Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Welcome to Leading With Force — a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
📍 If your team feels comfortable coming to you with every emergency and not making the decision to solve things themselves. We need 📍 to leverage more to your team and get them to truly start to lead the business because that is you being an operator. When you make it that comfortable for your team to come to you with all these problems, then you're creating a codependency and you will never get outta the operator mode and into being a true owner.
Hey everyone. Thank you for joining me for another episode. I really appreciate you being here. If you're getting value from this podcast or channel, I would really appreciate it if you would like or share or subscribe, tell somebody about the show. It really helps me with my mission to reach as many people as possible.
And while you're at it. If you haven't already, check out brian force.com and sign up for our weekly newsletter. I spend a lot of time really hammering out actionable guidance and insights that you can implement in your business right now. So check out brian force.com, subscribe to the newsletter and please like, share, subscribe.
That's enough for the PSAs. Let's get back to the 📍 episode.
I am gonna go out on a limb here, and I am going to say that every single entrepreneur shares a common goal. We all want to accomplish the exact same thing in whatever business we're in, whatever journey we're on, we really have one common goal. Entrepreneurs want to build a business that can run without their day-to-day involvement, without them being hands-on and having a piece of every part of the pie and having to do something every single day to move the business forward.
No matter what business you're in, this is why we get into business for ourselves, for freedom that. Magical, mystical word freedom, where we get to enjoy the lives that we're building and not have to be so hands-on and in the trenches every single day. For most entrepreneurs, they get into business for themselves, but they end up working more hours and even harder, and a lot of times even making less money than they were when they were working for someone else, when they were working a normal W2 job.
We have this dream of entrepreneurship. That we're gonna do things our way. We're gonna build the things we wanna build and we're gonna scale. And then when we scale, we're gonna make more money, we're gonna do less work, and we're gonna really live a beautiful, wonderful life of freedom and peace of mind.
And it's totally possible, by the way. It's absolutely possible. Look around you, look around the world, look at your network. I guarantee you, you know, people that are operating in a more hands-off fashion that are running great businesses and they're not having to do the day-to-day work, that's the cult.
And that's all of our goals. That's what every single one of us wants, And then we get into it, we start building our business, we start gaining some traction. We start gaining some momentum and we realize, oh my gosh, this is a lot harder than we thought it was going to be. Stepping out of the day to day and transitioning from operator to true owner is the most difficult transition you'll ever make in your entire career.
It's something that we all aspire to. It is truthfully something that very few entrepreneurs accomplish, at least for extended periods of time. There are times when you might take your hands. Off the steering wheel a bit, and hopefully the team drives itself to the destination only to find ourselves sucked right back in because things are starting to fall apart without us being involved in every aspect of the business.
This is what entrepreneurship looks like for most people. We end up just building ourselves another job when we really were looking for freedom. So that's what we're going to talk about today. Today we are going to discuss a step by step framework for entrepreneurs to transition from operators to true owners of their business.
But in order to do that, first we have to talk about what holds people back from transitioning from operator to owner. What gets in the way? Why can't everybody just do it? There are a lot of reasons why entrepreneurs get stuck in the day to day operations of their business, why they never really transition into being true owners.
But here are a few of my favorite reasons, the ones that I see the most often. The first is what I call the comfort zone phenomenon. That is where, even though we're tired, we are exhausted emotionally, we are frustrated. We feel like we're locked in a prison of our own making.
We're more comfortable doing the day-to-day work that we know how to do to keep the business going and to keep it moving forward, or at least not moving backwards. We're more comfortable doing that work than we are with leading other people. Leading others can be very challenging.
It requires a lot of a person to not only work inside the business, but also lead others to start taking on more and delegating more as you're also part of the operations.
Leading people is a very difficult, challenging process, and for most entrepreneurs when it comes down to it, they would rather just stay trapped in the muck of the business, then step up and actually lead their team.
The second reason is what I call the perfectionist trap. It's this mindset of no one can do it as well as I can. You are the expert. That's why you chose to go into this business. That's why you've been successful to this level and building your business, and it's very difficult to let go of the controls.
