 15 years old, I was learning about computers. I didn't know it at the time, but when computers eventually came along, I wasn't afraid of them the way many people were, and I had a natural skill with them. So what does that mean in my business? It means that I set up the networks, I set up the computers, and when something goes wrong, I'm the one to fix them. But what was really interesting is I recognized that I'd become addicted to the job. How did I know? Well, first of all, I had already hired an IT manager. So I now had an IT manager that was supposed to be fixing problems on the network or fixing problems on the computers when they happened. Sometimes I would be walking through the sales room. Somebody go, hey, Eric, my computer's broken, and there's no way you're going to be able to fix it this time. And it was almost like a challenge because I always could fix them. Would walk over, I'd hit a few buttons. Next thing you know, the computer be working. And then I'd fixed it again, and it became this game. In fact, one day, I was walking through the sales group, and one of the salespeople was like, you definitely won't be able to fix it this time. There's something terribly wrong with it. And as I went to fix it, here's what I saw. The whole sales room stopped to watch, and it looked like they'd been taking bets. Half of them bet that I could fix it, and half of them bet that I couldn't fix it. And of course I could fix it. So I went in, click, click, click, click, click, fixed it. And. And half the people celebrated, and half of them were disappointed. It made me feel good. It made me feel good to be able to fix the computer when they didn't believe that it could be fixed. My ego liked it. I was emotionally addicted to fixing the computers. I had an IT manager sitting in an office being paid a really good wage to fix the computers, and yet I was doing it. And you know why they wanted me to do it? Because I was faster than the IT manager. Why was I faster than the IT manager? Because I'd been doing it for longer. How's the IT manager ever going to get as fast as me if I don't let him do the job? I had to find a way to break the addiction. So to understand the addiction, I dove in. What is the addiction? And I realized what the addiction was. It was an addiction to recognition, an addiction to a sense of significance. You don't believe I can fix it, and I fixed it. I feel good about myself. And so I had to take a look and recognize that maybe my need for recognition or my need for significance wasn't getting met properly in my life. So I had to look at finding better ways of meeting those needs. Interestingly enough, after I went through this exercise and worked on breaking the addiction, I was walking through the sales room one day, and one of the salespeople did it again. Hey, Eric, I know you're not gonna be able to fix it this time. And I turned around, everybody was watching, and I said, you and I both know that I can fix it. Call the IT manager. And I walked away with a powerful feeling of significance that comes from owning a business big enough to have its own IT manager. How special is that? I walked away feeling significant, knowing that as I sat at my desk, I working on strategy things, working on the business, that my IT manager was over there fixing the computers. By rewiring my emotional connection to that event, I broke the addiction and I freed up my time and allowed my IT manager to become even better. I want to suggest to you that as your business grows, there are going to be jobs that you're going to be reluctant to give up. You're going to be reluctant to give them up because of maybe budgetary reasons why or time reasons. I don't have enough time to train somebody. Or because there's going to be some feeling you have about not giving it up. And it might be that there's an addiction in there that needs to be broken.
