The worst advice you can take as a small business employer:

Hey there,

"If you want it done right, do it yourself."

I see a lot of small business founders repeating that. The implication is that your team can't do what you can do, or don't want to do these things, or simply don't care about these things as much as you do.

But here’s what you’re missing:

Your team are already doing things that you used to do yourself. If they can do those things, they can probably do more.
Yes, it's hard to let go of the things that you feel only you can do, but if you never ask anyone else to do any of these things in your business, you'll never be able to leave it - not even for a day.
If you never get anyone else to do any of the important things in your business, you'll never learn whether there might be a better way of doing them.

That’s why this advice is actually NOT helpful at all.

Instead, here’s what you should do:

Make everyone a 'Boss'.

Enable anyone in your team to stand in for you.

To behave towards prospects or clients as if they were you.

To be able to follow through the process of marketing, selling and delivering your service right from beginning to end.

Most business owners hand over all the easy or boring (to them) jobs. But that just adds another job - supervising the people you've offloaded to.

Which means less time for you to do the important, revenue-generating stuff. And if you take on a 'manager' to do the supervision for you, you gain some time (you still have to supervise the manager), and lose a lot of profit.

If you enable everyone to be 'a Boss' instead, you immediately increase your capacity to serve clients, without turning yourself into a bottleneck or adding management overhead.

You can start to take breaks from your business without worrying whether it will break.

And you start to build a foundation for long -term growth. Even if you don't want to take advantage of that, it increases the value of your business when the time comes for you to sell it.

Make sense?

Increase capacity AND your ability to take breaks AND the value of your business, with one uncommon, but effective strategy.

That’s why making everyone 'a Boss' is the “secret” to being able to take breaks without breaking your business.

Here’s how you'll know you’ve implemented this correctly:

First, you can take short break from 1 day up to a week, without checking in on your emails, answering panic calls or texts.

Then you can graduate to longer breaks of a month or so. You can take that family holiday you've always dreamed of. You can work that 3-day week that seemed so possible back when you first started your business, and now feels so out of reach. Your business doesn't just survive while you're away, it thrives.

Next, you find you can take 6 months up to a year away. Remotely monitoring how the business is going, checking in from time to time to make sure all is well. You can take that sabbatical, or look after that loved one, without feeling guilty about abandoning your business.

Finally, you realise you could step away altogether if you wanted to.

But of course, by now you don't need to.

The key is to realise that the only thing stopping you right now, is not that your team can't do what you do; nor that they don't want to do what you do, and certainly not that they don't care about your business they way you do.

What's stopping them, and you, is simply that they don't know what you do.

You’ve spent years hand-crafting the customer experience that’s made your business successful. And in doing so, you’ve internalised it. For you, it’s second nature. You don’t have to think about it. You just do it.

But your team aren’t you. They haven’t been through that process with you. They don’t know what you know.

They may well have other models in their minds as they deal with clients, models learned from their previous experience. Models they’ve had to make up for themselves as newbies to business, and in the absence of enough information from you.

Telling them where they're wrong isn't good enough. Watching over them while they do it isn't good enough. Re-doing their work isn't good enough.

Your problem is not a people problem, it’s a communication problem.

Which makes it much simpler to solve.

All you have to do is tell them what you know. In a way that enables them to do whatever is needed as well as or better than you.

It’s not easy.

But it can be done.

Now, before I let you go, here’s a quick question for you:

Did anything resonate with you? Have any ideas for topics you’d like me to cover in the coming weeks?

Hit reply and let me know—I’d love to hear from you!

Chat soon,

The Disappearing Boss

I'm Kirsten, helping micro-business employers like you to empower their teams with light-definition, flexible, customer-centred processes, so you can all take breaks from your business without breaking it in the process.

If you want a business that can grow with less stress, delivers consistently great customer experiences, and gives you the freedom to take time out, recharge, or scale, let's chat.