As I’ve worked with & helped grow dozens of businesses over the past few years, I’ve started to realise how many business owners don’t actually own a business. It owns them, they are completely stuck, and they don’t even realize it.

client wants a refund, you deal with the request. Sales calls? that you. hiring and onboarding? guess who’s handing that. client onboarding gets handled by you. Your quoting process? who knows, it’s custom everytime, and only you know how to calculate it. Marketing is strictly based on referrals and worth of mouth from your network. dissapear for a month and your client will bolt, your systems break down, and you’ll home to a system completely stalled without it’s leader.

This can happen to successful business owners as well, who have processes for lots of their operations, but eventually you hit a wall again where your growth is slowed because you are the bottleneck.

This is not me being on my high horse bragging about how perfect my agency is either. I wouldn’t even say I own a full fledged business yet. I’m somewhere in business owner purgatory. All of (or at least 95%) of my ops run completely on their own.

If I and my partner Cade, die tomorrow on our cruise (sorry Sophie & Mikayla) my current clients would continue to be recieve the same level of service with or without me.

but the marketing and sales side is about 90% reliant on me and Cade, so our agency would die a slow an agonizing death over a year or 2 as clients churn and we don’t have the inbound supply of leads to replace them (churn is just apart of owning a business. Even if you get killer results for clients like we do)

So are some steps you can take to go from owning your job to owning a business?

first, track how your time is spent over a 2 week period. hour by hour. trust me I know it sounds incredibly dumb and time consuming, I had to convince my self to do it too.

Now analyze how your time was spent. (upload it to claude). You likely don’t realize all the little things you do thru out your hours and days in your work week that either kill your productivity.

spending 5-10min every couple hours responding to messages an offshore VA could handle. answering the same question from your contractors multiple times. knocking out misc tasks that are easy, but don’t contribute to your businesses growth, and someone else could be doing for you.

You then need to calculate how much your time is worth. basically take how much profit your business make + how much you pay yourself, then divide by 2000.

$100k total? divide by 2000 = $50/hr. This is what your time is worth. meaning, if you could pay someone $25/hr to do the exact work you’ve been handling for your business, that’s an easy yes.

Most important note here is in the early stages of growing your business, spend more for a good hire who doesn’t need nearly as much training or hand holding. you may save a few bucks by training someone up who is inexperienced, but the amount of time it takes for you to do that is almost never worth the money saved.

(loom videos are lifesavers here. just record yourself doing the task once and your future hire can see exactly how to do everything. no formalized, written SOPs needed)

even easier wins are software that save time spent on any number of admin tasks. if it saves you 1 hour a month and cost $25, it another easy yes

Note: these are concepts found in the book “buy back your time“, no plagerizing here, my english teacher would be proud

2 mindset shifts I see business owners having to make

you have to have is a focus on revenue growth over profitability as you scale. If your only focus was profit, the most profitable solution is to do everything yourself so you have “no expenses“.

Having someone do 100% of a task for you 80% as well as you is a win. this means while it may not be exactly how you would of done it, it does mean that you got to spend that time working on growing your business rather than working on deliverables.

Next, you have to stop being being the solution to every problem. you do this 2 ways.

1. build out a business brain with AI. Every time someone asks you a question and you give an answer, upload it to a document. (What I've done at Creekside is I upload every conversation, document, and meeting that we've ever had to a brain. However, this is a bit more complicated of a setup.)

Connect that to an AI model of your choice. After a couple of months of doing this, you will be able to direct your team to the AI agent before they come to you. This prevents you from being the bottle neck for all important info

2. purposeful incompetence. instead of immediately answering their question, request that your employees bring you 3 possible solutions and their recommended one. this creates a culture of indepence among your hires that forces them to try and solve their own problems before ever involving you

Going from your business owning you, to you owning your business is no easy task. if it was everyone could (and would) do it. there are plenty of failures along the way to building out a business that runs without you, and it takes a lot of time for your improvements to slowly compound over time.

I also highly recommend the book Scaling up: mastering the rockefeller habits, and the personal MBA (i definitely stole some ideas from these books as well). spending time learning is one of the highest ROIs you can have for your business, even if you can’t immediately measure it

Love,
Professor Pete