7 steps to remove yourself from the day-to-day running of your business

My most frequently asked question, answered once and for all

Aug 01, 2023

You shouldn’t be in control

The challenge in most companies is the same… There is huge distance between the people with the information and the people with the power.

Outdated leadership principles tell us that business owners or leaders should control their team, give the orders and pass them down the hierarchy, make the big decisions, ultimately holding on tight and never letting go.

But by holding onto control, the people with the information (the team), who speak to your customers, run the daily processes, sit in all the meetings… Have no control or decision making power. Yet, with all that deep, practical insight, they would be the best at calling the shots.

You need to turn that ship around

Sounds ideal, but does this actually work?

In the last business I ran, I completely removed the business owner from the day to day operations.

For context we had a team of 30 split across 4 functions. and I got us to the point where the owner very rarely came into the office, had absolutely no idea what was even happening day to day, and we’d keep him protected only to work on very high value things, like public speaking or annual vision planning.

The entire team was empowered with making their own decisions.

We grew RAPIDLY every single month & year. The growth in our revenue meant we could give our team regular pay rises as their value grew, invest in the best tools and education to continue the growth, our eNPS was consistently above 80 (world class), and in the end we sold that business to one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

So I’m going to show you how you can do that too

Calling out your BS excuses before you have time to convince yourself they’re right

Before we go any further. There is absolutely no point in me giving this system to you if you have ANY of the following bullshit excuses in your head right now:

This won’t work with my team, they’re just not savvy enough
We can‘t do this in our business because my clients will only talk to me
It’ll just be quicker & easier if I do the work anyway, why bother delegating

That voice (Which by the way, isn’t special to you) will kill your progress.
Instead of ‘this won’t work with my team’
I need you thinking ‘HOW could I make this work with my team’

Let’s get stuck in

I’ve boiled this down to the 7 most important steps I went through over the space of a few months, then continued to uphold over the years:

Step one: Open the books
How can you expect your team to act like entrepreneurs if you don’t treat them like so?
You should be involving your team, every month, in reviewing spend, profit margins, revenue, growth etc.
And I mean your ENTIRE team. Not just the senior leaders. Everyone in the team needs to understand the financial impact their day to day decisions are having on the business in order to make the smartest decisions.

Build a ‘stakeholder report’ or use your management accounts, email it around to the entire team, every month, then hold a meeting to discuss, answer questions and talk about the impact of the numbers [example below].
Step two: Know your fighters
All of us have been burned by delegating a task to a team member, them not quite understanding, then having to retract it and saying to ourselves ‘I’ll just hold onto this, it’ll be quicker for me to do it myself’
My questions back to you firstly would be: Did you just ask a fish to climb a tree?

In order to properly communicate, delegate and manage our team, we need to KNOW them, very thoroughly, and consistently get to re-know them. Head to my ‘How well do you really know your team’ article for the ways you can get to know them today.

We need to use a profiling tool, regularly understand their priorities, and have consistent and deep 1-2-1 structures in place.
Step three: Get CLARITY on the current state of play
We need to understand what a realistic day for everyone in our team looks like (including yourself)
Each team member needs an accurate job description, listing out every single pice of work, task and project they are expected to deliver on and be involved in. We need to be extremely accurate and honest here. Don’t forget to include things like:
- Organising team meals
- Emails
- Cleaning
- Ordering coffee

All these things are taking space in SOMEONEs brain. We need to know where, who and why.
At the end of this step, you should have a job description for every single person in the business, that looks something like this…
Step four: Traffic light system of where we want to be
Now we have the accurate picture of where we are, we need to start mapping out where you want to be.
You need to create a traffic light system on your job description, highlighting the things in green you want to keep forever (high value work), the things in orange that you want to remove in the future (potentially when you have more staff), and things in red that need to be removed immediately.

It needs to be 50% red, 30% orange, 20% green. We’re being ruthless here, you need your brain space free’d up to work on those high value activities.
Step five: Process writing time
Remember when I said we’ve all been burnt by delegation in the past, so now you just ‘do it yourself’
Question one is: Did you just ask a fish to climb a tree?
But question two is: Did you actually set them up for success, with an accurate process doc?

Now this step is where a lot of businesses fail. It’s the longer step, it’s a good investment of time to get this right. But once you’re past this stage, the hard part is done, and you can start free’ing yourself up once and for all.

You’re going to go through EVERY single line on your job description, and write a very simple process doc for each one. The great news for you is, AI had made this A LOT easier - Use a tool like Scribe to literally build the entire process out for you whilst you just perform the action. But if you’re not a fan, just use your One/Google Drive

You should finish this by every line on your job description having a link out to a process. Example of a test process I created using Scribe…
Step Six: Delegate
Now this is where things start getting exciting. Stop thinking of delegating as ‘giving my team more to do’, and instead think of it as growing their value to the world and your business.
Start by delegating the smallest tasks to the right people, and work up to the bigger ones.
I’d even pose the question to the team “I’m looking for these tasks to be taken off me, to hand over to someone who is great at them, to grow that persons responsibilities and in time, their salary”
People will snap your hand off. If you can increase their salary now, so do, but if not, once you're working on the higher value work, growing your business, you’ll be able to give them a pay rise in no time.

This step ends when all the ‘red’ tasks are completely removed from your job description, and you’re working on moving the oranges next
Step Seven: Ongoing push back

Once you’ve completed the six steps above, the next stage is for you to build some strong boundaries and ongoing communication to ensure the jobs don’t creep back onto your pile, and to lead your team as a visionary.

I’m not gonna go into this last stage in this blog post, as I’m sure you’ve now got enough on your plate, but Part2 coming soon of how to now lead a team as a visionary, with strong boundaries, and only working on the things that provide the highest value to your business.

P.S. If you’re starting your journey with these steps, I BELIEVE IN YOU. In a few short months you could be well on your way to business owner freedom. Comment below and let me know to affirm your commitment!

P.P.S Sharing this on socials can help me reach the right people, if this was helpful for you, I’d love you to share

Peace,
Heather