Tired of Working Too Hard for Too Little? Maybe it’s Time to Scale.

Can You Take Two Weeks Off Without Checking Your Phone?

When was the last time you took two weeks off and put the phone away?

For most of the owners I work with, the answer is never.

Even on holiday, part of their head stays back at the office, wondering what’s going on.

Somewhere along the way, the business took over their life.

That’s backwards. The purpose of a business like yours is to give you, the owner, the life you want.

In this video, I walk through what has to be true for your business to give you your life back, and the five things you need in place to get there.

Here’s what you’ll take away:

• The five stages of the Owner Evolution, and the one where the business starts running your life
• The three things that have to come together if freedom is the goal
• SCALE: the five things a business needs so it can run without you as the hub
• Why the Ten Commandments are written in stone, and what that tells you about the standards in your business
• How an HVAC owner stopped getting interrupted 10 to 15 times a month, and the moment he knew he’d handed authority to the right person
• The one-hour-a-week test for whether you have time freedom yet

Watch the video or scroll down to read the transcript.

The purpose of a business like yours is to give you the life you want

Owners often get so wrapped around the axle of their business that the business takes over their lives.

So what’s really the purpose of a small business, the kind of business you own?

Let me give you an answer that’s a little bit counterintuitive.

It isn’t the answer you’re going to share with your team, or your vendors, or your suppliers.

The real purpose of a business like yours is to give you, the owner, the life you want.

Often our business takes over our life, and we lose sight of that goal.

Our goal at W5 Coaching is to help you create a business that gives you your life back.

What does that mean?

It means you can take a two-week vacation, put the phone away, and not be wondering.

Or as one of my clients said, “I can visibly relax at 5:00 when the office is closed. Now I can sit on the beach and I don’t have to worry.”

It means the business gives you the level of profit to live the life you want, and the money to do it.

And it means you have a strong, reliable team that works in the business. So you can focus on the parts of the business you enjoy, or the parts where you create the most value.

Owners move through five stages in the Owner Evolution

So how do we do that?

Let’s start with an idea we call the Owner Evolution.

I see owners in roughly one of five stages.

The first is the solopreneur. Maybe you didn’t start as a solopreneur, but some people do. It’s you on a phone and a truck, or you at a desk in a WeWork.

Then you get to the technician level. You’re on the tools every day, but now you’ve got a couple of guys, maybe an apprentice, a couple of people in your office.

You’re still very much doing the doing every day. You’re involved in the work of the work.

The next level up is what I call the operator owner. At this level, you are the hub of the business.

What does that mean?

Think of a bicycle wheel. The wheel has a hub, and off that hub come all the spokes. The wheel is dependent on the hub being there.

Now, what happens if you take that hub out?

The whole wheel collapses.

An operator owner is the centre of everything that happens in the business.

You’re doing receivables Friday night at 8:00, because it’s the first chance you’ve had to look at them. You’re the only one doing payroll, and you’re wondering where the cash is. You don’t have good numbers.

You’re so busy in the doing of the doing that there’s no time for anything else.

The next level up is what I call the leader owner. A leader owner is leading the people who are operating each section of the business.

So there’s a team. Someone in charge of delivering the promise of your business. Someone in charge of sales, and of marketing. Someone in charge of accounting, and of HR. You might even have a general manager.

Now your job is no longer the doing of the doing.

Your job is to lead the people who are doing the doing.

And ultimately, there’s the investor owner. That kind of leader’s role is largely around strategy: thinking out into the future, and investment.

If freedom is the goal, three things need to be true

How does that affect you? How do you get freedom?

If freedom is the goal, three things need to be true.

1. You need to become a better owner. If the owner wants a better business, first the business needs a better owner. That’s usually about mindset, skills, communication, delegation, and leadership.
2. You need a better business. That’s a business that runs without you, one that doesn’t have you as the hub of the wheel.
3. You need better results. We need a way to measure results that gives you a line of sight on everything happening in the business, so you know what’s working and what’s not.

Those three things come together, and that’s ultimately how you get freedom.

Five things need to be in place, and we call them SCALE

Now, that sounds great. How does it happen?

These are the five things you need to have in place.

We use an acronym called SCALE: Standards, Capability, Authority, Line of sight, and Execution.

S is for Standards: everyone agrees on what good looks like

First of all, you have to have standards. Standards for yourself, standards for the numbers, standards for the team.

What does good look like? What does a good job look like? What does customer satisfaction look like? How do we know we’re delivering a great result?

Let me put it a slightly different way.

Why are the Ten Commandments written in stone?

Because we don’t debate them.

“Thou shalt not kill” is a commandment. That’s a standard.

The only thing left to wonder is whether we lived by that standard or not.

C is for Capability: you and your team have to be able to do it

What’s capability? You’ve got to be able to do it.

You’ve got to have workers who are capable of delivering the service. You’ve got to have people who can do payroll.

The most important part of capability, though, is you.

Are you the kind of leader who can transition from being an operator owner to being a leader owner?

