Latest / Your Money, Your Rules | Financial Mastery, Wealth Mindset, Leadership Principles, Intuitive Decision-Making, Human Design / 210 | Your Business Shouldn't Need All of You

Transcript

210 | Your Business Shouldn't Need All of You · Your Money, Your Rules | Financial Mastery, Wealth Mindset, Leadership Principles, Intuitive Decision-Making, Human Design

0:01
Erin Gray: You can have a team, you can delegate a lot of the work, and you can still be the person that carries the entire business, both mentally and emotionally.
0:11
Erin Gray: And if everything is still coming back to you, like the decisions, the issues, the questions, your business may have grown on paper or with people and team members and clients, but it actually hasn't become less dependent on you.
0:30
Erin Gray: So today I want to talk about the difference between being valuable to your business and then being the one that your business needs you to function because those two things are very different things.
0:42
Erin Gray: So let's dive in.
0:45
Erin Gray: I want to start off by saying I think that this is a very natural thing that I think this is kind of like the growing pains.
0:53
Erin Gray: Like, this is the stuff I think founders actually have to go through in order to get through the other side to recognize, like, oh, this is how it's actually supposed to be.
1:03
Erin Gray: I came into what a 30-year business.
1:06
Erin Gray: So I wasn't there from when my grandfather started the company.
1:09
Erin Gray: I mean, we definitely had growing pains at 30 years when I came in and all of the changes that I had to or that I wanted to make and that we did make.
1:16
Erin Gray: But I don't think that because I wasn't there from the ground up and you know, growing from no employees to 32 employees.
1:25
Erin Gray: So I didn't have that experience, but I did have the experience of having 32 employees and having a lot of the word that comes to mind is chaos, which is not necessarily the best word, but that's what it felt like when I came on.
1:38
Erin Gray: So the thing that I want to say here is that, you know, the the thing that made you successful can also become the thing that inhibits you or limits your growth to the next level.
1:51
Erin Gray: Because when you think about it, when you started your business, you were probably the only one.
1:56
Erin Gray: Like I think a lot of us start that way, unless you hire immediately, which I think that that's a great idea.
2:02
Erin Gray: I think that there's some sometimes there's some learning and some tweaking that we have to do in order to like within ourselves and within our business first, in order to start hiring people.
2:12
Erin Gray: That's a whole nother topic for another day.
2:14
Erin Gray: I don't want to get off on that tangent, but I think that, you know, because we are so capable, because we figure things out, obviously we're entrepreneurs, right?
2:21
Erin Gray: We're founders.
2:22
Erin Gray: We decided, hey, we had this idea, we wanted to create this business.
2:27
Erin Gray: We innovate and we ideate and we create.
2:30
Erin Gray: And so, because of that, that's an amazing skill set that we have.
2:34
Erin Gray: And in the beginning, we do all of it probably ourselves.
2:37
Erin Gray: And then as we start to grow, we recognize, listen, I can't do it all myself.
2:42
Erin Gray: I really need support in order to grow and to scale.
2:45
Erin Gray: I'm gonna need other people that are going to be helping me in my corner.
2:49
Erin Gray: And so when you start hiring people, when you start having people, a lot of times what we do is we don't make the identity shift of being a solo entrepreneur to someone that leads a team or has multiple employees.
3:02
Erin Gray: I don't know how many employees each of you have that are listening or watching, but you know, like thinking about for myself and my family's business, like 32 employees, there were um five, four or five different departments that we had.
3:17
Erin Gray: And, you know, recognizing that you have to, the person, the identity that you are holding when you started your business, you really have to become someone new or return home to, or however you want to say it, you've got to let go of who that person was when they did it all themselves.
3:36
Erin Gray: And I think what a lot of founders do is they take that identity with them and they still try to micromanage it, carry it all, and they still want all decisions to be made through them.
3:46
Erin Gray: And this is where I think it's really important for, you know, because I have talked about on previous podcasts of you do want people to think like you.
