You cannot grow your business because you are overwhelmed. You are the boss, but you do all the work in your company. You cannot delegate tasks to employees because they lack the expertise and experience. Others simply don’t care as much as you do about the success of your small business.
Learn how Fred reversed roles with his employees to end his overwhelm in his structural engineering firm.
Listen to this story instead of reading at the MMBIZCAST.
Fred was a structural engineer. He started working for a general contractor as an employee, first constructing small bridges and then working his way up to some large projects. While he loved what he did, predicting how much work his general contractor would get in any year was challenging.
Fred left his job working for the general contractor and started his own structural engineering firm. At first, his only client was the old general contractor he used to work for.
It was a win-win arrangement. The general contractor didn’t have to pay Fred unless they had work, and Fred could seek design work from others when the general contractor didn’t need him.
It wasn’t easy at first. Fred earned half of what he made as an employee. As Fred developed solid sales and marketing skills, he generated more interest in his design ability and eventually worked full-time as an independent structural design engineer. Eventually, he hired an administrative assistant to do all his paperwork and billing, an Auto-CAD technician to draft his drawings, and a junior engineer to help him with some of the design work.
He liked what he was doing. However, the money wasn’t great, and he worked continuously. He found that:
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he spent 40% of his time doing design work,
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40% of his time selling his services to government decision-makers and
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20% of his time directing the work of his underlings.
After he paid his expenses, he tended to make just a little more than he had made as an employee, with twice the stress level.
In one of Fred’s networking events, he met Coach Russ. This guy indicated that he helped business owners grow and become profitable while reducing their time at work. Fred remembers laughing when Russ told him that. Fred couldn’t see any way he could grow, make more money and work less. It just didn’t make any practical sense.
Still, Fred was curious. He was facing a busyness that yielded little profits and consumed much of his time. He wondered what kind of magic Coach Russ could perform on him. He called Russ, and they set up what Russ called a Discovery Session.
Fred canceled this initial meeting four times before finally meeting at Russ’s office. Every time Fred wanted to meet, something would come up that required his attention.
Russ started their meeting, “It seems like you’re a busy man. Four reschedules is probably a record for a Discovery Session.”
Fred responded, “I know. I’m sorry for all the delays. I intended to meet, but something always came up at the last minute.”
“No apology necessary. I’m glad we could meet. I’m curious. Why couldn’t others in your office handle whatever you were called to do to make you reschedule our meeting?”
“We’re a tiny design firm, Russ. I do most of the work and my staff helps me do my work. Two of the delays were due to pending design deadlines that I needed to meet. I was already working nights to meet these deadlines as it was, and I couldn’t afford the time to drive over here and meet with you.”
“Interesting. What caused the other two delays?”
“Those delays were caused by a high-maintenance customer demanding I meet with them at the same time I had scheduled our meeting. Because they had to coordinate their meetings with so many other players, I couldn’t force them to reschedule their meeting.”
“That certainly makes sense. Could someone else on your staff have attended those meetings?”
Fred laughed, “These are high-level meetings with very important clients. I have a rookie staff with an Auto-CAD technician, a rookie engineer and an administrative assistant. The best they could have done is take notes. My clients would have been furious that I wasn’t there in person.”
“Got it. Let’s talk about you. What prompted you to set up this meeting in the first place?”
Fred told Russ his story, how he broke away from being an employee of a general contractor only to find himself more stressed and working more hours for only a little more money.
As Fred finished his story, he said, “In our networking event several months ago, you claimed that you helped business owners grow profitably while spending less time at work.”
Russ smiled, “Yes, I did. If my memory serves me, I believe you chuckled.”
“Yeah. Sorry about that. I’m now curious if you can do this for me?”
“I probably can. However, it’s not really my work that will help you; it’s YOUR willingness to shift the role in YOUR company that will make the difference.”
“I’m not sure I understand. I’m working hard, Russ. I don’t know what more I can do to make my small engineering firm work better.”
Russ smiled again, “That’s the point. You’re doing all the work. You cancelled our meeting four times because you’re too busy working IN your business to work ON your business.”
“That’s where you lose me. If I were to hire all these people to do the work of my business, I would make even less profit than I make today. I can’t afford to hire the help you say I need.”
“How do you know that you can’t afford to hire help, Fred?”
“Look. If I’m barely making enough now; and I’m doing all the work. How can I afford to hire more people?”
Russ dodged Fred’s question, “I’ll tell you what. I want you to answer your question. If you want to work with me as your business coach, your first objective is to create a business plan that’s profitable and doesn’t require you to do one thing in your business.”
Fred reacted, “That’s impossible! Are you listening? I told you that I’m barely making it now. How on earth can I create a plan where I’m doing nothing in my business and still making money?”
