Let’s start with a little thought experiment: What is draining your time and energy right now?
Not all tasks are equally draining. That leads us into our first big idea.
1) Go after the things that drain the most energy first, not necessarily the most time.
Chances are, your business only needs a few key skills from you. And of all the other things in your business that you do, some of those things aren’t a big deal, and some drain your energy.
If you’re like me and it hurts your soul to check your email, create a simple system and hire someone to handle your email immediately. A few years ago I realized that my podcast agency only needed 3 things from me, and they were the things I was highly skilled at and enjoyed doing.
Everything else I ruthlessly started to get off my plate.
So how do you get everything else off your plate?
2) Systems first, People second.
We’re living in a massive labor shortage. A-players are hard to come by. A-Salespeople and high-level integrators always have been hard to come by and always will be.
If you focus on rockstar systems, you don’t need A players all the time to have a great business. The better your systems, the better your baseline level of performance in your business.
Rockstar systems means you can hire good, smart, capable people, and still get rockstar results. So what happens when you have an A player? Squeeze them for everything their worth by having them upgrade your systems while they’re with you. Plan on them to outgrow the role and probably leave.
I hired an A-player in the middle of last year, and together we built a great system inside my agency. He even documented the whole system step-by-step and helped hire and train the 2 people it took to replace him. So when he got an opportunity with an awesome startup, he was able to turn over the keys of the system to the people he’d trained and I wasn’t left scrambling. I was actually better off for him being with me for a year.
So I don’t plan on retaining rockstar people for my business to work. If you’re building a lifestyle team, at some point you’re going to hit a business sweet spot, where you’re not looking to just grow for its own sake. And at that point you have to be honest with yourself and the people on your team. You may not be able to retain all your A people by giving them a vision within your team. Their vision may take them out of your team, so you may as well plan for it.
McKinsey Consulting is the best example. They’ve known for decades that they’ll retain 1 out of every 5 people they hire, because they only keep the best of the best.
That creates the famous “Up-or-Out” structure McKinsey is known for, and creates an international fraternity of former McKinsey types who weren’t retained but ended up at other companies. They then turn around and recommend their companies hire McKinsey, so often the candidates that didn’t make the cut end up being McKinsey’s best clients.
And McKinsey gets the best out of all their people while they’re there.
We can all do the same thing by having an informal “Up-or-Out” policy. You only retain the best, those who can make you a lot of money or save you a lot of money. Everyone else will “outgrow” their role and move out of your team at some point, and you support them in that journey.
That brings us to one of the biggest challenges in building a team: Losing too many good people, especially A players. Rainmakers and founders tend to burn through good people, and some do it over and over again for years.
I have a client who made 1.3 million last year in billings all by himself.
That means he is worth $650 an hour, every single working hour a week for 50 weeks a year. If he paid a VA $650 a week, all they’d have to save him is one hour of work to be worth it.
Yet he’s the classic rainmaker. He’s burned through so many people over the years that now he shies away even from hiring a part-time assistant. And so he continues to do a bunch of energy draining activities, like checking his own email, setting his own calendar appointments, sending follow ups, etc.
And it’s a shame because it’s all fixable, and it starts with building systems first and adding people second. So once you have rockstar systems run by good people, how do you keep those people and get great performance out of them?
3) Manage people by metrics, not by your feelings.
One of my mentors is a very high-level performance coach. He’s built these incredible spreadsheets full of formulas and data tracking and visualization to help his clients track and raise their performance level.
What’s the problem? People couldn’t handle it.
Even the highest sales performers, routinely billing 7 figures year after year, have trouble caring deeply about more than 3 metrics. The people on our teams are definitely no different. We need to give the people on our team a definite and secure way to know they’re doing a good job.
I’ve been in both positions, working for the founder and being the founder. And it’s HARD to work for a founder. You never quite know where you stand, what’s expected of you, when you’re doing a good job and when you’re not.
The best thing you can do is when you hire someone, narrow everything down to numbers, and base their performance goals on no more than 3 numbers. No more.
If they hit those numbers, they’re doing a good job. If they don’t hit those numbers, they’re not doing a good job.
If our people hit their numbers and we’re still not getting the results we want in our business, who’s fault is that? Our fault for not knowing our numbers:)
When our people know exactly what we expect, and that we take responsibility for setting the numbers to get the outcomes we want, it gives people exactly what they want.
Security. Stability. Support. If you create that culture, that extreme ownership type of culture, your people will not only want to reach those numbers, but when something goes wrong, they’ll want to roll up their sleeves and help you fix it.
They won’t mentally check out and say, “Not my problem.”
I’ll leave you with this.
In our agency we have a weekly meeting, it’s run by my head of content who’s based in South Africa. And she runs that meeting, not me. She asks all the key questions that everyone knows in advance. Everyone reports in their key numbers. She interrogates and tracks those numbers.
I offer suggestions and little tweaks, so I’m valuable in that meeting, but I’m not necessary. That meeting happens whether I’m there or not. So I could leave the business for weeks, even months, and we’d continue to perform at a high level for a good long time.
And as the founder of a lifestyle business, that gives me the security, stability and support I want.
So to sum up, here are the 3 big ideas we covered:
1) Go after the things that drain the most energy first, not necessarily the most time.
2) Systems first, People second.
3) Manage people by metrics, not by feelings.
That’s how you free up time and energy while your team is in high-growth mode.