Quick note before we dive in:
I'm hosting a bunch of free online workshops over the next few weeks.
3 big ones coming up:
- June 17th - Real Estate Private Equity & Management Structure (Tomorrow at 11am EST)
- June 17th - Golden Handcuffs & How to Make Sure Your Top People Never Leave (Tomorrow at 2pm EST)
- June 24th - How to Pay Less Tax (Next week)
If you register, I'll send you a copy of the recording even if you can't attend live.
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Get out of the weeds or your business will break!
By "Being in the weeds" I mean spending all of your time on the day to day tactical execution.
If a customer service email comes in, you answer it.
If a bill needs to get paid, you pay it. If a document needs to get reviewed and approved, you do it.
If someone on your team has a nuanced question, you don't take the extra 30 minutes to teach them how to solve it, you just jump in and do it yourself.
These are the weeds. The grunt work. The manual tasks that fill our day.
Everyone knows this place.
But if you stay in the weeds too long, your business will suffer. This is where most entrepreneurs plateau or fail.
Thankfully, I learned that I needed to get out of the weeds very early on in my entrepreneurial career.
Truthfully, I never had the luxury of being in the weeds for more than 6 months at any of my businesses.
I came up in entrepreneurship being forced to delegate at all costs.
At one point, we operated Storage Squad in twelve states at twenty-five different college campuses.
We couldn’t be everywhere at once. We couldn’t drive over and solve problems. We had no choice but to empower employees on the ground to make decisions and do the work.
Early on, when I was running the company during the busy season, I could not leave my computer or disaster would strike.
I had to focus on the big stuff like the schedules, the staffing, the growth.
If I left my computer, I was back in the weeds doing $20-an-hour work driving a truck, loading boxes, organizing a warehouse, and so on.
As we grew, my partner and I used to say that we could not, under any circumstances, leave our computers.
If we did, and we started working on urgent stuff instead of important stuff, the business would suffer because we weren’t being efficient from an opportunity cost standpoint.
It was a beautiful thing because we got really good at management and delegation.
It was a simple choice.
We could stay on our computers, where we were efficient and doing $100-an-hour work, or we could get in the weeds and start doing the $20-an-hour work again.
The fact that we had no other option was a blessing.
We had to focus on the bigger picture.
Things like:
Do we have enough employees lined up to do the work tomorrow and next week? Have we communicated with them adequately? Are they trained and ready to go?
We asked the important questions instead of being consumed by schedules and pickups and deliveries going on at that very moment.
Our employees did those manual tasks.
Many business owners bury their heads in the weeds because it feels productive.
There is a level of comfort when you are moving the business forward by laboring or being on the front lines.
But this is a trap.
“I’m too busy to worry about growing the business” is an excuse, and a poor one. It's why small businesses don't grow.
So your challenge is this:
Find something urgent but not important on your list, and figure out how to delegate it to someone today.
Maybe you’ll have to hire someone, maybe you’ll have to pass the task off to someone who already works for you, or maybe you’ll ultimately decide that whatever it is isn’t really as necessary as you thought and no one will ever do that job again.
Whatever it is, it’s time to start making space for what comes next.
Know this:
The relationship with your business will change over time. And the bottlenecks will change, too.
In the early days, it might feel impossible to get out of the weeds until you have enough cashflow coming in the door to hire and delegate where you don't have to do everything yourself.
But down the road, when things start working, you will have to zoom out and focus on more strategic things.
For the most part, staying buried in the weeds just means staying small.
But it can also be catastrophic. When you’re buried in the weeds, you can miss important warning signs and blind spots can destroy your decision making.
You can miss trends shifting.
You don’t have time to research and pay attention to your competitors and how they are innovating.
You don’t have time to innovate inside your own company and improve operations. And you can fall behind and get passed up.
This is one of the many reasons why some business owners still operate with fax machines and phone calls as if it were 1985.
So look at the bigger picture.
Pull your head out of the weeds as soon as you possibly can.
The owner's job is not to do every manual task.
The owner's job is to focus on making sure enough money is coming through the door each month and then to hire and build a team with the right cost structure and incentives for them to complete the actual work.
Do the big things now that you know need to be done to protect your business and help it grow into the future.
I hope this reminder helps.
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A few posts to check out:
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(A conversation I did with Peter Lehrman about building my portfolio of businesses)
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Onward and upward,
Nick Huber
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