“Fred, you’re used to earning a paycheck as an employee. And you’re now engaged in a practice where you have some assistants but are overwhelmed with work. For you to grow, you need to shift your thinking. You first need to become a manager and then become an entrepreneur.”
“An entrepreneur? I am an entrepreneur. I answer to no one but my customers.”
“You’re striving to create a practice. There’s nothing wrong with a professional engineering practice. The challenge with a practice is that you provide ALL the expertise. This means that practices are limited to your ability and your time. That’s why you’re so busy.”
“Okay. How can I create this business plan if I don’t even think it’s possible?”
“You’re an engineer. A business plan is MATH. You can create a spreadsheet that shows your expenses with several employees doing the work while you manage these workers.”
“I suppose. I’ll put together the ‘business plan’… but I’m not convinced it will work.”
Russ smiled, “That’s all I ask. If you hire me as your coach, I’ll help you shift your perspective. You just focus on the math for now.”
It took Fred a month to get back to Russ with his business plan. The plan took time. Trying to set up a meeting time that he wouldn’t have to continually reschedule was a different matter. In fact, they decided to conduct their meeting via video because it would take Fred too long to drive back and forth to Russ’s office.
Fred started, “I have to admit, Russ. This business planning exercise surprised me.”
Russ asked, “How so?”
“I created a fictional engineering firm with three full-time engineers, an office manager, a salesperson, and an Auto-CAD technician. In my fictional firm, I’m managing these folks, not doing any actual work, and can bill enough time with my engineers to make it all work.”
“Wow! It sounds like your thinking may be shifting.”
“While I’ve made this work on paper, making this work in real life is another problem.”
“Tell me the opportunities you see arising with your plan.'”
“What? I didn’t say opportunities. I said problems.”
“The word problem indicates that you see obstacles. The word opportunity implies that you have yet to develop a solution. Which word would you prefer to use?”
“Okay. Here are my OPPORTUNITIES. I do all the engineering now, and am quite good at it. In fact, I believe that most of my clients hire me because of MY expertise.”
Fred paused, expecting that Russ would respond to his first OPPORTUNITY.
Russ commented, “Please continue.”
“Then there’s the problem with sales. My prospective clients expect to talk with me. I’m the expert. They want to see who they’re hiring in order to give me their business. They won’t trust some wet-behind-the-ears salesperson to convince them to use me for high-profile bridge designs.”
Fred paused and Russ asked, “Is that it?”
“Those are big deals! How can I solve those prob… I mean OPPORTUNITIES?”
“Fred, you’re going through one of the roughest transitions any manager ever has to go through. I call it the FLIP. To grow, reduce your working time, and make real money as an entrepreneur, you have to FLIP your expertise from you to your team.”
“Are you saying that I need to train my people?”
“Quite the contrary. To successfully navigate the FLIP, you need to change the direction of how expertise flows in your engineering firm.”
“I don’t get it. My clients hire me because of my expertise. I’ll lose business if I hire rookies and expect them to deliver for my clients.”
“For the FLIP to work, you can’t hire rookies. You must hire experts who are the new creators of your firm’s expertise.”
“That’s going to cost a lot of money. How am I going to come up with this money?”
“You’ve created a viable business plan demonstrating that you will be profitable paying your new experts while managing them. Right?”
“Yes. But how do I get to this fictional place if I can’t afford to hire these people today?”
“As I said, this FLIP isn’t easy, and it’s certainly not intuitive to most high-producing workers like you. I’ll tell you what. If you can block off a time once a week for coaching sessions, we can get through this together.”
Fred took Russ up on his offer and attended coaching sessions once a week. He was amazed that he even found time for these sessions. He also found that each subsequent session was more manageable and easier to fit into his schedule.
His first step was empowering his current rookie engineer, Robert, to do more work. Robert attended meetings and was able to weigh in on some critical engineering topics. Russ coached Fred to keep his mouth shut and give Robert a chance. Fred was amazed at how well Robert adapted to his new role as an expert instead of a helper.
Next, Fred hired a salesperson. She was an engineer who worked for a competitor and had relationships with procurement officials with municipalities he needed to sell to. Veronica was looking for lower hours and less engineering, so the sales position Fred offered was ideal.
As sales increased, Fred hired an additional veteran structural engineer who was terrific at bridge design. He offered solid expertise in engineering and brought in some design processes that made Fred’s techniques look primitive by comparison.
It was a financial challenge at first. But week after week, Fred noticed he had more time to work ON the business. His new employees were taking ownership of their areas of expertise.
Within a year, the FLIP was complete, and Veronica was fully in charge of sales. Fred was a little embarrassed when his long-time clients claimed Veronica was more pleasant to work with than he was. His new engineering team was completing all the design work, and Fred was doing the work of a CEO.
Fred was creating a vision of duplicating his team in other states and competing for large bridge projects that he could have never completed with his one-man practice.
