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Effective Delegation for Perfectionists: How to Let Go Without Lowering Standards
00:42:09
📄 Are you stuck doing everything yourself because no one else can do it “right”? In this episode of Build Your Business, Matt and Chris Reynolds break down why perfectionists struggle with delegation—and how to fix it. Learn how to build...
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast, powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:12]
B
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. You're listening to the Build you'd business podcast. I am your co host, Matt Reynolds, here with my little brother, Chris. What's up, man?
- [00:34]
A
Hey. Hey. How's it going?
- [00:36]
B
Been a couple weeks since we recorded. We saw each other in Chicago a couple weeks ago for the board meeting, and then I immediately went off to Mexico for my 25th wedding anniversary. For those of you watching on video, you can see how tan my face is and freckled and been in the sun a lot. Had a great vacation, Very relaxing. I've now trained 14 days in a row, no breaks.
- [00:59]
A
Excellent.
- [00:59]
B
I've eaten really clean, really backed off alcohol. Sleep has been great. So the crazy thing about that is that training and sauna and cold plunge, I do all that stuff every day. It takes about an hour and a half to do all that stuff. For me, when I'm in the midst of work death mode, I'm like, I don't have an hour and a half to give. And then I realize that when I do give the hour and a half, all the other work is way more effective and more efficient.
- [01:29]
A
And so there's no question it is definitely that way. If you can convince yourself to do it, the rhythm of it is just everything is better.
- [01:37]
B
Yep. So things are going great. Board meeting went great. Really happy with business right now, and things have started to slow down. I don't have any travel on the schedule right now, which is the first time that's occurred in probably in years. I'm sure something will pop up. But it's nice because going into summer, the pool's about to open and could just kind of hit a good stride of like a regular rhythm, which is a regular schedule, which is important because when you're traveling, it's just, you do the best you can, but it's. It's hard to get into that rhythm. So we're going to dive right in today and talk about effective delegation for perfectionists, something that we, both of us, have a lot of experience in, both because we are perfectionists, and two because we've had to learn how to delegate and how to do that well for. So we've talked to a lot of owners over the past several months as we've done this podcast. We've talked about things like Setting core values and all of those things, even writing SOPs. But how to truly delegate? Well, especially if you are a perfectionist or especially if you have superhero complex, which most entrepreneurs do, and they're like, well, I can do it better than anybody else. Doing that really at a tactical level in the trenches is much more, much easier said than done.
- [02:49]
A
Yeah, yeah, there's no question. I mean, I think a big part of this is how do you, how do you ultimately get to the point that you trust somebody? Right. Like, I think delegation starts with trust, of course. And you won't ever delegate something to someone that you don't trust can actually get the job done. And so I think all discussions of delegation start with a discussion about trust and how you develop it with your employees and your staff.
- [03:14]
B
Yeah, interesting kind of bridge and excellent side note here is that in the next few weeks we'll have my coo, Andrew Jackson on to talk about what he calls the trust equation. It's his presentation that's kind of something that he has really owned in the business. And it's how we've taken our core values and the things we believe. And that when you have shared motivation and experiences and things that like Andy Grove talks about in high output management, Andrew's really put this together on how that forms this collection of ideas, form trust between company and client, between employee and manager, between. Between coworkers. I'll just say you've heard some of these stories before that when I had to learn how to do this at Strong Gym, I've had to learn, obviously learn how to do this at a much greater level at Barbell Logic. And in the beginning, when you first start a business, you're, you're typically a business of one and you do everything and the day comes where you are a bottleneck for the growth of your business. And so you have to learn how to delegate to other people. And so the question is, how do you start to do that? And so we do have, we have episodes on SOPs and writing those systems and standard operating procedures. I think that's. Those are the things that have to be done before the delegation occurs. I think the delegation itself, what I'd really like to talk about a lot today is how we train employees using those SOPs to build the trust to then actually give it away. I'll kind of lead in with that. And I don't know if you have a personal story there or any comments on that kind of overview of how I look at it.
