Latest / The Enterprisors / The Founder Trap -Designing Freedom Into Your Business
Transcript
- Tim Meadows-Smith: Welcome back to the enterprises. The exhaustion most midsize founders carry is not the price of success. It's the price of building a business without designing for your own freedom inside it. This episode names what every listener is feeling, but has never been given language for. Tim, one of the lines from your book that stops people in their tracks is freedom was the promise. Exhaustion became the reality. What are you actually describing here? People, when they start a business, have a dream. They do. They think that they are going to be the Hollywood version of the entrepreneur with the fast cars and the fancy restaurants and their lovely holidays. And they're to have time to do all of these things and that it won't take them very long before they are making lots of money and they have lots of free time. Yeah. But the reality is entirely different. They, out of necessity, when they start, have to bootstrap and do everything themselves. Even if they are lucky enough to get some significant investment early on, they still have to do everything themselves. They have to work out what works, where to start. they have to invent every process. Yeah, they do. And then, you know, the next stage, if you do this organically, is that you hire your first assistant and you give them some filimennial things to do and that assistant just waits for instructions. So you have to do their thinking for them as well as doing what you've got to do as well. And you get a bit of the labor done. And then that multiplies and you get four, five or six people. And each of those are sitting there waiting for instructions and you're still frantically trying to do the things that you do and do the thinking for six people and checking the things that they go wrong. And then you become the chief problem solver. So you get really good at solving problems and founders are very capable people, they just get overloaded really quickly. And the problem is that they first can't afford to have systems to do things methodically. And then when they can afford it, they don't have time to think about it or specify them or put those systems in place. So they just constantly answer the problems that keep building up as they grow with more labor. And every time they add another person, they get another chunk of time taken away, managing and supporting that. person to do their job. Wow. And you say also that ⁓ exhaustion, they normalise it too, don't they? Most founders just normalise the fact that they're exhausted. To begin with, it's a status symbol. They tell their friends that they're exhausted because they're working 10, 12 hours a day and weekends and I can't do this, but they're some kind of hero because they can't do it because they're busy at work. They're not making a lot of money. They are utterly exhausted. have no space to think for themselves. Their hobbies get squeezed out. Their friends get squeezed out. Their families start to not see very much of them. They miss parties and birthdays and weddings and all kinds of stuff that they miss out on because they're just so focused on building this thing that was supposed to set them free. And so the very early stages of building a business are, you know, no systems and it's difficult to manage. Eventually people learn to delegate. That's kind of the first level, but what they don't do. What you just described is not quite delegation, it? it's micromanaging. It's actually effectively doing and supervising everything yourself just with a bit of help to do the hands-on bit. But you're not able to pass it off and say, that's done, I can review it again next month. It's, that's done until this afternoon and then they'll have another chat and put right what they've got wrong. ⁓ God. And there's a moment you call the weight of recognition. What's that? Well, you know, eventually people twig that something has to, I mean, they might get ill or some, crisis events that stop. I've got to do something different. And they, instead of doing something different, do something similar. Oh God. Okay. So have you got examples of that? So they may be so, well, I'm going to send so-and-so off and get some training. I'm going to get somebody in and sort this particular process out and get it right. whatever the thing is that's taking up too much of their time and his problems every day. But what they're not doing is stepping back and planning and then putting a system in place and training people to operate it and putting some procedures in place that they have to follow. But that's because they haven't got the time, Exactly right. They haven't got the time. And that is the trap. That is the founder trap. But even when they start to put some systems in place that improve things, they still operate on the basis of what I call command and control, which is you're the decision maker, you're the boss. What you say goes and people come to you when stuff goes wrong and you solve the problems for them. And that's no way to run anything. And in fact, it's the way armies used to operate in the middle ages, right the way through to Napoleonic times. the thing that we all learned as mission control from NASA and going to the moon. actually was the Napoleonic Wars where they discovered that if you lost communication between the commander and the battlefield, then people didn't know what to do. Whereas if you gave people a mission, the people on the battlefield could decide for themselves what they needed to do to achieve the objective. And so the same thing applies in business. You need to flip from command and control to mission control, where instead of everybody waiting for you to decide what you want them to do and solving their problems, you give them the responsibility of helping you to achieve your vision and mission. But of course you have to first be clear about your vision and mission before anybody else can share it and help you to achieve it. But the fastest growing, most efficient businesses are not run by command and control at all. You know, the big boss says, so we will do. They run by having a team of people who put a plan together, who share values, share a mission, decide on goals that are consistent with that mission, and are given a budget and responsibility for delivering it. So in order to not be exhausted all the time and to you've got to be able to relinquish some kind of control and be able to relinquish some control, you need to do that with the team of people that you trust. And in order to have that team of people that you trust, you need to inform them what the mission is so that they buy into the mission and that all takes time. You also need processes. So In order to sort of make the flip from command to we're in a mission together and we're doing this together. You kind of need to take a step back, don't you? You need space. You always need space. So within that space, if in the ideal world, if someone goes, know, I actually, the