It's very difficult for you to start leveraging things to other people because you have to accept that they're not going to do it as well as you can for a period of time. And there are times when talented people come into your world and they're just rock stars right away. They take the job from you and they go do it better than you ever have. I have experienced this at different levels in our organizations, but more often I've experienced the opposite.
I've experienced hiring people and having to go through the process of watching them grow into their role of guiding and coaching and leading them into their role, knowing full well that I could just take the job back at any moment, and most likely do it better than they could because they're newer than me because I am an expert, because I've been doing this for a very long time.
but that defeats the purpose of building a business. That's just me building a job for myself. If I refuse to let things go, I'll always be in the business. I'll never be working on the business. And so the perfectionist trap is one of the most difficult to overcome because even when you find the right people, there's a ramping up period where you're going to have to be okay with them performing at a level that is increasingly getting better.
But it's not as good as if you were to do it yourself.
the next thing that holds entrepreneurs back from truly transitioning into owners is the fear of losing control of their business.
Essentially, if they step back from the business and it does start to run without them, does their small team eventually come to them and say, Hey, we don't need you anymore. You are obsolete. Now we're going to go start our own business without you. And this is a common fear among entrepreneurs, is that they will become obsolete or they'll lose control of their business.
And if they run a small business, a small team, that that team will no longer need them. And then eventually the company will just dissolve because your team will just decide that they can go do this on their own without you. So we'll address that specific concern.
But that is one of the big things that holds entrepreneurs back from leveraging more to their teams.
and the last thing that holds entrepreneurs back from really transitioning to owners is just the financial concerns. People are truly afraid of bringing on leverage of building a team because it costs money.
And they look at their profit and loss statement and they go, there's no way they could hire somebody. Right now. I can't put myself in that financial position. Which is at times true, it is also untrue at times, and it's excuse that we make for not leveraging ourselves and not building a team. So we'll discuss when it is actually true and we'll discuss when it's the story that you're telling yourself to keep from having to do the hard thing.
All right, so now that we've covered what holds entrepreneurs back from transitioning into that owner role, let's talk about the hidden costs of making yourself that bottleneck.
This is the cost to you, your business, and the life that you could be living by not truly transitioning from operator to owner.
the first hidden cost is that you limit the growth potential of your business and of your people. When your business can only move at the speed of you, not only is the business always going to be underneath the ceiling of your personal potential, the team that you're leading, they have limited growth potential as well.
They don't have career advancement opportunities if you are not willing to let them grow, which means that eventually you'll lose your best people. Because your best people will realize that they deserve bigger, better opportunities, and so they will love you until the moment they leave you for a better opportunity because their world is not getting any bigger.
The second hidden cost is just personal burnout. We see this in every single entrepreneur from time to time, but it's much worse in those that are really trapped in that operator role. This is going to affect your personal life. This is going to affect your relationships, and this is going to affect the way that you interact with your clients.
It's gonna affect your genuine fulfillment and joy and happiness in this world if you can't transition from operator to owner, your burnout, the rise and fall of your energy is gonna set the tone for the entire business. And so when you are feeling good, your business might operate well, but when you are burnt out, everyone will suffer in your business and you'll provide a worse client experience.
The third hidden cost and maybe the most important is that you are limiting the value of your business.
If you are your business, your business isn't worth nearly as much as if you were a true owner of that same business. Let's say your business makes a few million dollars a year in revenue, and maybe you make a hefty net profit as well, you actually make a lot of money running your business. But if you have to be hands on with every part of the operation.
If your business was to sell today, it would be worth a lot less because the new business owner would have to keep you around and pay you a lot of money in order for it to make it worth selling the business, because you would have to come along with the business.
You make a certain amount of money from the business, and the business doesn't run without you. So that person's gotta bring you on, and you're not gonna do it for a 10th or a fifth or a quarter of what you were doing it before. And now if that person can't go, hire someone to replace you and lead your team, your business isn't worth a whole lot.