- [04:52]
A
Yeah, no, I think those things are right the thing about a well structured SOP is that it should provide enough guidance for someone who is good at following the instructions. Right. And I think the reality is that for most businesses, that's going to be a fair amount of the things that you need to get done. Right? There's just a fair number of this thing happens. We do this. I think leaning back on some of the conversations we've had about how do you delegate the things that maybe are a little bit resistant to the sop, which means that they've fallen outside of a normal process. And I think that's where you really start needing to lean on this. You know, what is the level of expertise of my employees and all of that kind of thing. So when you start the delegation process, it really should just be define the sop, make it crystal clear what needs to be done. But in the process of defining the sop, and I'm not sure we've actually talked about this in detail, I'm not sure how we missed it, but in the process of developing a sop, you want to make sure that you also talk about what to do in the circumstance that the SOP is not working, or it doesn't apply, or, you know, it's like a fail safe scenario, something like that. Because what you will find is that your ability to delegate and actually increase the amount of time that you have available to put your brain on important things is mostly about how much that SOP can apply and actually reduce the total amount of times people come to ask you questions.
- [06:32]
B
Sure, there has to be some flexibility built in, right? And so I think Indy Grove talks about this in his book as well as first off is like, why is this really necessary? Like, we can talk about it even from an ethereal point of view, obviously, like having a group of people with shared core values and with a shared mission is extremely important. And we've got podcasts on that. But at a basic math level, like if we just use math for every hour, you know, for example, I'm leading the sales team right now. We have a sales team of six. So we have six people on the sales team. And I'm doing this because I know how to sell and I've got a lot of experience there. But if I do all the sales, even If I'm selling 40 hours a week, which I'm not, I become a bottleneck for the company. Now if I instead, if I write the SOP and train my sales employees well and then delegate that out to them and give them that responsibility and the team is six people. Let's say it lands really well with five out of six, because honestly, most of the time, it's not gonna land well with 100% of the people. But let's say we get 80% or 85%, whatever, and it improves their ability to close by 50%. Right. What I have effectively done, if I spend, say, 40 hours in a combination of. It shouldn't take me 40 hours to write the SOP. It takes five hours to write this up, or sometimes two hours or sometimes less to write the SOP. And then let's say 40 hours total and training the employees, actually doing role playing on sales calls, things like that, to actually teach them how to do that. And it takes with 5 out of 6 and gets them 50% improvement in sales output. I'll gain somewhere in the ballpark in our business, specifically, of 25,000 additional output hours that I couldn't have given. So it is orders of magnitude higher, especially when you're able to delegate to not just a single person, but to train and delegate to multiple or teams of people, which all of your managers should be doing and all your C suite should be doing as well. And so, from a basic math standpoint, you are no longer the bottleneck because you've trained people. Now. I also want to say this. I'm not great at this. I'm really good at writing SOPs, and I'm really good at going over SOPs. But the thing that made Andy Grove so great, and we've talked about him before, CEO of Intel in their peak years, is that he was a great trainer of people. And my favorite type of person is when we hire from the inside, someone who already understands the core values. I want to come back to that in a minute because I think there's another piece that's at play here that they understand where we're going. I can give them the sop and they can take the initiative and run because they already have the skill set. And so that's the easiest way to do it. But that's not the most common way.
- [09:32]
A
Yeah, no, that. It's not extremely scalable. Right. That's. The other thing is, like, you can't scale from the inside forever. It just doesn't. I mean, the idea is just. Just eventually you have to learn how to train people from the outside, from the ground up. Now you can bring them in at a level where you're not the one doing the training, so that you train the trainer and the trainer begins doing the training. Right. So lots of ways that you can sort of get to the point where you reach the level of scale that you want to reach. But I. I definitely think that the. For every business owner that is running into the issue of, you know, time management problems, like, oh, I'm drowning. And I mean, we just had an episode where we were both like, holy crap. Like, we're both drowning. For most people, it is just a delegation problem. It's just that you need to sit down and write this up. You. You are literally only so many hours of work away from actually being done with this problem. But it's the combination of the SOP and the training. And the training is going to take more time than you think it should take more time. Oh, yeah. You got a lot of this stuff in your head that the SOP may not capture. A lot of this stuff is around judgment. You've been in the business for a really, really long time, and you maybe assume some set of judgment that they're not going to have. And so it takes time for people to see the way you work and the way that you respond to various things. I even think there's sort of a valuable master apprentice kind of relationship there where you can do it with not just one, but with multiples.
- [11:00]
B
Yep.
- [11:01]
A
You have to take regular breaks to explain, this is why I made this decision.
- [11:04]
B
Yep.
- [11:05]
A
In this circumstance. And then ideally, that's sort of informing the SOP further. Right. Like, you sort of try to institutionalize the things that are in your head around, you know, why you made those choices.