A is for Authority: delegation that works hands over authority and autonomy

Lots of people think of delegation as handing off a bunch of tasks. “Do this, do that, do this, do that.”

That’s not really delegation. And it’s not the kind of delegation that works for you if you want to be a leader owner.

What you need to have in place is delegating authority and autonomy along with the tasks.

Let me give you a simple example.

I have a client who owns a big HVAC business. He used to get interrupted 10 to 15 times a month.

The person administering the receivables would be writing up invoices for service tickets, and there’d always be an issue or two or three.

They might have 90 invoices in a month, and 5, 6, or 10 of them needed some kind of adjustment.

So 5, 6, 10 times a month, someone would come walking into his office. “Here’s the situation. They’re asking for some kind of deduction. Can we do that?”

So what did he do?

He changed the rules.

“Look, I’ll rely on your judgment. You can offer up to a $250 discount any time you think the circumstances merit it. You have the authority and the autonomy to do that without asking me.

“Once a month, we’ll check in. We’ll review the adjustments you made. There might be a couple I disagree with, and we’ll talk about those and get them sorted out.

“But I will never say you did the wrong thing, or criticize you for it. I’ll just help you make choices that are more aligned with how I’d like you to make them.”

You know what the great thing was?

This person said back to my client, “I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to give away 250 bucks.”

That’s when my client knew he had the right person. This person would carry out that responsibility capably.

That’s what delegating authority and autonomy looks like.

L is for Line of sight: check in once a month instead of ten times

So what’s line of sight?

Instead of having to check in 10 times a month, why don’t we check in once a month? Bring in all 10 cases where you gave a discount, and let’s review them.

Then I have enough control, or let me call it insight, to know whether we’re generally doing what I’d expect in that circumstance.

Line of sight comes down to questions like these:

• Do you have a good set of books?
• Do you have a good P&L, and do you know what it means?
• Do you have KPIs for all the key jobs in your business?
• Does every single person in the business know what good looks like, by some measurable standard?

What does that mean in practice?

How many callbacks did your service tech get in the last month? What’s the acceptable level, where they made a mistake or didn’t do the full job?

Maybe you’ve got 10 service techs, and one of them is repeatedly at 8, 9, 10 callbacks a month.

You don’t have to worry about the other nine. You talk to the one guy who’s causing the problem.

E is for Execution: everyone knows which part of the job is theirs

And ultimately, you need execution.

That means the ability to get done the things you expect to get done.

Everyone in the business understands what part of the prize is theirs, and what part of the job is theirs to do.

People execute at each of their own levels, and together that becomes the business executing on what it promises to deliver.

You have time freedom when one hour a week is enough to know how your business is doing

So what would have to be true for you to go on holiday, and get one opportunity a week to talk to one person in your business?

In that hour, you learn everything that’s working, everything that’s not, and what the plan is to fix it.

That’s when you have time freedom.

You can go on holiday and be fully present, without being distracted or worrying about how things are going back home.

If all of that sounds interesting to you, or if all of that sounds impossible to you, either way it’s probably worth a conversation.

I’d love to hear what’s going on for you, and help any way I can to get you the kind of time and money freedom you deserve as a business owner.

Book a 15-minute call with me.

More on the Owner Evolution, delegating authority and autonomy, and building a business that gives you your life back

The real purpose of your business
The story of a client whose business had him sleeping at the office until his wife gave him an ultimatum, and who now leaves at 4 p.m. and takes his weekends off.

Stop Sacrificing Your Life for Your Business
What it takes to become a better owner, broken into acumen, activity and mindset, and why mindset is the hardest of the three.

Do You Have a Job? Or do You Own a Business?
Walks through all five levels of the Owner Evolution in more detail, including the mindset that goes with each one.

Stuck in the Middle of Everything? It’s Time to Become a Leader Owner.
A video and transcript on why the step from operator to leader owner is the hardest one to make, with the story of a factory owner who was in his car by 4:30 every morning for ten years.

The Self-Managing Business: a Checklist for Growth and Freedom
The four things that have to be true for every area of your business before it can run without a bottleneck, plus a sample leadership structure for an HVAC company.

Take Back Your Time
The bicycle wheel on video, plus what I learned about delegating outcomes when I was president of a large organization with ten people reporting to me.

How to Delegate More Effectively
The three levels of delegation, from following instructions to full authority and autonomy, and how to tell which one a task calls for.

How to Delegate Decision Making (Not Just Tasks)
Sorts decisions into hats, haircuts and tattoos, so you can see which calls your team can already make without you.

Are you tracking the numbers that matter?
Goes deeper on the KPIs that give you line of sight, including how to choose them and why you need leading indicators as well as results.

How Do You Get the Right People Doing the Right Things Right?
The three pillars of team management, including values as the standards you don’t debate, position descriptions, and the meeting rhythm.

How to be less involved in your business (without everything falling apart)
The one-hour-a-week question in more depth, and the three things to put in place so you can see what’s happening in your business without sitting in the middle of it.