I’ve given business advice to business owners for almost fifteen years. That’s a long time.

Nothing is more educational than doing it yourself.

The past couple of years have been a wild ride of learning how to be a business owner. I wouldn’t change my journey if I could but it makes me wonder how things would be different had I started earlier.

Many people found their entrepreneurial selves during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Leaders

Great leaders are well-equipped to run businesses. The reason is not that they are capable of taking on a lot of tasks, have incredible amounts of knowledge, or are especially motivational.

Leaders are great at showing people how to be successful in numerous ways.

Business owners have many reasons for the work they do and many reasons for getting into their field. However, there is one single thing that will tell you how valuable your business is (not your services or products.)

The value of your business is inversely correlated to how important you are.

If your business relies on you, and you alone, to be successful, it does not have that much value on its own.

Doing It Yourself

You're a go-getter. You get stuff done. It’s been like that your whole life.

Did I just describe you? I hope so. The Impactmaker Movement needs plenty of Type-A personalities. We need leaders.

We don’t complacency.

Although, we also don’t need solo acts. Doing it yourself isn’t always the answer. In fact, it’s often not the answer once you’ve gained a little momentum in your business or impact project.

Delegation

Most business trainings I’ve attended have talked about delegation. This is a powerful tool but I hesitate to emphasize it too much.

Passing off simple tasks is a smart move for your own productivity, but it does nothing for the value of what you are building.

Furthermore, passing off challenging tasks but failing to train people how to do them can be downright destructive.

Training

I feel like training is a troubling word. Leaders don’t like to spend their time speaking about something they know how to do. Professional trainers from outside of your organization don’t know your culture and can be expensive. And perhaps most glaring is that most people don’t want to be trained unless it’s highly engaged and directly proportionate to their unique definition of success.

Training is usually general and to be honest, when was the last time you attended an engaging training session?

Most industries have required training and continuing education. This is not a referendum on being qualified to work in your field. However, it’s more like table stakes. It makes your people capable of working for you but it doesn’t deepen the value of your company.

Empowering

The best solution to preventing yourself from applying the “DIY” method to everything in business is to empower your people.

People don’t get excited about being delegated (save maybe politicians) or trained to do something. They get excited when they take ownership of a cause bigger than themselves. This is empowering them to do what they can to help your organization find success.

Doing it Together

A key point to empowering people is collaboration. You may think it’s about giving them free rein but you don’t want them to be DIYers either. You want them to be leaders in their own right and empower others.

Doing work together is extremely important. It doesn’t mean doing the exact same things but it does mean working with other people in a team environment and generously supporting each other.

You empower the people you collaborate with by accomplishing things as a group. Everyone that participates feels success and knows that they contributed to something good. This is more than half the battle.

The training and learning will come later. It’s paramount that your team members feel as if they’ve contributed.

Value

I spent a lot of time explaining a leader’s best way to empower others because it’s the way you devalue yourself.

Wait, what!?

Yeah, you read me. The point of this post is how to devalue yourself. This makes your business more valuable.

My Invaluable Practice

I referenced my previous career above. It’s still relevant. That career was very rewarding. I learned a lot about personal finance, investing, and insurance. I developed some great relationships, helped thousands of families, and made a nice living.

This time in my life should be celebrated for all of those great things. There’s one thing I’d change though.

I built a business that was focused on me.

It was a product of the industry and how I was trained but I am ultimately the one that build it. I see signs of what I’ve now realized looking back. However, at the time, it was tough to see. I was in grind, Type-A mode, and getting stuff done.

I was a DIYer…

I like to describe the three phases of my financial planning practice when asked how I built things.

The phases are as follows:

1. Drinking From a Fire Hose

2. Survival

3. Growth

Let’s review them.

Drinking From a Fire Hose

This is the phase that many business owners or new employees of sales organizations go through. You’re excited to be there and start something new but you realize quickly there is so much to learn and you’re trying to take in information and use it immediately.

Sometimes, information comes at the perfect timing and others it doesn’t come. You have to stop and start something new often because you have to make a living and you’re being measured.

Information comes so fast that it feels like you are drinking from a fire hose.

Survival

This second phase is much of a relief. It feels like the fire hose is finally cut off or severely slowed. You start to find good habits that have developed from all your learning and you realize that you are more educated on your professional topics than 99% of the people out there.

You’re not thriving but you can see that it’s possible. Quitting is no longer even an option and your focus is now getting better at things you like and less on treading water in areas that you see as necessary evils.

Growth

This is a stage that most people envision when they first start (maybe before the fire hose even turns on). Mature companies go through many versions of this and also have a potential fourth stage (stagnancy, which I never made it to). I split the 12 years evenly among the three stages. My practice was growing over the last four years. It felt good. This is where you’ll feel like you’ve found some success. You’ll likely receive some recognition for what you’ve done. And that, my friends, can be a terrible place to be.

You don’t want to be growing and feel that you are the only reason why.

I’m not saying I was arrogant because my business truly revolved around me. It’s not necessarily bad for growth but it’s terrible for value.

If I could go back, I would have engaged more people to be part of the process and phased out reliance on me. I had to build it as I did but I could have grown things with the help of and while empowering others.

Empowering

This is it. Empowering people will change your life and business or impact project.

You may want to sell your business someday or your impact project might grow to a point where you need it to appeal to the masses. This requires its value to move beyond you - way beyond you.

Think “Beyond Me”, by TobyMac.

Questions

The simplest way to start this process is to talk to the people on your team more - or better yet, get them to talk to you. It’s about listening (which can be prompted by asking good questions).

The conversations you have with team members are the greatest lessons for your leadership persona.

Take the time to talk with everyone, yes everyone (if you have thousands of employees, as many as you can and use surveys if needed). I have two rules for this:

1. You can’t ask the same questions to everyone (surveys can have open-ended questions.)

2. Always give them the chance to provide feedback and ask their own questions of you.

Answers

If asking questions is the easy way to start, evaluating the answers is the easy way to continue. You don’t even need a formal way to do this. It’s as simple as thinking about your conversations and documenting the key points.

• How are people thinking?

• What do they like about their role?

• What do they dislike about their role?

• Do they feel like they are an important part of your organization’s mission?

• What is going on in their personal life.?

• How can you make their experiences better?

• Where do they fit into the growth of the organization?

• What would turn them into a leader?

• What can help existing leaders do more empowering?

Momentum

Further exploration is beyond the scope of this entry but this is a great start and you will find momentum when you ask and consider the right questions.

You might find it motivating to hear from many people at a time or you might want to take more time with one person and start empowering them first (this is the necessary approach if you have only one person to go to). Either is acceptable. Just go with what feels right. Maybe it’s a combination and depends on different projects or initiatives.

It’s never a bad idea to talk to more people and ask more questions. Start back at the point if you ever find yourself stuck. Get the momentum running again.

Empowering is more about understanding people than understanding concepts.