- [11:16]
B
Yeah. Which always comes back to core values. And this is who we are, and this is why we made this decision. So a couple other side notes here. Number one, the training of employees must be done by their direct report. You cannot hire this out. I can't hire out how to train the VP of Finance who's gonna be the cfo. He reports to me. I'm the guy that trains him. And I've spent a lot of time this year training him. He's done a really great job. But if they direct report to me, I. I'm training them. And if they direct report to one level of my C suite, that person on the C suite trains them. Right. And then can report up to me. But you can't delegate out the training. Right now we can get lots of help with AI and other things and helping get the SOP written. But the training itself must come from the direct. From the manager. So whoever that person direct reports to. So that's number one. Then. The other thing is this. So I think really, the foundation of this episode that we may come back to, because I think it makes a lot of sense in from a sort of systematic way, is that there is a delegation ladder. We've kind of touched all on these points, but to be clear, it really is levels of trust. And so the first level is do exactly what I say or do exactly what the SOP says. Right. And there are certain jobs like custodial type work that. That might literally be as far as it needs to go, because it's super, super simple. You know, if you. If you know you're running a retail store and you need somebody to stock shelves, just follow the list, right? There's rarely a real hard decision that has to be made. But then you get to the next level of trust and it's okay, do the research and then ask me questions that you might need help to get answers for. And that's level two, which is. So now they're taking some ownership of that sop. Then there is the. You have seen these places that you talked about where the SOP is not perfect, or this problem or this challenge doesn't fit into the SOP perfectly. That next step of trust is give me the proposed solution. You ask the question, but you answer the question. The employee, the person that I'm managing, and you come to me with the challenge, the question you asked, and the proposed solution, and then we'll talk about it and maybe we tweak a little bit, right?
- [13:39]
A
Yep.
- [13:40]
B
Step four is you make the decision and then tell me what you made. You make the decision. This is where you should be with your C suite, by the way. Like, it's very rare that my C suite. I had a great conversation yesterday with my cmo, and we were talking about some challenges, and I had some ideas, and I sent him kind of an idea sheet a few weeks ago. And the overarching challenges we totally agreed on, but how I would do it tactically, he was like, I think this is better. And I was like, that is better. And I trust you to make that. That's why you're the CMO and why I'm not the cmo. Right. And then the last one is they own the outcome entirely. Right. And maybe at that point, these are C suite level employees, CEOs that have worked in the company long enough that you're like, you can just go. And I don't even need a ton of reporting from you. I want to know that progress is being made. But ultimately, I trust you completely in your job to do your job, to Handle all the challenges to fix the situation. So we start with the follow the stop exactly 100%. And as you gain trust and experience and shared experiences and cultural values and all those things, you eventually get to a place where in a perfect scenario that employee, manager, C suite, whatever, they can just do their job in a way where they never have to ask the questions, never have to get permission. They take initiative and ambition to do the thing, and you trust them entirely that the decision that they make is the same one that you'd make or better than the one that you would make.
- [15:17]
A
And that's the primary difference. I mean, like what you end up with there usually is someone who owns some section of the P and L, which is to say the profit and loss statement. So you just. For people that are listening, there's a idea here that parts of your business might actually be. You might have a manager responsible for both the revenue and the expense side of that particular unit, whatever that is. This is sort of the company grows. When someone owns their whole section of the P and L like you, you trust them a ton.
- [15:43]
B
Like that's right.
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A
They're driving, you know, they're, they're probably being paid also based on those numbers, the profitability of their P and L portion, the whole concept there is, it has to get to a point where the decisions they make are better than the decisions you would make because they are more the expert than you are in that area by that point in time. That's it. I mean, that's, that's the magic. It's where you want to get.
- [16:05]
B
That's right. Now let's take a step back because I know most of our listeners are not at a point where they have a C suite. C suite is like your team of top level executives, right? So chief, whatever, chief marketing officer, cto, cio, coo, all that sort of stuff. Most of our listeners are not going to have that, but they are starting to add employees. And now we may be in a position where we're not a company of one, we're a company of five or something, or 10 or whatever it is. And the two ways again that I remember that Andy Grove talks about, how do we do this well, how do we delegate? Well, well, there's only two primary factors that really make this work and work well. And number one is that you can have increased motivation by your employees if your employees are truly motivated. And there's different levels. There's, you know, there's self interest and there's, there's motivation by pay or Bonus, there's motivation by whatever the thing is, like they have stock options and they're trying to increase the value of the business. There's. And then a lot of times it's just they're hyper motivated. Cause they're just, they want to be successful in their job, they love the business, they have a shared mission, all of those sorts of things. One of our jobs as one of our primary jobs as owner entrepreneur of a business CEO is to make sure that we are able to cast vision well and motivate our employees all the way from the C suite down to the custodian, right?