Because if you come with the business and you already make a lot of money operating the business, that's going to become an expense on the new owner's books to keep you around.
So you're limiting the value of your business by not leveraging yourself out of it.
So if you have a goal to sell your business and retire at some point, you being the operator rather than the owner is very much handicapping the value of your business.
So how do you know if you are trapped in an operator role rather than an ownership role? Here are some of my favorites. One, if your team needs approval for routine decisions, you are not an owner, you are an operator.
An owner is only consulted for very substantial decisions in the business regarding strategy or major expenses or bringing on a new vertical or something like that.
Your managerial team should be making all of the routine day to day decisions. So if your team is coming and asking for your approval for routine stuff, you are the operator of the business. We need to move you to the owner of the business. The second would be if clients insist on working directly with you, meaning you are not only the face of the business, you are the one that clients insist on working with.
That means that your team is not providing the same client service as you can personally. Or you have not done a good enough job of setting the stage with your clients, that they're hiring your business and your entire team, not you personally. And until you do that one, your client service will suffer because you're gonna get spread thin.
You can only serve so many clients at once. And two, your team will never be fully empowered if your clients insist on working directly with you.
Number three is you're constantly putting out fires. You're always being pulled into the chaos, the emergency situations that some other team members should be responsible for. This is probably the number one way to tell if you're still an operator and not truly an owner.
If your team feels comfortable coming to you with every emergency and not making the decision to solve things themselves. We need to leverage more to your team and get them to truly start to lead the business because that is you being an operator. When you make it that comfortable for your team to come to you with all these problems, then you're creating a codependency and you will never get outta the operator mode and into being a true owner.
All right, so now that we've identified what it looks like to be an operator versus an owner, how do we make that mindset shift so we can start to transition from one to the other?
The first key mindset shift that you have to make to transition from operator to owner is that good enough is better than perfect, because if you're demanding perfection from your team, if you are demanding your team to always do it as well as you could do it personally, then you're never going to have your standard met,
at least not for a long time, you won't be able to get there because you won't tolerate good enough for long enough for your team to actually get closer to mastery and closer to perfection. So you've gotta be willing to set a standard for what is adequate, what is good enough in our processes, our onboarding processes, our sales processes, our client service processes.
What is good enough? I'm okay with things running this way for a little while so my team can improve, they can learn, they can fail forward and they can get better and better and better.
We do this in, in our organizations. We have KPIs for pretty much everything. Every role has a scoreboard, A KPI that they're supposed to meet, and then we measure overall KPI. So the amount of processes completed on time is a very big KPI that we measure.
We wanna make sure that we're being efficient in everything that we do. I have a standard that 90% of our processes need to be completed on time for it to be good enough. I would prefer it to be a hundred. I would prefer it to be at least 95, 95, 90 6%. I know they're probably never gonna totally be at a hundred.
But I would very much like to see 95, 96, 97. If we're not headed in that direction, then we've got an issue. As I stepped out of the day-to-day operations, my standard was at least 90%. 90% was good enough. And if we weren't hitting 90%, then I had to jump back in.
Then I had to retrain somebody. Then I had to hold somebody accountable. Then I had to have a fierce conversation. Then I had to coach somebody. Then I had to raise the standard. But 90%, if we were hitting that, that was good enough for a baseline for me to go, okay, this is working now. We can make it better.
Now we can get better every day. Now we can turn these guys into real professionals. So you've gotta figure out what is your standard, what is good enough? 'cause perfect's not going to be an option right away.
the next mindset shift that you have to make is you have to value long-term results over short-term efficiency. You're not going to be perfect in the beginning, but what you wanna see is improvement. You want to value long-term results over short-term efficiency, and so as your team is learning, as your team is failing forward, are they getting better?
Are you making the same mistakes over and over and not improving? Or are you making mistakes, learning, refining, and getting better every day? If that's the case, then while we may have miles to go, I value the long-term result over the short-term efficiency.
