Stop doing the things you hate! You will grow your company faster if you follow this advice…
The other day I recorded a video and it was about how you know you’ve made it or when you will feel like you’ve made it. Something I mentioned in there was the progression of hiring. First an office manager, then an operational assistant, and then either a sales person or an operations manager. I wanted to expand on that thought a little bit.
When you get advice from other people, people say you need to scale your company this way, or you need to hire these people, or you need to get a sales person, and then you need to do this, or you need to get an operations person, or you need to do that. They’ll tell you how they think you should do it based on what they’ve read or maybe what worked for them. But, at the end of the day, you really have to figure out who you are, what you want, what you’re good at, and what you’re weak at. The idea here is that you are looking for someone to fill your areas of weakness.
If you want to grow really fast and you want to become really successful, it’s not your job to figure out all of your weaknesses and spend all of your time focusing on making yourself better. I’m not saying you don’t work on becoming better at things. What you do is you figure out what you’re really good at, and you work on becoming really good at the things you’re already fairly decent at. You hire people to take care of the things that you’re weak at. What you’ll probably find most of the time is, a lot of the areas that you’re weak are the things that you’re not attracted to, the things that feel painful to do, the things that suck the energy out of your life when you’re doing them. It’s a struggle to get good in those areas. It’s a struggle to read about those areas. It’s a struggle to work on those areas because they maybe go against who you are.
What I believe the ideal is, is that you figure out what you’re good at and what gives you energy and what you enjoy doing and what you do even if you weren’t making a lot of money doing it. Then you focus on that skill and you become a master of that skill, you become excellent. If you’re a sales person and you love it, become a fantastic salesperson. If you’re an operational person and you suck at it, you’re not good at making processes, you never followed the process, and you find all kinds of pain in building the process, find somebody to do that for you. Go focus on selling and growing the company and you hire somebody that loves being an operations manager or operations assistant to fill in where you’re weak. Together you’ll make a great team.
Now, long-term if you want to scale, you’ve still got to get yourself out of that sales role. You won’t move yourself to the next level but you can grow quite big if you’re working in the area that you are naturally good at, and you develop the skills and you hire people around you to take care of the things you hate. You hate doing a lot of the office stuff, hire somebody. You’re not great at bookkeeping, don’t do it, hire somebody. Granted you’ve got to go sell enough to be able to hire these people but if you want to go fast, you work on what you’re best at. You hire people to do the stuff you’re not great at and you don’t love and it doesn’t give you energy.
