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Any great entrepreneur looking to build a substantially sized business needs to build a business that can operate without them.
However, the challenge for many entrepreneurs lies in how to dilute themselves from the day-to-day operations of their business, while maintaining the same quality and standards.
Here I outline the core principles and practices that you can implement into your strategy now in order to move past this.
1. Be across everything
While you might want to reduce your involvement in the day-to-day of your business eventually, in those early stages, you need to be across every aspect of it. You need to know your company from the inside out – your numbers, your sales, your marketing strategy, your team members and, most importantly, your customers.
In my businesses, there are almost no positions that I haven't personally filled or directly managed at one stage or another over. Knowing your business wholly and completely puts you in a prime position to effectively delegate and hand over aspects of daily management.
2. Systems
A system is nothing more than a written documented process as to how to do each task that is required by your team.
When you first start to separate yourself, it’s likely you’ll be responsible for creating these systems, however, as you grow, you’ll bring on other people to design and oversee these processes.
A lot of entrepreneurs tell me they have the systems in place, yet no one on their team seems to be following them. This is generally because one thing is missing… accountability. If there's no one to ensure the systems are followed, then there’s a subconscious disincentive to stick to them.
There are multiple ways to create accountability, but these methods will be largely dependent on the particular task and the size of your organisation. One simple way to manage responsibility is through the development of checklists.
For example, The Entourage has an incredibly extensive checklist we use for enrolling new students into our programs. The Entrepreneur Development Manager team understand the importance of following this system as it creates a world-class student journey.
Before any student is officially enrolled, every step is double-checked by our Student Experience Team. This level of accountability ensures that data is recorded accurately and our students have a seamless experience from start to finish.
3. Find truly great people
You can have great systems and accountability mechanisms in place, but if you have people in your team who aren't driving those behaviors, then ultimately your procedures become worthless.
The leaders and managers within your organisation, in particular, need to be advocates and guardians of the systems, as they are the ones on the ground driving team members day-to-day. Regular conversations and weekly performance checkups are essential for leaders to ensure their team’s structures don't fall by the wayside.
Even if you’re not at a point where you have multiple team members, managers and leaders within your business, the people you hire need to understand and drive these systems.
I recently wrote a blog post on how to find the right people for your organisation, which you can read here.
So who should you hire? Inevitably in the early days, due to revenue constraints, you'll have to hire people who are younger and less experienced.
However, as your revenue grows, you should hire people who have as much, if not more, experience than you. Every entrepreneur should aim to hire a great COO who can oversee the day-to-day operations of the business. A COO will be able to largely take control of systemising your business for scale, so you can spend your time where it is best used – thinking, leading, innovating and strategising.
4. Reportability
If you want to maintain quality, particularly if you're growing fast, you need to have reportability systems in place across the organisation. Ask yourself:
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What does 'good' look like for my organisation?
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What are the core metrics and deliverables of my business on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual basis that will enable us to achieve this?
Empowering your team with a clear understanding of what 'good' looks like, both in their role and for the business at large, will allow them to consistently deliver results.
As the founder, having visibility of these core metrics will empower you to make educated decisions around the direction of the business.
So how do you systemise reportability?
This will differ depending on the size of your organisation, however, the overall principle remains the same. At The Entourage, we have almost 100 team members. The leader of each department – Sales, Marketing, Education and Finance – reports weekly to our COO.
The COO then provides me with detailed weekly and monthly reports.
These reports give me a comprehensive overview of the performance, productivity, challenges and objectives of the business while informing me where we're winning and where we're not.
Remember, it’s a gradual process
As you start to implement these steps, you need to understand that this is an incredibly gradual process. Just like building a business, it won't happen overnight. It's always going to be a two steps forward, one step backward, one step forward, two steps backward process. It's likely it'll take more than one try to get it right, and there may be times when you have to put aside your ego and be willing to step back in.
Now I'm genuinely interested to know: What is your number one challenge in delegating and diluting yourself from your business? Let me know in the comments below, I'll be there, let's have that discussion.
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Attracting the right staff