All I wanna see. Is that you're doing it good enough to pass the standard and you're getting better. If those two things are true, then I know long term you're gonna be very good.
And the last mindset shift you have to make is about your role. You've got to start to view your role as developing people and developing processes, not doing sales, not doing client service, not doing the day-to-day your role in the. Business is to develop people and to develop processes and help your people develop processes on their own after a while.
And so the way to do this is you need to start to challenge yourself to not be the one to take the action in the business. Whenever something needs to be done, you need to get in the disciplined mindset of saying, what role needs to be responsible for this, and what resources do they need to get it done?
And then identify that person that fills that role right now, ensure they have the resources and leverage the job to them. If they don't do it well, if they fail, train them, coach them, guide them, hold them accountable to the standard and allow them to improve.
And do that over and over until you identify. Do you even have the right people? Do I need to get new people or are they learning? Are they growing? Are they getting better? Force yourself to not take the action force yourself to develop the person who is taking the action. This is gonna be very difficult on chaotic days in your business days where it just feels like there's a million things happening.
You just need to dive in, fix it, take everyone's job back. Do it yourself. This is going to be very challenging for you, and it's probably the most important part of this entire process. You absolutely have to get used to identifying the role. Who fills that role? Do they have the tools? What's the standard?
Allow them to go do it. Then hold them accountable, coach them and guide them. That is your role in the business as an owner. 'cause if you do that well enough over time, then you build a. Because if you do that well enough over time, you build a layer of secondary leadership underneath you, and now you're truly a more hands-off owner who's just monitoring the business and improving the leadership skills of your leadership team.
Now speaking of team, that is our next point of conversation. You need to assemble the right one. Your team is your business. Your business is not the product or service that you provide. It isn't the way you treat your clients. Those are byproducts of your business. Those are the things that happen when your business runs well, but your team and your processes are your business.
It's what gets up every day. And does the thing to create sales and to create happy clients. And so you need to assemble the right team. You could have a killer team, you could have a killer set of processes. You could have all the best software. It could be all set up properly. You could have the best tools in the game, but if you don't have the right people working them, your business is not going to go very far.
Just like any sport, you could give the most expensive first class golf equipment to somebody who's never played golf before, and it's not going to make them any better. You could give a really good golfer, subpar equipment, and they're still going to play a great round of golf because it's the person, because it's about the person.
Good, because it's. Because it's about the person. When you find the right people on your team to work in the right roles or sit in the right seats on the bus, as we say, then they're going to do very well if you lead them well. So finding the right people is absolutely crucial in your business, and you need to start.
To find the right people by figuring out what people you're looking for in the first place. This is coming up with your organizational chart for whatever stage your business is at. You're gonna have an organizational chart for where you're at right now, and then an organizational chart that grows to where you want the business to eventually be.
But for right now, we need to start with what does your organizational chart look like for you to take the first step out of the operation side. Who do you need on your team and what seat on the bus do they sit in?
I'll give you a great example of how to go through this process and identify which roles need to be in your organizational chart and which ones you need to fill at any given moment. There are really two key sides to any business. There's sales and there's operations.
Every entrepreneur has strengths, things they're better at, things that are their strong suit, and they're normally either gifted and operations, meaning systems and processes, or they're gifted salespeople. Entrepreneurs come in both flavors. Some entrepreneurs just love doing deals, and they're great salespeople.
Their operations are a mess without their team, but they can do a deal. They can bring in business. There are other entrepreneurs that are not great on the sales side, but they build really beautiful systems and processes. When business does show up, it flows very well through the system.
Normally business people, entrepreneurs, they're not both. And so whichever one you are not, that's probably the first thing you need to hire for. So normally your first role in your organizational chart, that's not you, is going to be an operations manager or a sales leader. Which means by default in the beginning, you are filling that other role.
So in order to step out of your business and you're an operations person, you need to figure out how to get business coming in so that you can focus on building great operational processes, which you'll eventually leverage yourself out of and have someone else take on the sales side. So if you're great in operations, a sales manager needs to be your first hire that's gonna help you stay inside.
