Stop working in your business and start working on your business. It is the only way to gain personal wealth, truly help others, and leave a lasting legacy.
It doesn’t matter what the conversation is; at some point, I’ll say, “I’m an Engineer.” This is the heart of who I am… and probably always will be.
This rigid identity clouds my ability to grow my business. I took pride and joy in engineering. Like it or not, when you have 30 employees, this is the last role you should be doing in your company, even if it is an engineering firm.
This same challenge exists for most of my business owner clients. They were and are great at their core skills. In some cases, they were great salespeople. In other cases, they were skilled carpenters. Still, in other cases, they were great engineers. To transition from being great at your profession to being a great business owner, you ultimately must let go of your identity as an expert and allow your people to be experts.
I know how distasteful this may sound to most of you who love your work. You say, “Jeff, I love engineering… or I love being a trial lawyer… or I love being an electrician.” I can only say that if you truly love these roles, don’t start a business.
There is one exception. Suppose you want to run a practice where you are the expert professional and surround yourself with assistants to handle administrative work, sales, and marketing. In that case, you will be limited in growth by how many partners you want to take on. Most dentists, lawyers and engineering and architecture firms do this successfully. That’s how they get business names like Simpson, Lawson & Sons.
Be Anonymous
When I realized that my business wouldn’t grow if I didn’t empower my employees, my mission was to have a key client who didn’t know my name.
Let me explain. When I started my engineering firm, I did everything. I sold projects, designed them, supervised their construction, and even provided warranty and service support after they were completed.
Early on, I knew I needed to outsource portions of my work to grow. The first outsourced position was construction management. I hired construction managers to manage the work after it was sold and engineered. I then outsourced engineering as I hired engineers to design the work. I then outsourced marketing. The last part of my business to outsource was sales. I had hired salespeople but always felt compelled to attend essential sales meetings and presentations. Customers often would refer to me by name instead of my company’s name.
My employees first laughed at me when I said my goal was that new clients would never know who I was. After sixteen years, it finally happened. We acquired a $3M customer who didn’t know who I was, and I was super excited.
Why? Because I felt like my company was a genuine business. I thought I had grown something independent of myself. I could take an extended vacation and know that my business would survive. I was now training my managers to grow in the same way that I had.
This accomplishment was much greater than creating an innovative engineering design. So, even though I still consider myself an engineer, I had graduated to something that I felt was even greater… an entrepreneur. But it couldn’t happen until I thoroughly let go.
Business Lessons Learned
Enough about me. Let’s talk about how you can create much greater success in your business.
Want a Business Instead of a Job
As I’ve already said, “You have to want it.” If you love your profession and have no desire to create a business with your profession, then get a job. There is no benefit you will receive in starting your own business, and you will limit anyone you hire as an employee to be your assistant. Who wants that?
Create a Compelling Vision
The vision I created for myself was that customers would not have to know me to do business with my company. To do that, I had to create an organization chart and consider what my office space would look like to house all my employees. I then created a financial plan, marketing plan, and sales plan that supported that vision.
Backfill Your Skill
Your first step of growth is to replace your expertise. This means you need skilled professionals to execute each facet of your business. In my case, there was an administrative facet, an engineering facet, a sales facet, a marketing facet, a construction management facet, and an ongoing service facet. I hired individuals to take on each one of these roles. In some cases, I made terrible hires and had to backtrack, but ultimately, I had people I felt could confidently execute each facet of my business without me.
Grow Your People
Having skilled people to do the work is a great start. However, to continue your growth, those people must let go of their expertise to some extent and lead other experts. It’s not natural to be a leader. It’s not even natural to want to be a leader. Most people gravitate to leadership positions because they want a bigger paycheck. In some cases, they may want more control or power.
In my case, I needed a sales manager to manage my sales team. If you’ve ever been in sales, you know that sales managers and salespeople are two different types of people. If you don’t know this, you’re in for a rude awakening. I also needed an operations manager to manage our construction managers and a business manager to manage my administrative team. These groups became departments in my company.
It may interest you that most of my leaders were not necessarily experts within the departments they managed. They knew that their value was in leadership, not in expertise. You can’t simply promote your best employee to this position to grow leaders. It’s tempting because you think such a promotion is a reward for a job well done. If you want to reward good workers, give them a bonus or a raise, but don’t automatically think they are the best person for a leadership position.
Let Go to Grow
This is the most important lesson I’ll convey in this post.
There’s a standard guideline for empowering your people:
- First, you do a task while the junior person watches.
- Second, they do the task while you watch.
- Third, they do the task on their own.
There are two resistances to this process.
The first is the person you’re training. They’re very comfortable when you’re there to guide them or are always available to advise them. It’s very uncomfortable for the trainee to do a task independently. Some employees want to be left alone, while others seem needy. Different people will react differently to empowerment. Regardless, your employees will eventually have to be independently competent for your company to grow.
The second resistance is you, the trainer. You don’t fully trust that your trainee is ready, no matter how ready they are. You may not trust the trainee’s character. Maybe you think they’ll succumb to the temptation to cheat or cut corners. If you’re good at what you do, you may even believe your trainee will never do the job as well as you can.
While these feelings are often unjustified, lacking skill and character exist in the workplace. To fully let go, you need to have an easy way to verify that work is being done well on behalf of your company.
Use Metrics
To verify that your company is doing quality work that is resulting in profit for the company, you need to measure what you delegate. If you don’t measure, there’s almost no way you can know the people you’ve trusted are doing the job you want and need them to do.
Each function has different metrics. Here’s what I used for my teams.
In sales, I measured closed sales amounts at a specified gross margin. Because we had 6-month to 1-year sales cycles, I also measured the achievement of specific milestones in our sales process. Many call this the sales funnel.
In engineering, there were two metrics. This was because engineers participated in sales as well as final engineered projects. So, the first was combined with sales in how much work was being sold. The second was the complaint rate from operations. If engineers didn’t design well, our operations folks who had to install their designs would let you know.
In construction, they were measured on overall delivered profitability and the timeline that was allowed for construction.
No matter your industry, you can find a measurement that allows you to ensure your people are diligent in their work without micromanaging them.
Being a CEO is a Critical Job
Many of my clients are reluctant to let go because they feel useless. After all, if their staff is doing all the work, what job is left for them to do? Should they sit in their office and play solitaire on their laptop?
As the leader of your company, it is your job to work “on” the company. Think about your company as a car. Each component of your vehicle needs to work well for your car to perform well. Suppose your vehicle could do the quarter mile in 10 seconds. To grow, the car must finish the quarter mile in 9 seconds.
As the CEO of your company, your job is to create plans on how to improve your company’s performance. This may mean expanding product lines. It could be branching out into other geographic territories. You may reorganize to enhance efficiency. It could be partnering with other companies to provide innovative bundled services. The sky is the limit to what you could be doing if you aren’t micro-managing your people.
Why grow?
This is a great question. After all, you could just play solitaire in your office, take a very long vacation, or retire. Why invest any time and effort in growing your company?
Change is the one constant in our free-market economy… as it should be. The world around you will change whether you choose to change or not. Your employees will get restless and want to grow their career opportunities. Your customers will be searching for the best value from you or your competition. And, your investors, if you have investors, want a financial return that doesn’t happen unless you grow the value of your company and their investment.
Reduce Your Workload
If you grow right, you will notice that you work fewer hours and spend more time at home, on vacation, or living the life you truly desire.
I hope you’ve learned a few things about how to stop doing your company’s work and start working “on” your company—or what I call “Letting Go.”
