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How To Run A Business Without It Running You

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If done right, running a successful business is the best thing in the world. You choose who you work with, you deliver great work you believe in. You set your working times, your values and ethos and you have a career on your own terms. You pre-empt problems and you create a great place to be for everyone involved. Life is a dream.

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If done wrong, it’s the worst way to operate. You’re at the mercy of clients, team members, shareholders and your emails. Instead of being wonderfully on top of processes, you’re left fighting fires and backtracking, feeling like you’re frantically spinning multiple plates. You’ve created yourself a prison and are being held hostage inside it.

The two scenarios described aren’t that far apart. Here are the elements that can mean you always experience the former.

Set the rules

You cannot scale a business if you’re taking everything case by case. Offering too many options, every decision needing a multi-person discussion and making concessions and exceptions every day are all recipes for a slow-moving and clunky establishment. It also means you’ll be pulled into every scenario when you might not be needed because people need guidance in grey areas.

Commit to communicating the right information, to the right people, at the right time. Make it OK for your team to do the same. Don’t answer the same question twice. Nearly all those you answer will have been answered before. Update an FAQ document every time you answer a question and ask your team to as well. Soon you’ll have every process mapped out for easy reference and your team will be empowered to use their own reasoned choice.

Know the vision

Do you know what you stand for and what your business is there to do? Do you know not only your long-term goals, but also what you’re going to do in the short term to make sure you achieve them?

If you and your team know the overriding purpose of your existence, short-term decisions should be simple. If you’re flitting between multiple visions and agendas then you’ll be left confused and so will those you’re working with.

Leave no room for misunderstanding. Define and communicate your purpose at every opportunity, and use it as a framework from which everyone operates.

Hire the right people

If you have a niggling feeling that something’s not right, it probably isn’t. If you’re not 100% convinced about someone in your team, do something about it. When everyone is carrying out their own role in a competent and conscientious way, teams thrive. When there’s mistrust, dishonesty or a simply a lack of commercial awareness, everyone loses, especially you as the owner.

The best leaders highlight the work of their team and play down their individual contribution because they know they couldn’t operate without them. If you’ve hired the right people this will be easy to do. If you’ve hired the wrong people you’ll find yourself distancing yourself from them. The latter doesn’t lead anywhere good.

Work with people you trust implicitly, who are aligned in their values and operate in a conscientious way. It’s the only way everyone can take complete ownership of their own role. As Marcus Aurelius wrote: “What is not good for the beehive, cannot be good for the bees.” Everything everyone does needs to be good for the beehive; there can be no selfish agendas.

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Processes in place

For everything that happens in your business, there is a process that follows. Organizations that run beautifully have action plans mapped out and "if this then that” documents, all supported by reliable technology that helps founders focus on growing their business and supporting their team. Think of it like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, whereby efficient automation and documented processes are the base level that enables the higher stage of creativity and excellence to be accessed.

The default should be that processes run, not that bottlenecks are formed in every department. Sooner or later those bottlenecks will require fire fighting, and that’s when you’ll be pulled back in. Zoom out, right out, and look at where the breakdowns are happening. Maybe it’s hiring or quality control, or just overflowing inboxes. Practical solutions might involve a task management system, an invoice automation tool or even just better email filters.

Processes should work by default and break only occasionally, not the other way around. However small it might seem, if it’s causing a breakdown, it’s costing time and attention and must be solved and eliminated.

Address your mindset

The difference between you running your business and your business running you might be the boundaries you set for yourself. When’s the last time you didn’t check your email until 10 a.m.? Or left a colleague to deliver without micromanaging? How much do you take things personally?

Remind yourself that you have made the choice to run a business. No one forced you to do it. If you’re running a successful and growing company with happy clients and a dream team of colleagues, but you still feel like your business runs your life, the problem might exist solely in your mind. Develop other interests, give yourself space and don’t be so hard on yourself. If you’re actually in a cushy situation but you’re telling yourself it’s a chore, recognize that you could, instead, choose to chill out and be grateful.

Incorporate balance into your week. If you spend Saturday morning responding to emails, spend Wednesday afternoon taking a walk.

The reason you started a business in the first place was to operate on your own terms, right? So don’t take the worst parts of self-employment without allowing yourself the perks. Businesses that run like clockwork without the owner being frazzled do exist, and yours can be one of them.

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