That's gonna help you stay in your genius zone. It's gonna keep you from getting burned out continuously because you're doing the thing that you are passionate about, that you are good at, and you're leveraging someone else to be accountable to the sales side. So for example, in one of our businesses, we just brought on a business development manager.
We had been really running the business off of referrals and flat out old school marketing for about the first three years of our existence, and we'd really kind of hit a ceiling. My managing partner in that business is a great. Operational person. I am the owner of the company, so I am running several businesses at one time and looking to develop my people and our processes.
So I don't have the ability to jump into a sales role in that organization. And my managing partner is great at the operational side. So we brought on a business development manager that's a sales leader who's solely in charge of driving new business into the company. If I had asked my managing partner to take on that sales role, it wouldn't have been a fit.
She would've been extraordinarily stressed out. The operational side of the business would've started to falter without her being in the mix every single day, and she would not have been the strongest person to accomplish the standard that I've set for new business coming in every single month.
So you've gotta identify which role you're not going to fill and which role you are going to fill. That's gonna be the beginning of your organizational chart. And now as your business grows, because that dynamic is succeeding, you need to start to build out the rest of your chart. Who else works beneath you?
On the operational side, as your business grows, who replaces you in that role so that you can elevate to the next level of leadership
and take one slow, deliberate, methodical step out of the operational side of the business. So sitting down and identifying your current organizational chart, who needs to be in what seat, and then what the organizational chart needs to look like. Whenever you get to your next level of goals, whether that's your one year, three year, five year ultimate goal for your business, you need to build out what that chart is going to look like so that you have a roadmap of the team that you're building, and then you'll be able to hire the right.
People to fill all those seats on the bus.
Now as you're going into hiring mode and looking to bring on the right people, you might find that hiring the right people is one of the most challenging things that you'll ever do in your business.
It's very difficult to hire someone else to come in and run and own a small part of your baby. The thing that you've bled for, the thing that you've poured, everything you have into, you're now delegating a portion of a success to someone else. And you really wanna make sure that it's the right person.
How do you know whether or not it's the right person? Well, the reality is to some extent. You don't. Not until they really get into it. You can do your best and there are a lot of ways to do your best, but you'll never fully know if someone is the right person until they get into the role and they start performing.
That is why I very much like the mantra and stick to it slow to higher. Quick to fire, unfortunately, because you can take all the time in the world interviewing and interviewing and interviewing, but until somebody gets into the throes of the day to day of your business, you never quite know how they're going to perform.
I have interviewed people that I thought for sure were going to be a plus players. Right out of the gate, they struggled mightily and within 30 days I knew they were not a fit for our business.
I've also been wildly surprised by bringing on people that we put in sort of lower roles on the totem pole, more entry level positions, and they ended up being massive performers and completely blowing me away when I figured that this would be a role that would have a lot of churn because it was difficult to find the right person for that role.
I've been totally surprised. On both ends of the spectrum. What I will say when it comes to hiring, we could do an entirely different episode on hiring and finding the right people, and I'm sure that we will in the future. I always, I very much support. I very much support. I very much support the adage hire for.
I very much support the added. I very much support the adage. Hire for attitude, train for skill. You can train people. If you hire the person, if you hire someone with the right attributes, meaning if you're hiring an operations person, they need to have worked in operations before. Have a solid track record, know how to use your tech stack, right?
Like obviously still try to find a personality fit. Try to find the right person with the right skillset, but you don't even know if the right person with the right skillset is gonna be the right person. They're gonna perform up to standards. So. But you do know what their attitude is like. You do know how their energy has shown up in the room.
That's why I, you do know how their energy has shown up in the room. You listen to their stories around their past roles and their wins and their losses and their questions and their curiosity and their takeaways. And you can identify, is this person a legitimate team player? Is this person a leader? Is this person going to own the role or are they going to give it back to me?
that is the type of person. Those are the types of questions that you wanna be asking yourself and thinking about when you're doing interviews, and that's why I do tend to hire slowly. I normally will hire somebody more than fi. I normally will interview someone more than five times, even for our mid-level, like.
