Many businesses stay small because the owners are afraid to let their employees take over important tasks, for fear they’ll make a costly mistake. Let’s face it: the owner is a control freak!
Here’s a basic rule for growing your business:
The more you can let go, the more you can grow.
• If you’re stuck being a worker or an administrator, you can’t be a good manager.
• If you’re stuck being a day-to-day manager, you can’t be a good strategic executive.
You’ve got to bring in top-quality people to handle every one of these tasks you hold on to and need to hand off, or you’re stuck doing them yourself. That holds you back, and limits your growth and profitability.
Many owners have a very hard time seeing this. They can see getting a bookkeeper or admin assistant, or hiring more producers, but they hold back from hiring a director of operations or a director of marketing. This keeps them small, and consigns them to low profit and low wealth build up. Then they complain about how hard they work and how little they have to show for it.
Hire good people, show them how to do what you need done, give them goals and targets, then let them do the job you hired them for, give review and feedback as needed. If they don’t do it, let them go, but that means you didn’t do a good job of hiring them in the first place.
For you to have good people so that you can let go, that means you have to learn to select good people–or get help from somebody who can help you choose and bring on board good people.
CEOs of rapidly growing companies are leaders of a growth team.
