Das Business ohne dich laufen lassen

0:00There are people who can do like no one's going to ever be able to do it as as well as you. Not true. Um, no one's going to be able to do it as well as you with, you know, onetenth of the work with onetenth of the practice or reps. But every human is replaceable in my opinion. Um, and we know that because humans have replaced all humans since the beginning of time. Um, but we can know that on a shorter time horizon, if they only learned all the things that you learned the right way without learning all the bad mistakes, they might be able to get to 50% as good as you right off the bat. And so, a a a belief that I would like to switch for you, I'll give you two. Number one is if someone if I can do it right with part of my time, someone else can do it better with all of their time. So you might be able to do a five out of 10 which you consider to be 100 because it's onetenth of your time but if someone spent all of their time doing they for sure should be better than you over time with enough practice. And so that is the first one. The second one I forgot what I was going to say which leaves us very naturally to the second big bucket of things. So the first one big picture is we get a big inventory.

1:10We create the decision trees. So we have a big list of stuff. We slide in the people we have what's left over. We then have our our our scorecard that we can make for people. We have our decision trees that they can decide up to with certain amounts of money. And then we have a test at the end which tells them uh whether they pass or not, are they good enough? Okay, here was the second belief I just remembered which is you can outwork anyone in your business. You will not be able to outwork everyone.

1:37And this is something that it took me too long to learn. I kept I mean you can imagine me I pride myself on my work ethic but I can't outwork everyone and so the longer it took me to realize that the longer it limited my ability to grow. I can do a mountain of work but I can't do Mount Everest. That requires more hands and more shovels which brings us to number two. So you want to start trading doing for managing and leading.

2:01So here's the simple math behind this. Like there's actual math here which is let's say you swap 200 hours a month. So you know roughly 50 hours a week of work for doing 20 hours of managing. So now you go from 50 to five. So you have a a tenth or 10x improvement in leverage and you replace yourself again by hiring a manager the next time and then you trade the four hours for one hour. Right? And so this is basically how leverage occurs through labor, right? is that you have to turn your effort into an organization that produces without you, right? And so employees or AI in the future, right?

2:42Make a fully functioning enterprise that can continue to scale. And that's kind of my my litmus test is the baseline is does it burn down without me. For many of you, if you just get to here, you'd love your business 10 times more. Like I can actually leave for a month and come back and it didn't burn down. Thank god, right? But where it gets really nasty and really exciting is where you can leave for a month and when you come back it's in a better position than it was when you left. That is a business that people want to buy because what it functions as is essentially a faster growing annuity for an investor which gives them a big multiple which is why they pay you lots of money for it. So let's walk through what this actually looks like. So the first there's kind of three steps to it. So you'll shadow train. So this is where they watch you do it. The next is you supervise them doing it. So they do it in front of you.

3:26So you do it in front of them, they do it in front of you and then after that you kind of just support their independence and you're available but not involved. So it's like I'm fully available, you can hit me up whenever you need anything. And then what happens is in the beginning there require a little bit more ad hoc uh calls, consults, help. And then over time if you have a competent employee, those decisions get automated back down to them, right? And so that's when the full handoff occurs is that they own it completely. And again, initially I'm cool with 80% sometimes 60% as good as long as I have a clear path to them getting better. And I'll give you a little pro tip.

4:02I over I used to measure employees by how well they started. I measure employees today on how fast they improve. Because if you look at two employees, right? Let's say somebody starts here and someone starts here. If this person's flat and this person's like this, I know that in three months, six months, this guy's going to pass this guy. But then what happens another six months, right? And so sometimes it's worth taking someone who's a little bit less experience or has fewer inherent skills because they didn't have as much time because they're able to learn faster and like so intelligence I measure as rate of learning. And so I will rather have a more intelligent employee who learns faster than a more experienced employee who learns slower.

4:43Just something that I've learned and it depends on the role obviously but um I would say that I've had a big shift in terms of how I think about talent. Now the goal here is that we want to move from doing the work. This is the big picture point. Move from doing the work to managing people. Right? We focus on recruiting a players not doing a player work. We focus on the business aka strategy prioritization not on the tactics of what we need to do next or what we need to do today. And so your job becomes attracting talent and aligning incentives. And so the ultimate test for you is can you take three months off and have the business grow.

5:21Anyways, like this is the easiest especially for those of you who are brick and mortar. This is super important. If you're brickandmortar, a lot of you guys want to get my second location, want to get your third location. This is the the simple simplest litma test. If you can leave it alone, like your phone doesn't like your your phone doesn't ring. And I'll tell you how to do that in a second, right? I call it the phone test. I'll tell you later. Um, but 3 months later, it's bigger. Great.

5:46It's the same. We have to figure out a way to get it to be able to grow. Unless you're in a super cap market where there's no way it can grow, fine. But the vast majority of businesses can improve, can grow year over year over year if you have a good business. And if it's flat, the thing is is that you still have some sort of magic over here. As soon as the eye of Sauron moves, sometimes if it's flat, it's going to go down. Now all of a sudden, you've got double the liability, double the debt, double the overhead, half the talent because it's spread. And now you have more risk and less profit. No bueno. So this is why it's so important. You're like, man, that's never going to happen.

6:15It's like, right, that that's why a lot of people shouldn't have second locations for much longer than they think. It's why overexpansion is one of the number one reason people got out of …