3:55
Erin Gray: And when I say that, I don't mean everybody, every employee needs to think like you because that's not helpful either, right?
4:01
Erin Gray: Like you hire people for different ideas.
4:03
Erin Gray: You hire people because they do things in their specialty better than you do.
4:07
Erin Gray: Let me give you the example.
4:08
Erin Gray: Like right now, you know, I'm having someone help me with social media and I'm having to teach them how I think, like how they might create some of the stuff that they are creating for me might be different for someone else that they're working with, like that.
4:23
Erin Gray: Someone else might like that, the way that it looks, or the type of words, or the vibe that they're using compared to what I want.
4:30
Erin Gray: So when I say you want to teach someone how you think, what I really mean is would Aaron speak like that?
4:36
Erin Gray: Would Aaron make that decision?
4:38
Erin Gray: Would Aaron, so it's almost kind of like you got to give your team bumper, you know, like on the bowling balls when you bowl, you know, the bowling lanes or boundaries or something to work inside of so that they know that they can run free and they can exercise their self-trust, their leadership skills, their decision making, and know that you are there to support them.
5:01
Erin Gray: I think a lot of times what founders do is we aren't clear with them because we're not clear with ourselves.
5:07
Erin Gray: So we aren't clear.
5:09
Erin Gray: We want them to go do the thing, and then we want to come back and be like, well, why did you do it that way?
5:13
Erin Gray: And what were you thinking?
5:15
Erin Gray: And I would have done it this way.
5:16
Erin Gray: And you know, it almost feels very much so accusatory versus let me get inside your head and tell me what you're thinking or what you were thinking that had you leading to this decision.
5:29
Erin Gray: When you are growing, when you are having people that you are working with, you have to consciously make the decision that I'm going to let go.
5:39
Erin Gray: And that doesn't mean I'm gonna let go and I'm just not gonna take care of anything anymore and I'm just well that they did that.
5:45
Erin Gray: What I mean is let go of the control.
5:48
Erin Gray: You know, when you want to micromanage, you've got to turn that back around and look at yourself and think, why am I, why am I wanting to micromanage here?
5:55
Erin Gray: What is the fear here?
5:56
Erin Gray: Like you've got to start digging down and getting to the root of like, what is the feeling that I am feeding feeling that is creating the action or the thinking right now that I am having?
6:08
Erin Gray: Have I not been clear?
6:09
Erin Gray: Have I not said exactly what I want?
6:11
Erin Gray: I'm redoing my website right now.
6:13
Erin Gray: And the joke is, you know, the designer or the developer is like, Erin, you're very hard to please.
6:19
Erin Gray: And I said, I actually don't think I'm very hard to please.
6:21
Erin Gray: I think I know exactly what I want, and I'm not willing to settle until it looks that way.
6:27
Erin Gray: But I'm totally fine with ideas that he brings me because he brings me ideas and then I modify it and I use that and I, you know, my generator self like responds to it and modifies.
6:38
Erin Gray: But I'm totally okay with him creating and having these ideas and bringing these ideas to me.
6:44
Erin Gray: Like I want people to do that.
6:45
Erin Gray: That's what we want to do as a founder, right?
6:48
Erin Gray: We don't want to be the one that's carrying all of it.
6:51
Erin Gray: And I think a lot of times that's what we end up doing because we are afraid.
6:55
Erin Gray: You know, I told him the other day, I was like, no, I know exactly what I want.
6:59
Erin Gray: My work is to stop saying it's fine when it's really not fine, when I really want it to look this specific way.
7:08
Erin Gray: And I'm not actually saying that, no, this isn't when I say not good enough, you know what I mean?
7:13
Erin Gray: Like when it's not to what I actually want it to look like.
7:17
Erin Gray: What we need to really sit back and look at is okay, where have I been unclear with my team, with the people that I work with?
7:26
Erin Gray: Where have I not given them maybe explicit when I say instructions, I mean like boundaries and guidelines.