I normally will hire, I normally will interview someone at least five times, even for our middle level, more sales based roles. Because I want to really get to know them. I want to know what they're like on a bad day when they're stressed and they had car trouble on the way to work and like things aren't really going all that well in their personal life, or they've got some distractions or things like that.
I wanna know what they're like the first time we've met when they're on their best behavior and they're bringing their best foot forward.
And I also wanna know what they're like when the challenges start showing up. If I interview someone five times, there's a really good chance that at least one of those times, they're not having the best day.
as long As you have the right strengths, which I wouldn't even be sitting across the table from you and talking about a job opportunity if you didn't have the right strengths for the role. I can train you for the skills.
I can train you how to run our processes. I can train you how to run our systems. I wanna know what type of attitude you're gonna show up with every day. I wanna know what your attitude's gonna be like on your best day, and I wanna know what it's gonna be like on your way more challenging days.
I want to spend a lot of time with you before I know that you are the right person. So that would be my number one hiring tip is spend a lot of time with your people. It might seem a little frivolous because you're busy, but you won't know if it's the right person until they really get into the role.
You can take a shortcut as to knowing how they're gonna react in difficult situations by spending a lot of time with them upfront. Hire for attitude, train for skill.
So you've gone through the process of bringing on the right people, or at least the right people for right now as your business continues to grow and scale. So now, how do you start to delegate the decision making in your business to the right people when you have them?
How do you transition from having to be involved in every single decision in your business? To allowing your people to know when it is, okay. And what is okay to just make decisions on without your interference whatsoever?
Well, this comes down to a very process oriented approach for me. I like to assign decision making to roles and processes. So inside of our business, we have a process for basically everything that we do. Like I said, client onboarding, sales, outbound marketing. There's a process. There's a way that we do everything right. So one of our marketing approaches is events. Our business development manager plans all of our events.
That's how we grow our network and we generate more business. I ascribe decisions. To every role and every process in the business. Who makes the decision for these processes? Who makes the decision on how we handle things inside this process?
And then I set basic parameters around that decision where if the decision is outside those parameters, that's the only time you're coming to me for any sort of approval whatsoever. And then slowly over time, I expand those parameters and eventually give you full ownership of the decision making process for that role.
So. The parameters around events are simply financial. We want to do a certain amount of events per year to attract more clients, get deeper with our existing clients, grow our referral business.
The only thing that I really care about is how much it's going to cost the business, because I wanna measure our return on investment over time. And so if it's going to be above a certain financial threshold, I simply want our business development manager to come talk to me about it,
explain to me why it's going to cost so much and what we expect the outcome to be. Some events cost us very little. We partner with other people. They're like, some events cost us very little. Some events cost us very little, like our educational masterminds that we do. That's basically just buying lunch for our existing clients and potential new clients.
Getting them into a room and fostering a mastermind for a few hours. It's very, very simple. I don't make any decisions in that process whatsoever. I trust our business development manager to run it, market it, get the entire process set up, execute on the event. Then we do larger scale events where we try to get hundreds of people together, really put like a big party together and really earn a lot of new business.
When we throw those events, if it's gonna be above a certain financial threshold, which it normally is, I want our business development manager to come and talk to me about it, because I wanna know what we're spending on and what the strategy is to generate new business out of it.
More often than not, she'll come to me with a good strategy. I will approve it. I will listen to what her vision is, and I'll allow her to go execute on it. I don't want to give her free reign on the financial side of the business just yet until she's really more comfortable. Measuring what the return of our events are and really accounting for every dollar that we spend.
But I'm building wider parameters every single time we do these so that she can get better and better, and eventually I want not to make those decisions at all. And so you need to ascribe the decision making parameters in your business to different roles and make them wide enough that your people can act autonomously to an extent and only come to you if the decision absolutely has to be made by you at this point in the business.
Then once that decision is made, you want to discuss that decision with whoever fills that role and make it a coaching conversation. Talk about why you're making this decision.
