Trigger warning: You don’t have a sustainable business

If your business doesn’t work unless you do, you don’t have a sustainable business.

If the business requires you to be there, you can’t scale past your own capacity.

This means they have a team, but are still involved in managing people, sales and or delivery.

I’ve spent the last 10 years buying and selling business.

The most common challenge we see is; owner dependance.

It’s not that you haven’t got a good business.

But we can’t buy a business where the owner is the operator, unless you’re happy to stay and work for the buyer. 

In this scenario a large percentage of the price at close will be withheld as an earn out.

You traded your business for a job.

Congratulations.

So why are so many businesses dependent on the owner?

Fear.

Their fear is rooted in distrust. 

Their trust issues stem from being let down people they gave responsibility to in the past. 

And it’s completely understandable, once burned, twice shy.

They say “Oh I’ve given John the opportunity to run the business whilst I was away for 2 weeks and it was a total nightmare. We had delays, clients complained and I came back to more work than when I left."

John (or whoever your John is) are not bad people but you’re putting the horse before the cart.

Don’t put your trust in people. 

Put your trust in time tested systems and processes.

“So you want me to write down a dozen SOPs and hope for the best?!?!?!?”

NO. This thinking is where the real problem lies.

Slapping together some SOPs using a template you found online isn’t a plan.

This is lazy and will cause more harm than good.

Like any thing that has worked before, we only use processes and systems that we know work.

We build bespoke SOPs that are unique to your business.

We don’t rush and or make big changes.

We stress test small sections of the business and pre-empt where problems could arise.

The process looks like this:

1. Identify all the areas where the owner is heavily involved.
2. Install systems that make the work that the owner has been doing more efficient.
3. Automate these tasks and slowly test what happens without the owners involvement.
4. Delegate tasks/activities that cannot be automated to the team.
5. Rinse and repeat.

When you do this right, it can start to work in a matter of weeks.

But we’re not talking about systemizing the whole business in one go.

We start by moving the founder from being the operator to a leadership positions. Then as we built out the leadership SOPs we can delegate this and so on.

I recommend a timeline of 270 days to remove yourself from an operator to hands off from the day to day.

 90 days to document and to delegate the owners most time consuming task and actives. 

The following 90 we work on installing systems and processes into each area of the business. 

The final 90 days we use to take inventory of what works, what doesn’t and optimize.

We can remove a lot of the noise by eliminating redundant roles and activities. 

This gives back the owner a lot of white space in their schedule to work on strategic activities. 

Look, this is not an exact timeline, it’s a guideline.

Some businesses are further ahead and others are further behind. The timeline could be 6 months or it could be 18 months. 

But having done this process many times, I know that with patience and persistence it works.

Once your SOPs are working you can then groom employees for leadership roles.

And finally you can hire for a GM or CEO to replace yourself as the operator to owner.

If you have any questions on how to do this in your own business drop me a comment or send me a DM and I’ll be happy to help.

P.S. Photo taken by me in Bogota :)