Not only was Fred working less, but his firm was making serious money. He reminisced about how he would’ve driven himself to an early grave had he continued his high-stress, heavy-workload life that he had a few years earlier.
Fred had successfully navigated the FLIP to transition from what Russ called “technician” to “manager.” Fred worked with Coach Russ once a month to eventually transition from “manager” to “entrepreneur.”
BUSINESS LESSONS LEARNED
In our story, Fred followed the typical path for most professionals. He worked as an employee for a time. When he felt limited by his job, he started his own engineering practice. Fred quickly succeeded and grew his revenue and even his staff. This is where Fred’s engineering practice stalled out and is the source of today’s business lessons.
If you read last week’s blog post about Brooke, we covered a similar transition from technician to manager. Today, I wanted to highlight a specific characteristic of this transition that I call the FLIP.
Most of us think of growth as learning more and improving our work. That’s a natural path for most professionals. Whether you remain an employee of a growing company or grow your own business, you’ll have to FLIP at some point.
The reason I call it a FLIP is that it’s an ABRUPT change or reversal of direction. One day, you’re doing all the work. You provide the expertise to your business. You often create wealth for the people who work for you. The next day your underlings are doing the work, providing the expertise, and building your wealth. Psychologically, this is very unsettling for many Type-A personalities. As it happens, most Type-A’s start businesses.
Type-A FLIP Obstacles
The obstacles that stand in the way of Type-A’s when it comes to flipping are: 1) momentum, 2) ego, and 3) control. These three qualities got most Type-A’s to the point they are in their business ownership journey. If something needed to get done, they got it done. Unfortunately, each one of these traits needs to be reversed to transition from technician to manager. Let me explain…
Momentum
Let’s face it: for your entire life, from childhood up through adulthood, you’ve been taught that you benefit from your work output and your skills. And, now a business coach asks you to change this momentum and turn your brain off while your workers do all the thinking. It feels unnatural, and you will resist this change.
Ego
Ego is a tricky thing. When it’s too small, we lose our confidence and retreat. When it’s too big, we tend to talk down to others and think too highly of ourselves. To FLIP, you won’t change your hard-wired personality, but you must be fully aware of how your ego gets in the way. Business owners will often adopt a fluctuating ego. When their business is succeeding, they think highly of themselves. They believe they’ve figured out some magic formula that all those other business owners can’t get. When their business fails, they get down on themselves, wondering why they crash while others seem to be succeeding quickly.
As a business-owner technician, this ego is tied to the quality of work and the business’s success. It’s unnerving to break this tie when it has worked for you for so long as an employee and now as a business owner.
Control
At the heart of this thread is our third obstacle: “control.” This ego and momentum show up as a type of control. People may call you a control freak. You call yourself a control freak. Frankly, control is a good thing. No one wants to work for a company that is out of control. However, the means of control must change for any company to grow.
In our story of Fred, he was willing to give up control of small ancillary tasks like bookkeeping, administrative work, and low-grade engineering work. However, he believed he needed to take control of his core engineering work and directly interact with his customers.
Once he gave up this control, he was almost surprised that his customers connected with his staff better than with him.
Managing People
When you give other people control, they’ll fail. It’s not a matter of IF. And when they do, there are a few directions you can take. You can decide that this “giving others control” idea is bad, and you can take control back and never make that mistake again. You can help grow your staff to minimize the number of failures in the future. Or, you can fire your staff and replace them with more competent people.
This is one of the most challenging decisions that managers face. They need to discern whether their people can grow into positions of expertise or whether they need to hire different people with different skills and abilities. This blog post is not long enough to discuss the intricacies of this decision. However, I can tell you that you won’t grow your company if you go back to taking over control.
Money
The last topic I want to illustrate in today’s blog post is this genuine concern over money. If you’re boot-strapping any professional practice, it will be more costly to FLIP than to do business as usual. In our story, Fred first created a business plan of how things would look once he had grown his business with his staff of engineers. In Fred’s case, his main goal was to envision a business where he wasn’t required to be a daily employee of that business.
Once that end goal has been envisioned, you can create a path to get to that vision through transition steps. If you do it right, you’ll see that investment is required to move through the transition of a FLIP. This means that your company will experience a momentary loss of income. In most FLIPs, you hire a salesperson who you can’t afford until they succeed at selling. You’ll also hire a high-paid professional to take over your role as the expert. Both positions will stress your finances.
If you plan, you can build the investment into your financial forecast and pricing. That’s why Coach Russ told Fred to create his business plan and vision as the first thing.
This post is part of a Coach Russ story series by Jeff Schuster, a business coach with Mechanics & Mindset Business Coaching. Jeff has published several more blog posts, podcasts, and videos on business mechanics, mindset, and coaching. Please set up a complimentary coaching session with Jeff if you’d like to share your business situation and gain insight into what may help you grow your business to the next level.