Guide them to understand your logic and reasoning and use that as wisdom that you're now transferring to them so that they can start to make those decisions on their own in the future. Don't just make decisions in a silo.
Discuss the decisions that you've made with your team as you're making them so they can learn from your decisions and then start to make them themselves and you can again, and then and then you can slowly start to transition out of that decision making process altogether.
A really good three-tiered approach to the decision making delegation would look something like this.
Decisions that team members can make independently are just day-to-day decisions that are within those parameters for every process. They don't need to come to you for approval on. It's just the day-to-day arduous stuff that your team does. You don't need to be dragged into any of that at all.
Then there are decisions that I think need to require notification and or consultation, which would be something like we are bringing on a new client that has a complex setup and we're going to need to operate outside of our normal systems.
And since we're doing that, I am notifying you and my expectation would be here is how I'm gonna keep this from impacting the other departments. I'm gonna onboard them differently. But I'm also setting up our other departments for success by taking these approaches. I'm fine if you've already made that decision and you're informing me of it, because I wanna give you feedback on it.
I wanna measure if it's working or not. I don't want you to come to me for approval on that. I want you to notify me that you're doing it, because if our processes start to break down, I don't want to be in the dark as to why that's happening. I wanna be able to look at you and go. Hey, whatever you did, it's not working.
Let's go and fix it. Now. I don't want that to be the first time that I'm finding out that you did something outside of our normal scope. I would like you to notify me so that I can give you feedback on it and essentially consult with you on it.
And we can use it as a coaching moment and maybe build something that we end up using permanently. Then there are decisions that always require approval. Those are gonna be mostly your major financial decisions. Really two types of decisions, I should say, require my approval, major financial decisions, and letting a client go.
If there's an issue that we have with a particular client that we're serving and we no longer feel like we are the best fit for that client, then I want you to come to me, explain the situation. I want to seek first to understand, learn what we could have done better, and then learn if we are still a fit for their business.
And I wanna be the one that gives you approval to say, that is totally fine, let's go ahead and part ways with this client. So those are really the only two things that I need to give people approval for in my business currently, and eventually I'd like to get out of those as well. That's when you get to real true ownership mode is when you eventually bring on your executive leadership team and they're the ones making even the financial decisions.
in order to really empower your team to go and make those decisions, you have to have a way of measuring are they making the right decisions? So this is where you have to have accountability and standards for every part of your business, every role in your business. I've talked about this ad nauseum.
Every role in your business needs to have a scorecard, which is the most important KPI for that role. So again, for our business development manager, her major KPI is, how much new business is she bringing in every single month?
Everything else is kind of irrelevant as long as she's hitting her KPI and winning on the scoreboard and bringing in enough new business every single month. For our operations people, it's the amount of processes. Completed on time, you can develop a scoreboard, a KPI for every single role in your business.
And you need to, because as you transition from operator to owner, you need to be able to look at your business every day and say, we are either winning or we are losing. And these are the areas in which you're winning. These are the areas. In which we're losing. So for our property management company, for example, if we are bringing in enough new clients every single month, we are winning on the sales side.
If we're not processing applications very quickly, and we're not hitting our standard of getting 90% or more of those done on time, we're losing on the operation side and whoever's making the decisions over here, I need to coach this person. I need to find out what's going wrong. Why their decision making has come up short on the scoreboard.
You need to know whether or not you're winning or losing Before you empower your team to start making decisions, you need to have a standard, you need to have a way of tracking that standard so that when they go and start making those decisions, you know whether or not your business is headed in the right direction.
Because unfortunately, feedback loops can take time to really give you the relevant information if you don't have a scoreboard. And so your business could be making the wrong decisions for a while, and then when it shows up in your bank account, that's really the first time you realize that you're headed in the wrong direction.
