Do you want to know the quickest way to business failure? Too much control…that’s right. Control is good, but when it becomes detrimental to the business, then it becomes a liability. I believe the MAIN reason business owners stop growing their businesses, burn out, and eventually fail is because they invest hours and hours working on things that should really take only minutes.

These business owners become their own BOTTLENECKS! That’s right, letting go, delegating, empowering others; whether they are employees, vendors or even clients is a NO, NO. They have to know it all, they have to approve everything. Nothing, absolute nothing moves without their consent.

Guilty as charged…I was one of those bottlenecks. I would get to my office early in the morning, blink and it would be the end of the day…huh? What happened? Where did the day go? If you entered my office, you’d probably think I was giving away tickets to some concert because there was literally a line outside my door. It got so bad, that at one point I had to put a sign outside my door “by appointment only”…eerk! I trained my employees to ask me before they made important decisions and boy, did they learn well.

Steps to Freedom:

• Implement self-service tools where clients, vendors and employees can find the information themselves. This way you enter the information once, and they can retrieve it at their own leisure.
• Implement a Wiki or an Intranet for internal use. Key employees can keep the data up to date so it stays current and accurate. Things move way too fast nowadays. What was accurate a year ago, or even a month ago, can be totally obsolete today.
• Implement a support desk with knowledgebase capabilities for your clients and vendors. You and your key employees will enter product, service or any other data related to your business. The customers would have login access and be able to find the information themselves. This strategy alone allowed us to reduce our office phone lines from 21 to 4…I will tell you in a later post how we even got rid of the receptionist and got a top of the line system that made us look like an S&P 500. Keep tuned.

Anyway, the point is that you must implement systems where you can

1. Dump your brain
2. Empower others to enter and update the information
3. Allow customers and vendors to find the information themselves
4. Allow employees to find the information themselves
5. Allow vendors to find the information themselves

The possibilities are endless. You can create training videos for new hires. This can take you completely out of the equation when hiring new people. You can create training video for clients, so they do not have to call you over and over again with the same questions.

So you must be wondering, how I got here…I have to tell you, someone will eventually have to start a “Workaholic Anonymous” organization. Being an entrepreneur and running a business can become as addictive as any drug. Letting go is hard to do. Sometimes, like in my case, it takes a personal crisis to get you there. One way or another, I hope you read this post and take it seriously, because this type of business ownership behavior, if left unchecked, can take a serious toll on your health and on your family.

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