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A
Yep.
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B
So improved motivation improves output, but also once you get to the point that they're hyper motivated, you have to improve capability. It's a skill set. And this is the thing that you're really training now. I would argue that you're actually training on motivation as well. If you're not constantly talking about core values and our mission and where we're going and things like that, then you'll lose that. And if there are people are just. This is the difference between somebody who is a typical blue collar worker who just punches in and punches out. And again, I'm not. Some of those blue collar workers are making $150,000 a year and have, you know, they clock out at 5pm and they don't have any responsibility till the next morning they clock in. There's some value to that for sure. But for your employees, once they are hyper motivated, which is your job, the next job is you've got to make sure that they have the skill set needed to actually do the thing to get the output. And this is where the SOPs and, and the training and improving the capability. So I can have a hyper motivated sales team and I think I do have a pretty hyper motivated sales team and that's an ongoing conversation. But if they don't really know how to close, then it doesn't matter how motivated they are, the job doesn't get done. You can have a hyper motivated developer, but if they don't know the code, the code base, they don't know how to write in code, that whatever the thing is, you have to train them in that. And it's 99% of the time it's more than just handing them the sop, it's handing them the SOP and saying now we're going to walk through the SOP and now we're going to do it together and then we're going to explain the whys and you're going to Ask questions about why do you do it this way? Well, here's why I do it this way. That's the training. And so that training aspect, I don't know an exact percentage, but typically my guess is the writing or creating of the SOP is pro, probably 10% to 20% max of the time spent. And 80 to 90% is then training the employees on that SOP, on that skill set.
- [19:35]
A
And if you want like really, really solid, just easy to wrap your hands around, idea of, of what that training looks like, it can be fairly straightforward, especially on a one on one basis where you basically say, watch me do it, then you do it while I tell you what to do. And for most people, that's your, their hands are on the keyboard on the second one, if it's kind of thing and you're walking them through it. And in the third one it's, you do it. And I'm not saying anything. At the end we talk about it. Right?
- [20:06]
B
That's right. And then you build enough trust where you're like, I don't ever have to even see it because now I know that you, you can do the thing.
- [20:12]
A
There's one more step in there that I would normally have people do as well is observe while they train somebody else.
- [20:19]
B
Right.
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A
A colleague. Right?
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B
Sure.
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A
And that's not to say this doesn't go away from, I mean, you're also training that colleague, so it's not, you haven't gotten rid of that duty by, by telling somebody else to do it. But what you would do is say, look, this is just like classic classroom type stuff.
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B
Sure.
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A
When you teach something, you learn it better. Like that's just what it is when.
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B
One teaches, two learn.
- [20:40]
A
Yep, that's right.
- [20:41]
B
That's the deal. Yep.
- [20:42]
A
So you can use that same concept here. And it works really, really well. One thing that I, I will mention, I think this is important for those of you that are in this position. Maybe you've been in this position multiple times and, and, and you've been frustrated because it doesn't seem like the people that you're, you're putting in place are really actually lifting load from your plate. One of the things that I would say is there's a couple reasons that could be. One of them is that you may be the problem. Okay. So just be aware, you might be the problem. It could be that.
- [21:13]
B
Can you go into that, like in, in what ways do we see that?
- [21:16]
A
Yeah, so the ways that we typically see this is you struggle with communication in general. So it's Difficult for you to explain the things in your head, out of.
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B
Your mouth you know how to do, but you don't know how to communicate to someone else how to do it.
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A
And the second one that I see, but I probably see this a lot more frequently, is someone who gets really frustrated really fast, right? So when you're teaching someone else a thing and they're not picking it up, they're. They are sensing from you this rising temperature that's happening. Like, oh, it's getting, it's getting more and more dangerous the more I don't get this. Right. Which is making them even have a harder time figuring out. So that's. Those are the two things I normally see when it's.