weight of this is too much and I need to do something about it in order to just take that space. In that space, what do they need to do? Well, there are, so creating the space is the first problem. Yes. So the techniques for creating space are a number of different ones, but essentially, If you understand the 80-20 rule, which is the Pareto principle, if you just say, are the things that I do where 20 % of my effort delivers 80 % of the reward, I'm going to do those things only, and I'm going to let a few things slip. They're not important, they're not urgent, but I'm spending a lot of time doing them and they don't have much effect. Just stop. Just don't do That's really difficult to do though. So if you apply the Pareto principle, you could easily take a day a week out just by stopping doing the things that take a lot of effort and have not much effect. one way of dealing with it. you can do that throughout your organization. You can actually just decide. we're not going to serve the 20 % of customers that, you know, 80 % of our effort. Yeah, absolutely. We just won't bother with them because they're costing too much to service. And so you've then created a bit of space to start to put systems in place and start to organize yourself to do things differently. But if you get this right, it should be possible for you to take a year off, not look at any email, not pick up the phone, not worry about the business at all, come back and it's still running properly, if you get it right. So that's what it looks like to a donor. That's what good looks like. Most people can't take a weekend off. No, you're right. Most people go on holiday with their laptops and their telephone. Exactly, and it's not really a holiday. No, not at all. So if I wanted to do that, if one of our listeners recognises themselves in this episode that they no freedom, no freedom, and they're exhausted, what's the first thing that they need to do? Well, the first thing to do is to decide. You decide this cannot go on. I am going to do something different. And then you need to take advice or read. You can buy in a transformation service to transform your organization into a different way of working. There's lots of things that you can do that help you get from where you are to where you want to be. And usually the thing to do is to decide and define where you want to be and then build a bridge back to where you are now. Most people think about where they are and how to improve it a little bit, which is not very efficient. And it tends not to get you exactly in the direction that you want to go. Whereas if you define where you want to be. Not just monetarily, but also in terms of your own freedom and how the business looks like to you. And indeed, if you get that bit right, you will define who the people are around you, not their name or what they look like, but how they perform. What qualities do they have? What difference do they make? What will they not do as well as what they will do? And then say, how do I take this person here to be capable of behaving the way I want them to? Because usually there's nothing wrong with the potential of the people you've hired. It's just you've not trained them the way you want them to behave. or given them permission to... to use their own If you've got 25 useless people in your organisation who burn your time, whose fault is it? It's yours. Yeah, absolutely. It's not theirs. Yeah, because you haven't given them the permission to Well, you haven't trained them, you haven't given them the tools, the resources, the ideas, the direction. All of that is missing and they're really not good at gazing into a crystal ball and... deciding what it is that's going on in your mind. Yeah, true, absolutely true. And so it's that whole sort of like revolving door situation that you find yourself in that actually if you don't take yourself out of, you're just gonna end up being exhausted. Exactly that. And I have a ⁓ very short phase that people need to aspire to, which is to go beyond doing. founders and entrepreneurs are really good at doing, they are doers, they're really clever, energetic, creative problem solvers, and they love it. Yeah. It's not leadership. Right. What is it? It's being an entrepreneur. It's what caused you to start the business in the first place. But in order to break out of that and get to that vision of freedom that we started with. you've actually got to stop being a doer, go beyond doing and become a leader. forgive me, nobody is born a leader. I know all entrepreneurs think they are leaders, they're not. You have to work hard at becoming a leader and developing leadership skills. And until you do, your business won't grow. And you have to become somebody that people want to be led ⁓ by as well. You do. Yeah, absolutely. You do, you know, and look in the mirror and say, you know, would I like to work for you? ⁓ my God, no. Yeah, no, I don't think I'm a leader either. So, yeah, but there are people that start businesses that don't have all the, as you say, the enthusiasm, the creativity and the drive to do it. And then they get stuck. They fall at this hurdle of not being able to lead. Well, you know, this all went wrong when the education system started telling people that becoming an entrepreneur was a career choice from the end of education. And candidly, it's not. You know, you've got an awful lot of learning to do. the mistake that people make is they think that when they finish their formal education, it's time to stop learning. Yeah, I've heard you say that before. All education does is equip you to learn for the rest of your life. And every day, genuinely every day is a school day. And I'm now a pensioner and I'm learning loads every day. In fact, I'm probably learning more today, every day than I used to in my twenties. I think so. think actually as I've got older, I'm learning more as well. that also keeps your brain going. It keeps you useful and it keeps you engaged with society. I think you're right. Unfortunately, we swap energy for wisdom. And if you had wisdom and energy, you'd be really powerful. People are working on that though, aren't they? They are, yeah. But so to go right back to the beginning of the episode is actually you don't start a business. You don't become an entrepreneur in order to be exhausted. You do it for the freedom. And if you get stuck at that point where you are giving your life, your health, your energy to the job because you haven't created an enterprise, then you need to take a step back and do as you advise. But you know, everything is your fault. You're quite happy taking all the glory from people about what you've achieved and you know, how hard you work and all of these things that actually get you from nowhere to just a little step forward. But in order for you to actually achieve what you want, you have to design the business the way you want it to be. Your primary job is to design it and then lead it, not make yourself ill working in it. Great, I'm gonna leave it there. Good for you, thank you. you, Tim.