How to step out of the day-to-day and let your business support you.
photo credit to @bruno_nascimento on unsplash.com
Your business has been successful in large part because of your charisma, your leadership, your vision, your entrepreneurial spirit, and your capabilities in delivering great work to clients.
But now, you want freedom of choice. You’ve built an amazing asset and you’d like to continue to have income from it. In addition, you want to do other things. Maybe you want to retire. Maybe you want to be able to work part-time in your business. Maybe you want to stick around, but have time to think strategically, or take on new types of projects that feed your yearning to learn new things.
Maybe you just want to be able to take a long vacation every year not because you have to recover from the business, but because you can afford the time and the business is fine without you. A lot of founders in your shoes cannot fathom taking a 2 week vacation without being in touch with their business. I also hear people say all the time: “I have to take two weeks because the first week is just me unwinding from the constant thinking about my business”. I’ve been there myself. I get it.
Wouldn’t it be great to be able to take a month-long vacation without your laptop? How about 2 months?
Imagine for a moment, your company, running smoothly without you. You show up by choice, knowing you are supporting your team, providing vision, or working on projects that feed your soul. You are valuable, but not necessary. Your business sustains you vs. the other way around. You can take long breaks and vacations, or short ones. You are healthy in mind, body and spirit. You take pride in what you have built and the growth that you have supported in the people you have chosen to build this business with. Clients are happy, but not dependent on you personally. The business is growing. Client projects are interesting and fulfilling. Your team is aligned. What else are you imagining?
This post provides a blueprint on how you can turn your professional services firm into a sustainable business. One that runs with you or without you. One that has value beyond you showing up every day for all of the details that may not be the highest and best use of your time.
Know that this is a journey, not a magic pill. Are you ready to begin?
Step 1. Decide on a goal.
This might be the big question: “What do I want most in my life?”
Or, if you don’t know the answer to this, don’t overthink things.
I think it can be very helpful to imagine an interim goal such as “Take a 2 month sabbatical away from email and phone”.
The trick here is to decide on a goal that is exciting enough to motivate you, but is also not so challenging, or so far into the future that it is demotivating. It should be some milestone on the way to having a business that runs itself.
Step 2. Assess your team and yourself.
Before going anywhere, it is important to know where you are starting from. If we want to get to San Francisco, and we are in New York, it is a completely different path than if we were in Vancouver Canada.
It is important to note that you need to assess your team and yourself, not just your team. You are part of the team today, and you will be during your transition to freedom. You have an impact, for good and for ill. It is very important during this step to be willing to look at yourself and how you have likely been taking actions in the past that have got you to where you are today.
It is nearly impossible to do this step on your own, with your existing team. This is because you need an outside, neutral point of view. Even the most self-aware CEOs have blind spots. Your team has blind spots, too. But a good leadership consultant or coach can assess the strengths and weaknesses of you and your team, and give you a roadmap of what needs to be improved in order to move to a new structure, uplevel the team’s leadership skills, etc.
There are hundreds of assessment frameworks and tools out there, and I recommend you speak with a few leadership coaches and consultants to find the best fit for your situation.
There is one quick assessment you can do to get a rough idea of where you are starting from. Envision the company without you– yes, totally without you. A useful activity is to imagine that you suddenly become sick, or injured and simply cannot run the business. Who do you imagine stepping up to do the things you did before? How will they do things differently than you did? Is this OK? Better? Worse? Who on your team do you think would naturally emerge as a leader, keeping the rest of the team together? What are the things you do, that only you can do, or only you can do well?
It can be useful to know more about the type of leader you are, and for your leadership team to know their strengths and opportunities for growth. Take this 5 minute quiz to understand your leadership archetype.
Step 3. Tackle burnout.
The next step, is to address burnout in your team and in yourself.
If you are burned out, you need to take this on by working on sleep, diet, water and reducing your overworking.
If your team is burned out, they need to do these same things, but they won’t if you are working long hours, being on email at night or when on vacation.
Burnout can show up at any point in the process, so it is important to note that my “steps” are not entirely linear. If burnout is severe, this may actually need to be step 1, before you can even know what you want!
Step 4. Excite and engage your team.
Once you and your team are not as tired, let your team know about the possibility of you playing a less involved role.
Your team is a wealth of knowledge, energy and possibility. Let them know you plan to reduce your role. Let them know that you support them in stepping into greater leadership.
Consider offering ownership in the company to the people that you see have the potential to step up into a more important role. Gauge their interest, and enthusiasm.
Let your team know that you believe in them, and that you are open to feedback from them about ways you may be hindering them from being leaders themselves.
At this step, it can be very helpful to offer your senior leadership team coaching to help them realize and utilize their strengths as well as shore up the gaps in their leadership skills.
Step 5. Inventory current roles and responsibilities.
What are the necessary roles in the company to take it forward without you? Think about all the things that are getting done by you and everyone else.
It can be very helpful to explore with each team member each of the things that they do, how well they like each type of task, and how good they are at each type of task. In an ideal world, everyone would be spending 70% of their time doing things that give them energy vs. taking it away.
Of course, ideal worlds are a ways away, so don’t make unrealistic promises. Just let people know that you intend to find ways that bring them closer to doing more of the things that they love and are good at. Share that you’ll be assessing these things as a team and working towards clarifying roles and responsibilities where you hope to move them to a role that better fits their preferences and talents.
Step 6. Grow your leadership team.
You’ll need to step aside in some places in order to make room for them. Encourage leaders underneath you to bring their own strengths and style to their bigger role.
You’ll need to step away from your ego here, and allow them room to fail and learn. You’ll need to compassionately guide and support them as they grow.
This will likely be a big step for you, it isn’t easy to let people do things “less well” (or differently) than you are able.
Hire a leadership coach to help them gain confidence and learn new skills, and work with a coach yourself to help you see the blind spots that you likely have that are keeping your team from growing.
Step 7. Create a shared vision.
Here, you might encourage and support the team in creating their own vision for the company. What do they see as the future of the company?
What are the milestones along the way from where the organization is now to getting to a shared vision?
You’ll need to consider how you’ll align your vision with the team’s vision, should they be different.
Step 8. Improve Processes (or create, or remove).
In this step, you’ll work to improve processes and procedures that need improving in order for the firm to run without you.
There are likely processes that have been running in an informal way, based on your intuition that you’ve honed over the years. It can be challenging to codify these, because so much has always depended on your ability to react in the moment.
Will your growing leadership team have the same intuition that you have now? Or, do some things need to be codified into a standard procedure?
How will decisions get made in the future? Not everything can or should be codified into a formal process, however, it needs to be clear how decisions and actions will occur when needed.
Are there processes that aren’t serving the team anymore, that can be officially abandoned?
Step 9. Test and reassess.
A great test is to take a sabbatical. Go somewhere, and plan to not be on email or text and let your team run the business. When you come back, you’ll have a good sense of where the team was capable and where they struggled.
Assess again after your test. You’ll like have more work now to do in #5 and #6.
What did the team learn about their roles?
What did they learn about the strengths in their own capabilities and leadership?
Where did they struggle without you?
What next steps do they need to keep growing?
What did you learn about yourself on your sabbatical?
Perhaps you now have more clarity around a longer term vision for your life, and how much or little you’d like to be in the company you have created.
p.s. Discover your leadership archetype.
I’ve created a leadership quiz to help you determine your leadership archetype. Your archetype will reveal many of your strengths, and point to qualities and skills you may need to develop in order to become a better leader.