- [22:01]
B
You let me play on that second one for just a second because I think that second one is directly related to what I would even say is like that second issue of, like, getting frustrated quickly as the teacher, as the master is a perfectionism problem. It's because you are a perfectionist and you want it perfect. But you have to understand, we've homeschooled our kids and we start teaching your kids math. It's single digit addition. You don't go to calculus. You can't. Right. And so it's one step at a time. They are going to make mistakes. Now, one frustration that I've had in the past with my own daughters in teaching them is that they are quick to get frustrated. If the student is quick to get frustrated, this is where it comes back to the motivation piece. You have to learn how to. I do this all the time with my training clients, right? Like, they're frustrated at themselves because they can't get the squat motion movement technique perfect. And I go, hey, you're doing great, dude. Let's go back three months and look at what your squat looked like three months ago. This is so much better. Yeah, we're always going to tweak. We're always going to like, our aim is perfection. I've had to tell lots of clients, just so you know, I'm not frustrated. I know that I keep telling you to, you know, stay on midfoot and not get on your toes. And you're struggling with that. But I can see that you're trying. So as long as I know that you're trying, I'm going to keep using tools in my tool bag to help you find that solution, that whatever that is that makes the light bulb go off. As the teacher, as the master, you have to be able to do that. But likewise, you also have to be able to motivate the student to say, like, it's okay to fail because the greatest learnings are in the failures, they're not in the successes. And so you can celebrate the failures. And obviously there's times when somebody's made a mistake in the business. There's times when I've made a mistake in the business where cost the business $100,000. That's a little harder pill to swallow. But during the training of this stuff, like, oh, I screwed up the role playing on the sales team, okay? That's why we're role playing and why we're not doing it with a real learn it here client here. And by the way, if you screw it up with a client, and this is the other thing that I'll do, is when I start to test this out with somebody like a sales team, I give them kind of a low ROI client, a low risk, low ri, low return. I'm not going to give them a VIP client the first time they do it. So it's like, hey, if you fumble your words and you kind of like, it's okay, it will be okay, right? And so that's. That comes back to the motivation. So we have to be able to teach and communicate well, but we also have to be in a spot that we are continually motivating and encouraging during the teaching process and not getting frustrated because we are perfectionists. They will not be able to do it as well as you do in the beginning. If you teach well, by the end, they'll be better than you. That is the ultimate goal.
- [24:59]
A
In some circumstances.
- [25:00]
B
Yeah, that's true. But even if not, you talk about, even if not, Even if they're 80% of you and you have 10 employees that are 80% of you in all of those things, you have just by orders of magnitude, no question, increased the output of the company.
- [25:14]
A
There's also one more caveat that I feel like is an important one to hit. And all of those things are right. Like, look, most of the people that you would pick for a role, most of the people that would apply for the role are going to be the kind of people who want to be in that role, want to learn, want to become good at whatever they do, you know, whatever. There is an occasional situation that I've seen and sometimes it, it just emerges in an organization, depending on how things have gone, where you end up with people in the role that you either inherited or like, whatever, whatever it is. Like, let's say that you acquire a business, right? Like, in that situation, you're in an interesting situation, because you didn't. You didn't pick people.
- [25:55]
B
Sure.
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A
And so when that happens, the one thing that you need to keep an eye out for is sometimes the person's in the wrong seat.
- [26:02]
B
Correct.
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A
Or they're the wrong person entirely.
- [26:05]
B
Right. Like, exactly.
- [26:06]
A
You cannot fix that. You cannot train that. And one of the things I want you to always keep in mind here is, like, if you've crossed all the other things, if you're not getting frustrated, you're, like, perfectly calm going through it, and you're. And you're motivating them. You're saying, hey, listen, it's totally okay. Like, we're supposed to be making mistakes now. That's how we learn, you know, whatever. If all of that's going well and you're spending a right amount of time and you're, you know, you've worked on communication, made sure that's clear, and they don't get it. And they don't get it. And they don't get it, and they don't get it. They're the wrong person.
- [26:36]
B
That's right.
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A
And you will never fix it.
- [26:38]
B
That's right.
- [26:39]
A
There is one way to fix it, and that is to help them get another job that isn't. That isn't that job.
- [26:44]
B
The other example you gave is even more common. So you're. I agree 100% that there are times that. And there's. By the way, it's an easy excuse to say, I bought the business and it came with these employees, and there's gonna be some employees that are wrong, and I'm gonna have to fire them, because that's not really your fault in that situation. But the reality is, I've hired the wrong employees before, as have you.
- [27:05]
A
Oh, me too.
