Why You Need to Shift from Working IN Your Business to Working ON Your Business

Have You Outgrown the Way You’re Running Your Business?

I have a client who runs an accounting business.

For years, the first of the month was the worst day on his calendar. Month end. He handled every piece of it himself.

When we started working together, he told me flat out: “I can’t be replaced. I’m too involved. This place is too dependent on me.”

Then one August, he was away for a few days.

It was the third of the month before he clued in. Month end had come and gone. Nobody had phoned him. He hadn’t touched it.

He’d forgotten it was the first of the month, because he no longer needed to know.

That’s what working ON your business gives you. There’s no ceremony to it. One day you notice the business ran fine without you in the middle of it.

He’s still in his business. He’s just no longer the escalation path for everything that happens in it. When something does reach him now, it’s the one-in-a-hundred problem that actually needs the owner.

And with those days back, he’s building the parts of the firm he never had time for. Right now that’s marketing and sales, work he couldn’t have looked at while he was buried in fulfillment.

Most of the owners I work with start out sounding exactly like he did.

Every decision still runs through you

You built a business that works.

But it only works because you’re in the middle of everything.

Every exception comes to you. Every judgment call. Every “quick question.”

You’ve got a team now. Eight people, or fifteen, or twenty. They’re good at their jobs. And still, not much happens until you weigh in on it.

So you’re working 60 or 70 hours a week. Quotes at night, books on the weekend, because the day is gone before you ever get to your own work.

Ask most owners in that position what the problem is and they’ll tell you it’s the people. Hiring is hard. Good ones are scarce. The ones you have need too much supervision.

The problem is usually somewhere else.

You’ve outgrown your role, and you haven’t yet changed how you operate in it.

That’s the moment to stop working IN your business and start working ON it.

What “working ON your business” actually means

The phrase comes from The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. It’s still one of my favourite books, and it’s near the top of the list I recommend to clients.

Gerber’s point was straightforward. The person who does the work and the person who builds the company are doing two different jobs. Most owners only ever get trained for the first one.

So what is that second job?

Two kinds of work, running at the same time.

One is building the business itself. Systems, roles, standards, the capabilities your company doesn’t have yet. My accounting client is doing exactly this with marketing right now. None of it is delivery work. All of it is in support of having the business operate without your constant involvement.

The other is building yourself. Every one of those things needs an owner who can set a goal, hand it to somebody, and hold them to it. Most owners were never trained for that. They were trained to do the work.

That second job looks different depending on what stage of business you are in. At W5 Coaching, we call this the Owner Evolution.

The owner evolution: five levels, and one hard step

After coaching more than 400 owners, I’ve come to see five distinct levels. Each one asks for a different set of actions, and a different way of thinking about your own role.

Solopreneur owner. There’s no separation between you and the business. You are the business.

Technician owner. You’ve hired help, and you’re still doing the delivery work yourself every day. Two vans instead of one. Payroll at night.

Operator owner. You’ve got a team and you’ve learned to delegate tasks. But every exception and every decision still flows through you. You’re the hub.

Leader owner. Everything the business produces belongs to someone other than you. They own the result, and they have the authority that goes with it. You set the goals, coordinate the effort, and hold people accountable.

Investor owner. The business is an asset that generates profit whether you’re involved or not. Your job is strategy and capital allocation.

Most of the owners I work with are somewhere in the operator stage. And the step from operator to leader is the hardest one in the whole progression.

Here’s why.

Every level before it is about handing off more of the doing. Moving from Operator to Leader is about handing off the deciding. You need to stop being the only person who knows the answer.

No amount of scheduling or systems will get you there on its own. What has to change first is how you see your own job.

Four shifts that take you from Operator to Leader

1. Delegate the deciding, not just the doing.

Most owners think delegation means assigning a task, having it done, and hearing back that it’s finished.

There’s more to it than that.

Delegation means handing over the authority to make the call, at a level that matches the person’s experience and judgment. It comes with responsibility, and with the coaching and supervision they need to carry it.

What are you still deciding that someone on your team should be deciding by now?

2. Give every outcome a name beside it.

At the leader owner level, everything the business produces is someone else’s responsibility. Finance. Operations. Sales. Delivery.

When your staff have a question, they’re not phoning you. They’re phoning the person whose job it is to know.

If you can’t name that person for a given area of your business, you’ve just found the reason everything still comes back to you.

3. Replace your availability with an agreed standard.

The reason people ask you is that you’re the only place the standard lives.

Write it down instead. SOPs, checklists, agreed ways of working. Aim for 85% of the work in someone’s area being routine and systematized, with the other 15% being the exceptions where you genuinely want to be involved.

Systematize the routine and humanize the exceptions.

Then be clear with your team about which is which. You want to stay reachable for the 15%, and stop being interruptible for the 85%.

What did somebody ask you this week that a written standard could have answered?

4. Change what you measure yourself by.

As an operator, you judge your day by what you personally got done.

As a leader, you judge it by how your team performed and whether the business moved toward the goals you set.

Systems run the business. People run the systems. You lead the people.

That last one is your job now. So here’s the question to end your week with. What did my team produce, and did it move us toward the goal I set?

3 signs you’ve made the shift: your phone, your vacations, and your revenue ceiling

Three things changed for my accounting client. They’re the same three for anyone who makes this move.

Your phone stops ringing and pinging. When you move decision-making as close to the work as possible, people stop coming to you with every small thing. You stop advising on minutiae all day, every day.

You might actually take a vacation. I’m guessing your last several have stunk. When the business only functions with you in it, you spend the whole week answering your phone from somewhere with worse wifi.

Your revenue can grow again. You only have so much capacity. You’re one person. As long as the business runs at the speed of your attention, that’s the ceiling.

Take yourself out of the middle and the ceiling moves.

I’m also guessing this isn’t the life you had in mind when you started the company. The purpose of a business is to give you the life you want.

The good news is that it all starts with YOU

None of this is about working harder or hiring more people.

If the owner wants a better business, the business needs a better owner. That sounds blunt, but it’s the most hopeful thing I can tell you. The part that has to change is the part you control.

If you’d like some support to help you make those changes, book a 15-minute call with me to discuss coaching.

More on the owner evolution, delegating decisions, and getting out of the middle of your business

Do You Have a Job? Or do You Own a Business?
Walks through all five levels of the owner evolution in detail, with a description of what each stage looks like day to day and the mindset that goes with it.

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

How to Delegate Decision Making (Not Just Tasks)
Sorts decisions into hats, haircuts, and tattoos, so you can tell which calls your team can already make and which ones genuinely need you.

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

The Magic of Systems
Goes deeper on systematizing the routine and humanizing the exceptions, including how to get your staff to write the SOPs instead of writing them yourself.

Staying Accessible Without Losing Control
A practical way to contain the rings, pings, and dings without becoming unavailable to your team or your customers.

From Firefighter to Fire Marshal
Why rescuing your team feels like leadership when it is actually dependency, and what changes when you start designing prevention instead.

Cutting the Strings: How to Get Unstuck and Free Yourself from the Daily Grind
More on the E-Myth idea behind this post: the technician, the manager, and the entrepreneur who all live inside every owner, and what happens when the technician runs the show.

The Owner’s Real Job: Build a Business That Runs Without You
A podcast conversation on the Exceptional Sales Leader Podcast about the three problems every owner brings to coaching, and why a better business starts with a better owner.