7:32
Erin Gray: Like, you know, when I had my sister was the bookkeeper, there were certain things that I wanted her to do because there was a system that I had regarding pay apps, which is what we would go and request invoices basically to the owners when we had our contracts.
7:48
Erin Gray: And but I let her into my way of thinking and I told her exactly what I wanted.
7:54
Erin Gray: And so I think sometimes we aren't clear with our people.
7:57
Erin Gray: That's first.
7:57
Erin Gray: Second, I think also there is fear that, oh my goodness, if they mess up, what's going to happen?
8:03
Erin Gray: And I think that it's a really good exercise for all of us to sit down and be like, okay, so what happens if they do mess up?
8:08
Erin Gray: Like I had to get to the point where it's like, okay, well, what happens if she doesn't do it, you know, the way that I've taught her to do it?
8:13
Erin Gray: Okay, well, then the pay app gets rejected.
8:15
Erin Gray: Okay.
8:16
Erin Gray: And then what happens?
8:17
Erin Gray: Okay, well, then you may not get paid that month for that amount of invoice.
8:20
Erin Gray: And I'm not talking like a couple thousand dollars.
8:22
Erin Gray: I'm talking several hundred thousand dollars that we may not get paid that month.
8:25
Erin Gray: Okay, so that was on me to teach her the reasoning behind why I was having her do what I was having her do.
8:33
Erin Gray: So really starting to communicate better with your team, to share with them, you know, what you your ways of thinking, and then letting them let their own ideas run free and bring some things back to you versus you being the one that carries it all.
8:51
Erin Gray: The second thing I think here is that delegating is very different than releasing responsibility, right?
8:59
Erin Gray: You can have a team and you can delegate all of the tasks, but if you're mentally and you're emotionally still invested and worried about it, and I know you might say, Erin, it's my business, it's my baby.
9:12
Erin Gray: Being emotionally invested and caring about your business is very different than control and gripping and, you know, like think that the world is going to like crumble if things don't happen the way that you want them to.
9:25
Erin Gray: Like that is the point that I had to get to because I was driving myself literally crazy because I wanted to control every little thing.
9:33
Erin Gray: I didn't want to hire certain people, I didn't want to hire, you know, have somebody help me in the books.
9:38
Erin Gray: Everything, I became the bottleneck and I created so much tension, literal tension in my body and tension for myself because I was not allowing other people to help me.
9:51
Erin Gray: And I think that if we are making all of the decisions, if we're trying to fix, and this is where I think everything is nuanced.
9:59
Erin Gray: Like you can't take one thing, one sentence that I say and just run with it.
10:03
Erin Gray: You have to run it through your filter, right?
10:05
Erin Gray: Like me explaining to my sister how the payups work, that was important for her to understand and to do it the way that we had that system set up, right?
10:15
Erin Gray: Because if it did not get approved by the engineer in time, then you did not get, and we're not talking about like, oh, well, then you get paid like, you know, in the next couple of weeks, it's a whole nother 30 or 60 days before you got that several hundred thousand dollar check.
10:29
Erin Gray: So that was important.
10:31
Erin Gray: Like, what is my tolerance, right?
10:33
Erin Gray: Like, where can my employees and my team air quotes mess up and it still be okay?
10:40
Erin Gray: What is that boundary or those bumpers, but you know, the bumpers that we put on for the bowling lanes?
10:46
Erin Gray: Like, what are those things that I can put in place that give them the freedom to make those decisions?
10:53
Erin Gray: You know, I was telling a client, this is probably a couple months ago, I was like, there are certain things that they can make a decision on that they don't need to ask you.
11:01
Erin Gray: And if your answer to me is no, they can't, then you haven't given them and haven't empowered them with any decision.
11:08
Erin Gray: Like they have to be able to have some autonomy.
11:11
Erin Gray: They have to be able to start trusting themselves because this goes back to like what I'm helping clients learn is to self-trust.
