Business Owners Must Stop Working Longer and Start Scaling

Listen, every time I tell business owners to stop working so hard, I get a lot of backlash. Business owners, especially American business owners, are taught you can’t grow a business without giving it your all. 200 percent of your time. 100 hour weeks. Americans believe that working harder and longer is the path to success. Hard work is definitely helpful in some instances, but that’s not the whole story.

In fact, we all know lots of successful business owners who work plenty hard but also seem to have time to take vacations. They go to their kid’s soccer games. They say goodnight to employees as they head home for dinner. So how are they doing it?

Let’s be clear. I’m not saying you don’t have to work hard. Launching a business requires a huge time commitment and lots of personal sacrifices along the way. But it doesn’t have to consume your entire life forever and ever. Creating structure, assigning tasks, and building a solid team is the best path to sustained growth. That means that the owner, who is also the person who cares more about this enterprise than anyone else on the planet, will have to create processes and systems that enable other people to run it.

Growing a successful company is hard work. A typical founder starts out by doing everything partly because they are good at what they do and partially because it saves money. While the “give it all you got” approach can be exciting (and necessary) for a while, it can quickly become unprofitable. You get tired. You focus on the wrong things. You make mistakes. You spend time doing tasks instead of orchestrating strategy.

The owner’s primary value is the contribution of vision, quality control, and business strategy. If you want to scale your business, you must spend your time on tasks that add the most value and delegate the rest. As an enterprise grows, it’s time to train other employees to lead the way, and that can be scary. But every successful businessperson throughout time has had to do it, and you can too.

Amplify Your Influence

Business owners often believe that growth happens when they, the owners, do more. And maybe that’s true in some cases. But scaling can only occur when owners have created processes that amplify their influence.

Creating predictable, reliable processes makes it easier for any business to satisfy customers, expand trade, and maintain margins. Both growing and scaling can increase your business's size, but scaling also helps owners create an organization that can sustain growth without their daily involvement. (Wouldn’t that be nice?) Scaled firms don’t need the owner on the premises looking over shoulders. Creating systems and processes allows a founder to explore new growth opportunities (new locations, revenue lines, acquisitions, etc.) while also having time for a fulfilling personal life.

How Does Scaling Work?

Let’s use the example of a dentist opening a practice. At first, the dentist must invest in property and equipment, so he sees as many patients as possible to pay the bills. He’s overextended, so he’s scared to hire a lot of people. Let’s say this dentist has one full-time receptionist. He sees patients non-stop for 10 hours a day, six days a week. And they are fully booked. The dentist also handles payroll and monitors revenue and expenses. He works with his receptionist throughout the day to handle building maintenance. He makes decisions about scheduling processes and software. He monitors billing. In this example, the dentist is doing as much as possible to make money, trying to pay off debt, and consequently working more than 80 hours each and every week. But with just one dentist and a receptionist, there’s a clear ceiling that limits the practice’s growth.

Three or four hygienists could help a dentist see more patients because now the dentist spends much less time with each patient. So right away, the dentist in this example could triple his patient load by hiring three hygienists. The practice may need another chair or two, so it’s not a complex addition. But the dentist is still working more than 80 hours a week.

To really scale, that dentist is going to have to think about the bigger end game. Is the goal to work with patients all day, or is the goal to serve patients AND have a more profitable dental practice? Could the dentist employ other dentists? What tasks could he delegate? How much time could he get back if he hired an office manager, an accountant, or a tech consultant? Could he have offices all over the city? Throughout the state? Across the country?

In this example, if the business owner stopped focusing on “doing” and started focusing on vision, he could create a dental care practice with multiple locations. With systems in place, it’s possible to scale the practice, which means the owner could increase profits 10x or even 100x while working fewer hours.

Delegating Small Tasks = Big Dividends

If you haven’t done a lot of delegating, it may be hard to get started. After all, we all do a series of small tasks each day that take up a lot of time in the long run. Yet, we keep doing these small tasks because they “just take 10 minutes,” and handing them off or training someone to do them would take a lot of effort or maybe mean you’d have to pay someone to do them. With this mindset, we find it harder and harder to delegate.

However, if the time saved over the long haul outweighs the short-term training investment, training is the smart move. And if you’re doing tasks that could be done better by an expert, it may also be time to delegate.

For example, many business owners issue checks to vendors. They pay the bills. Maybe an assistant gets the mail and opens it or sends you an email with payables, and the owner sits down once a week and writes checks. Maybe they just open their computer and issue bank checks as the bills arrive. It just takes a few minutes, right?

Sometimes it’s helpful to do the math. If it takes an owner 15 minutes to review and pay a bill, and the owner pays seven bills a week, they spend 1.75 hours a week paying bills. That doesn’t sound too bad, right? Especially for founders who are already spending 80 hours a week at work. It’s a drop in the bucket. But over the course of a year, it would take that owner just short of 90 hours to pay bills. It adds up.

Creating systems and training staff whenever you hand off a task or a responsibility requires an upfront time investment, which can feel frustrating. But remember that these responsibility shifts are part of a bigger plan. In this example, let’s say that the owner shifted bill-paying responsibilities to an accountant. This transition took about 8 hours of planning and meetings to complete. The founder gained just a few minutes each day, but they recovered weeks of time each year that they then used to focus on vision and strategy. Those bills became part of a monthly P&L statement, with quarterly projections. The accountants regularly identified errors and suggested more cost-effective suppliers. Instead of paying bills here and there, an accountant transformed bill paying into a more deliberate approach to P&L.

As you create new roles and delegate responsibilities, you spread out work. You also allow people to specialize. You assign tasks to people who have the time and expertise to handle them more efficiently. And you take the pressure off yourself. After all, a successful business can’t depend on any single person being present every day–including the owner.

Time to Shift Focus and Start Scaling Up

To scale up quickly, owners must focus on building systems, automating duties, creating processes, and building an organization that runs well with or without them. While you may have been chief cook and bottle washer in the early days, if you’re ready to scale your organization, it’s time to orchestrate, refine, and build. And that’s when exponential growth can begin. If you want help finding ways to scale or to strengthen your structure, systems, margins, or succession plan, email me at?[email protected] .