And then you've really gotta steer the ship and get it back pointed in the right direction. And that takes a lot of time. That could be really hard if you've been headed in the wrong direction for a substantial period of time. So make sure that you have scoreboard for every role in your business so that when your people are empowered to make decisions, you know, whether or not it's showing up properly on the scoreboard.
the last piece of this framework really comes down to your accountability. If you wanna transition from operator to true ownership role, you need to hold yourself accountable by giving yourself a stepping out timeline. Whether it's 90 days, whether it's a year, whether it's five years.
If you run a pretty complex business and you've really gotta build some infrastructure and you've really gotta step back slowly, whatever it is, you have to build that timeline upfront. Your goal. Is to transition from operator to owner and protect the integrity of what your business does.
That's how you're gonna give yourself the life of freedom that you truly want. It's not just stepping outta your business, but stepping outta your business in a way where it continues to run at a high enough level. A good enough level without you being involved, and then it continues to get better and better and better.
You need to hold yourself accountable to what that timeline looks like. That's gonna spur you forward every day to finding the right people, training and coaching them, setting the standard, holding them accountable to the scoreboard. If you don't have a timeline, you're just gonna do what most entrepreneurs do and just put it in the someday bucket. Someday you're gonna find the right person. Someday you're gonna leverage, someday you're gonna empower others to make decisions. But right now, today is busy.
It's chaos around here. I have to do it all myself. And then the next 15 years will go by and you'll be saying that same thing. So put it. On a timeline, make sure that you have a timeline for when you're going to step out of each part of your business and hold yourself accountable to it. If you don't already have a coach, you need a coach, and that coach needs to know your step out plan.
That coach needs to know your step out timeline because your coach is gonna hold you accountable to the things that you need to do to meet the milestones on your step out plan. So don't let everything else you're doing be in vain. Don't go halfway in and then stop. Don't dilly dally around.
Do what you did to get here. And that is be disciplined and be committed to growing your business. Be disciplined and committed to your step out timeline and hold yourself accountable to meeting those milestones along the way.
Alright, so as we wrap up here, let's recap a little bit. There are a lot of reasons that entrepreneurs make excuses for not leveraging, not delegating, not bringing on the right people, and not transitioning from owner to operator. It's not the right time. They won't do it as good as me. I can't afford it, so on and so forth.
The truth is you can't afford not to bring on the right people. If you are hiring slowly, firing quickly, if it's not the right person, you're not bringing on somebody for an entire year's worth of salary only to find out that they're not the right person. What you're really risking is 30 days of working with the wrong person.
Your business can probably afford. 30 days of salary to find out that you didn't have the right person. So I want you to think about it in that frame of mind. If you're thinking, I can't afford this right now, I don't want you to think about, oh, it's an $80,000 a year job, I've gotta bring on. I don't have that in the bank right now.
Really, it's 30 days to discover whether or not you have the right person. Then you'll know. And once you know, that person will be worth every single penny. So I just want you to dispel that belief in your head that you can't afford it, you absolutely can't.
And there are many other reasons that entrepreneurs don't move from operator to owner if you do want to move from operator to owner, and I know you do, then you need to build your organizational chart.
You need to figure out which role is yours currently, what role will be yours next, and how you find the right people to fill every seat on the bus. Then you need to hire slowly, hold people accountable to a standard, figure out what is good enough, and make sure that you're improving past good enough.
You need to become a coach. Allow people to make decisions. Remember that your role is to develop people and develop processes, not to bail people out and take their decision making power back. Figure out what the decision making rubric looks like. For every role inside of your business, what is that person allowed to decide for themselves?
What do they need to notify you about and what do they need approval for? And then once you do that, you need to give yourself a hard step back timeline that you're accountable to delegating one thing at a time to your team until your primary role is simply to lead your people.
That's how you build a great team. That's how you transition from owner to operator. I'd love to hear the feedback on what you got out of this episode and what you're going to go implement in your 📍 business right now. So drop a comment, get in touch with me.
If you haven't already, go subscribe to our newsletter at brianforce.com. Please like share this episode with somebody that you may know that could use this message. I really appreciate you joining me for another episode, and I look forward to talking to you soon.