11:17
Erin Gray: You're also helping your employees do this as well.
11:20
Erin Gray: And so when you don't tell them, like, hey, pretty much everything is gonna be fixable, it's not a problem, and empower them to trust themselves, to understand the way that you think, to know that they can figure out the, I don't like calling them problems, but they can figure out the problem if they need to and that they don't have to come to you.
11:40
Erin Gray: And this is going to take you feeling uncomfortable in your body.
11:45
Erin Gray: So if you are always the person, but like I was, always the person, the joke was, oh, just go ask Aaron.
11:51
Erin Gray: Like they almost sometimes would call me like, go ask mom, go ask Aaron.
11:54
Erin Gray: I'm like, that's actually not healthy to be that way in the business.
11:57
Erin Gray: You know, if the business doesn't run because I'm not there, I'm not a very good business person.
12:03
Erin Gray: You're not a very good leader.
12:04
Erin Gray: And I don't mean that from a place of shame.
12:07
Erin Gray: It's just what have we been conditioned to believe what a good leader is.
12:11
Erin Gray: A good leader is someone, I believe, that empowers their people, that has them thinking on their own, that has them problem solving and thinking about things and making decisions and standing by their decisions and feeling empowered.
12:27
Erin Gray: Like that's a really good leader.
12:28
Erin Gray: I call it like leading from behind, right?
12:30
Erin Gray: It's not this showy, like, let me tell you what to do kind of leader.
12:35
Erin Gray: It's like this quiet, like, I believe in you, I trust you, like run with it.
12:38
Erin Gray: Let's see how it works.
12:40
Erin Gray: So I think if you're constantly checking, if you're deciding, if you're fixing, you know, what you are probably quietly saying to your team is I don't trust you, right?
12:50
Erin Gray: You may not be coming out and saying that, but that's the message that they're getting.
12:54
Erin Gray: If she's always coming behind me and she's always correcting something.
12:58
Erin Gray: Now, again, this is nuance.
12:59
Erin Gray: When you're hiring someone, when you're training someone, like I've been training a couple of new people, okay, there's gonna be this back and forth for a little bit.
13:06
Erin Gray: But at some point, there will come a time where you know what, just run with it.
13:10
Erin Gray: You know the way I think, you know I wouldn't allow that to go out on social media, or you know, that's not my vibe that I'm sending, or I would never put that type of copy on my website or whatever it might be.
13:21
Erin Gray: There's that training ground for that.
13:23
Erin Gray: And then there has to be the part where we let go.
13:26
Erin Gray: If you want people to lead, you have to be willing to do that.
13:30
Erin Gray: You have to be willing to feel, right?
13:33
Erin Gray: Because this is the work that we need to do within ourselves.
13:35
Erin Gray: What are we afraid of?
13:36
Erin Gray: Are we afraid of that, you know?
13:38
Erin Gray: Because when I was talking to a client, I was like, What are you afraid of?
13:41
Erin Gray: And she said, I'm afraid of what he might say to a client that I would never say.
13:47
Erin Gray: And I said, Okay, well, then that starts with you having a conversation with him.
13:51
Erin Gray: Obviously, he is his own person.
13:53
Erin Gray: He's going to show up, you know, in his vibrant self.
13:56
Erin Gray: And also, what's the worst that's going to happen?
13:58
Erin Gray: Okay, he might say something to the client that the client's like, you know what, this company isn't for me.
14:03
Erin Gray: Okay, but how can you use that as a learning experience versus, you know, hovering over him all of the time?
14:09
Erin Gray: So then that tells me that you need to either communicate with him more, you need to train him more.
14:14
Erin Gray: There might be need to be some more communication between the two of you and working on some inside stuff before you let him go off and work with clients one-on-one without you there.
14:26
Erin Gray: But you can't grow.
14:27
Erin Gray: I was telling her, like, you can't grow if you're always going to be sitting at every single client consultation.
