Do you feel like you’re the only person in your business who has all the answers? Have you trained your clients and team to always come to you when there’s an issue?
Perhaps it’s your fault and you don’t even realize it.
The fact is, if you keep jumping in and taking charge, it reinforces the bad habit – business owner to the rescue!
It’s time your owner-dependent transformed into a systems-dependent business.
In this video, David Jenyns shares his insights and the steps he took to remove himself from the day-to-day operations of his business.
Timestamps:
0:39 – Business owners get pulled back into their business under pressure.
1:02 – It reinforces the habit of the business owner jumping in.
1:38 – Goal #1: Being able to deliver your core product/service without you.
1:55 – Replicate it onto other product lines.
2:20 – Systemise your delivery process and charge more for custom work.
2:50 – This is they way we do things.
Transcription:
We’re trying to transform your business from a team member-dependent business to a team member-independent business.
For me, that transition really started with Melbourne Video Production, because it was the first business that I was involved in where I couldn’t do the thing. I am not a videographer. I don’t know how to shoot the cameras. I don’t know how to edit in Premiere. I didn’t know any of that.
We had a digital agency. We had a lot of requests for creating content. And I thought, well, let’s spin this off as a little separate business. And as I kind of went through that process, it forced me to build it without me in it.
I know how easy it is as a business owner—if you know how to do the thing—to get pulled back into the delivery of doing that work. It’s the hairdresser who can cut hair. It’s the web designer who knows how to design websites. It’s the accountant who knows how to do the tax. It’s incredibly easy for you to fall back to doing the thing under pressure.
‘Hey, this client needs something done, ‘Hey, all hands on deck, okay?’, ‘Business owner to the rescue’, ‘Business owner can solve all of the problems’. Because you know how to do the thing, the default is you’re going to jump in and do it. What that does is it just keeps on reinforcing the habit that you just always jump in.
When we’re talking about building evidence, you’re collecting all of these little pieces of evidence that whenever shit hits the fan, you, as the business owner, jump back in and solve the problem.
You teach the team and the client that this is how it’s done as well. This is a big part of what we need to break as your default position and your habit. If you can imagine your business being able to deliver what we identify in a critical client flow without you, that’s the real first goal. We want to deliver that core product or service without you and get it to a point where even when troubles bubble up, your team knows how to handle that situation.
Once you make that happen for you, it opens up a world of possibilities, because you see it can be done, and it is a game changer. You only need to plant that seed, just like I saw it in Melbourne Video Production.
I took that idea, rolled it over to Melbourne SEO services, and started to replicate what we did in the video business, in the SEO business, and in other product lines where historically, I was dependent. Then we started to productize all of the little delivery pieces that we did, whether it was an SEO audit, whether it was building a website, we started to systemise it to the point where it was a little bit cookie cutter.
Anytime that someone wanted something that was bespoke outside of that, we would charge premium rates. That would mean I could afford to get a more skilled team member to handle it.
If you have a vanilla offering, a productized service that you can offer, ‘this is the way that we do things’, then it makes it much easier for you to find the right team members to do it.
Again, only when it falls outside of that, and it’s the exception to the rule, then a senior team member takes it. But at that point, you’ve also charged significantly more, which means you still have an extra layer of defense before it gets to you because you’ve got a more highly skilled team member that sits in between.
There are some ideas to explore if you want to find out more and you haven’t got a copy of the SYSTEMology book, definitely check that out. I think that’s going to be really helpful for you and I’ll see you in the next video.