14:34
Erin Gray: That's just not humanly possible.
14:36
Erin Gray: So you're gonna either have to get him on your page with your vibe, or maybe he's not the best fit for your role or in your company or whatever it might be.
14:45
Erin Gray: But this is when I say it goes back to really having to sit with some of those uncomfortable conversations with yourself, right?
14:52
Erin Gray: So have I hired him and and I hired him because I just needed a warm body to do consultations?
14:57
Erin Gray: Did I hire him because I thought at the time he was what I was looking for and now I'm a different person and we're not in alignment?
15:04
Erin Gray: Like you've really got to do some of that inner work with yourself first, right?
15:09
Erin Gray: Because your people are just a reflection of who you are or who you were at the time.
15:13
Erin Gray: And either your people will rise with you, which is totally okay, which is what we want, or your people will fall away, which that is okay too.
15:20
Erin Gray: Like one of the beliefs that I had to really embody was like, it's okay for people to come in and out of my life, whatever that might be.
15:27
Erin Gray: So if you are attached to someone, if you have thoughts or feelings around letting someone go, like this is where all of this stuff gets churned up that we are we're controlling because we don't really want to look inward and look and see, oh, okay, this is what I'm trying to avoid.
15:45
Erin Gray: This is what I'm trying, and we're always trying to avoid a feeling.
15:49
Erin Gray: And the final thing that I would say, and this is what I always start with with clients, is that your business is supposed to support your life, not the other way around, right?
15:57
Erin Gray: Not require your life to support it.
16:00
Erin Gray: And you really have to start with, what do I want my life to look like?
16:04
Erin Gray: Not how much money do I want to make.
16:06
Erin Gray: That will come, you know, through the process, but like, what do I want my life to look like?
16:11
Erin Gray: Very rarely when I ask that question, do I get, I want to be tied to my phone, I want to be on Slack all day, I want to be answering my employees' questions.
16:20
Erin Gray: Like none of those answers ever come up when I'm having a conversation with a client.
16:25
Erin Gray: Like, what do you want your life to look like?
16:26
Erin Gray: It's more like I want more freedom, I want to be able to have fun in my business, I want to be able to support my team, I want to be able to travel more, I want to spend more time with my kid.
16:37
Erin Gray: Like those are the conversations that we have first.
16:40
Erin Gray: And so when you are looking at it from that place, when you start from the end and you work backwards, then it can make your decision-making process so much easier.
16:51
Erin Gray: Is it easy?
16:52
Erin Gray: No, but does it make it easier?
16:54
Erin Gray: Yes, because you're so much more clear.
16:56
Erin Gray: Because more revenue doesn't necessarily equal more profitability.
17:01
Erin Gray: It doesn't necessarily mean less headaches.
17:03
Erin Gray: And I'm not saying that more revenue equals more headaches or more problems.
17:07
Erin Gray: I'm just saying that if you are not clear on where you are going and why you are going there, you'll wake up one day and you'll be like, How did I even create this?
17:17
Erin Gray: One day at a time, not paying attention, not being very specific on to what you want when you are making decisions.
17:23
Erin Gray: And that is how we create everything in our life.
17:25
Erin Gray: So when you think about why am I going to hire this person?
17:29
Erin Gray: What is the purpose of having, you know, this team?
17:32
Erin Gray: What do I want to empower them to do?
17:34
Erin Gray: Like, really, you have to get big picture 30,000-foot view, which is what I love doing with clients, because then you start to zoom out and you start to see, okay, I want to be able to let, you know, this part be fully, you know, we're always going to be in our business.
17:52
Erin Gray: But like you really have to start letting go of making those decisions.
17:56
Erin Gray: Like I said, the delegating is very different than letting go of responsibility.
18:01
Erin Gray: So really start to spend some time this week to think about like, what do I want my business to look like?
18:07
Erin Gray: What do I want?
18:08
Erin Gray: Even bigger than that, is what do I want my life to look like?
18:12
Erin Gray: And am I creating and having offers that allow that to look like that?
18:17
Erin Gray: Am I setting up a team that is conducive to that?
18:22
Erin Gray: I think sometimes we also hire from a place of money versus hiring the best person intuitively that we connect with and knowing that the money is going to follow from that hire.
18:37
Erin Gray: Because if you hire someone from a lower income standpoint, but let's say you have two people that you're looking at hiring and one is asking for more, but they take care of everything.
18:48
Erin Gray: Like I used to joke, I'm like, my family's business, obviously, the construction guys, I'm never gonna do any type of that work.
18:54
Erin Gray: But you have two or three errands in your company, yeah, you're gonna pay them a lot more than you would pay other employees, but you're never gonna have to wonder, is this getting taken care of?
19:05
Erin Gray: Or like, I took care of so much stuff in my family's business because that number one, that's the type of person I am.
19:12
Erin Gray: And also like an employer, right?
19:15
Erin Gray: So when you have an employee who thinks more entrepreneurial-like, who actually is in it for the long haul, who isn't there to just take a paycheck and go home, there is a different vested interest that you have with employees.
19:29
Erin Gray: So, really, I would highly encourage you, you know, if you're hiring people, is to hire from an intuitive standpoint.
19:35
Erin Gray: It doesn't matter if they look great on paper, if every time you suggest something, they want to argue with you.
19:42
Erin Gray: And arguing and communicating two different things, but you know what I'm talking about.
19:46
Erin Gray: When you have a contentious employee, right?
19:48
Erin Gray: Who you have someone who's not really happy to be there and they're just there for the money, they aren't necessarily there for like your vision and why you are there.
19:57
Erin Gray: You know, being around everybody else that they are around, it makes for a different type of environment, a morale in your organization.
20:04
Erin Gray: So really start to play with what do I want my life to look like?
20:07
Erin Gray: And are the decisions that I'm making every single day in my business are they supporting the lifestyle that I want?
20:12
Erin Gray: Or am I getting more in the weeds in my business, or am I taking more of a 30,000-foot view?
20:18
Erin Gray: To summarize, I want you to think about the three things, right?
20:21
Erin Gray: The thing that made you successful, that got you to where you are, are currently isn't probably gonna be able to, like that identity, you need to shift the identity.
20:30
Erin Gray: You need to become someone new, you need to return home to who you truly are, however you want to say it, but the identity needs to shift in order from where you started from to where you are going, right?
20:40
Erin Gray: Your business cannot be dependent on you.
20:42
Erin Gray: If if you are the bottleneck, that is not a great business model.
20:45
Erin Gray: Second is delegating tasks is not the same thing as responsibility.
20:49
Erin Gray: We're letting go of responsibility.
20:50
Erin Gray: So, where can you release more responsibility?
20:53
Erin Gray: Where can you empower more of your employees and your team to take care of things?
20:56
Erin Gray: Where can you entrust?
20:58
Erin Gray: Where can you like give them more self-trust?
21:02
Erin Gray: Like allow them to trust themselves more than what they currently are.
21:06
Erin Gray: Zone out to that 30,000-foot view is like, what do I want my life to look like?
21:10
Erin Gray: And how do I want my business to fit into my life?
21:13
Erin Gray: Am I making decisions like this every single day?
21:15
Erin Gray: We don't look at just how to grow the business.
21:18
Erin Gray: We look at one that actually feels good to be inside of and that works for you.
21:23
Erin Gray: You know, one of the things that I used to do all of the time is look at everybody else's business and try to make their business feel, you know, fit into my business model.
21:31
Erin Gray: We need to stop looking outside of ourselves and we need to think what do we want for our life and create the business that works for us.
21:38
Erin Gray: And if you are a seven figure founder looking for a strategic thinking partner, you can find the link in the show notes to work and to apply with me.
21:47
Erin Gray: Okay, I'll see you in the next episode.