- [27:05]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And you train them and you're like, I thought you had the potential for this, and you don't. And so this is where the old adage of hire slowly fire quickly. Once you know that the person's not the person, you get them out. And so I've had to do that. And the nice thing about that is, is that. And I think this should be authentic. Anytime I've had to fire somebody, I immediately take the. I pretty much take the blame for it right now. There are times when, you know, maybe an employee's done something heinous or something, and so you fire them. And the main reason is, like, listen, this thing was totally out of bounds. But ultimately, I will still almost always say, like, hey, this is my company, and I put you in position to do this. And that was obviously a mistake on my part. Like you take some role in. You have to. Internally, I take a hundred percent of the responsibility in my brain. Even if they do something heinous, I'm like, well, then I hired somebody who would do something terrible in my company to hurt my company. And that's a me problem.
- [28:10]
A
That's actually, that's actually right, that's right.
- [28:13]
B
Now I may not go into that level of detail in the process of firing them because that's, you know, not really what they want to hear. That needs. As a matter of fact, we probably need to do an episode on how to fire people, because I can remember the first time I fired somebody and she cried in my office for 45 straight minutes. And then I called you and you're like, oh, you screwed that completely up. And you walked into, we need to have that talk at some point.
- [28:31]
A
Go watch Moneyball on a, on a podcast.
- [28:34]
B
Right? And so what will happen more often for me is you think the person, you may give the person a promotion because they're doing great at the job that they have. And so everybody wants to climb the ladder. And the only way to climb the ladder in your business and these corporations is to do exactly as you said. You train them on the skill set, they become masters at the skill set and they start to train others as well. And then they go from essentially employee to manager to mid level manager to, you know, upper manager to executive, whatever. That's the way this works. But there are lots of times where I've put somebody in a position who is an excellent worker at this part of their position. But as I move them into the new position, I was like, oh, they're not good at this at all. And so, you know, on a sales team. And by the way, if my sales team's listening, I'm not talking about anybody specifically here, but I've seen this happen before where they're just great people persons. That doesn't mean they're great at sales. I've had people on the sales team before that. I'm like, oh, you shouldn't be on the sales team. You should be on the customer service team. You're a customer service person. And I've had customer service people that I'm like, listen, this person is a sales machine. They do a customer service call with a pissed off client and the client comes back and has makes an upgrade and they spend more money. I'm like, that person needs to be on the sales team. And my head of client experience she's amazing at both. Like, she's one of the best I've ever seen at both customer service and sales because she never sounds like a salesperson because she genuinely cares about people and wants what's best for them. And often what's best for them is a higher level of service with the business. And so you just have to watch for that as you want to be able to play to people's strengths, where they're strong and where they can succeed best is where you want them in your business. Obviously, no matter who they are. From lowest level employee custodian all the way up to executives, there is a process of training and skill acquisition where they get better at their job. And so you want to be able to also think about not just do they have the skill set today, but do they clearly have the potential to have the skill set in the short term future. And so this person is a great customer service person, but they need to be on the sales team or vice versa. But they don't exactly know how to do sales yet. They're just great people persons. And I think they would be awesome at sales because they continue to accidentally do sales anyway. You just then you're hiring on potential now. You might move them in that position and maybe they suck at sales. And so you're like, nope, back to customer service. Right. And then sometimes you have the person who is just never motivated. No initiative, no ambition. And what it really comes down to is they don't have shared values or a shared mission. And when you have that person, it's not a move them around on the org chart. It's a get them out of the business in general.
- [31:32]
A
I've made this mistake. I know you've had to have made this mistake. Move them around the business is normally not a good idea in general anyway. If you find yourself and by if you get any advice from me at all and you think like, oh, I should take this advice, this is it. Once you've moved somebody twice in the organization, that's it.
- [31:53]
B
Yeah, they're done. The movement should be upward, not lateral.
- [31:59]
A
There are rare, rare occurrences for lateral. But yes, in general, no, correct.
- [32:03]
B
There are times when you see that this person can absolutely fill this role and fill it well. And they're on one team and they need to move to another team. And often they'll move the other team and maybe manage the other team. Cause they're so. So there's often an there an upward and lateral movement on the org chart. But typically lateral movement ain't great. And two lateral movements is one too many.
- [32:25]
A
Yeah, that's exactly right.
- [32:26]
B
So most of the movement should be upward, and it may be up and over a little bit. There may be 5 degrees, 10 degrees of change. But it should typically come with some level of promotion because they are exceptional at this thing. And that should be something that's on. On that team that maybe they're not doing that exact thing. So it's not truly a lateral movement. It's a promotion in the team itself. On that team. And yes. So, yeah, I totally agree. I think two lateral movements is one too many.
- [32:54]
A
Like, think about this. For, for listeners that are, you know, hearing this and going like, oh, like, that's, that's interesting. Like, okay, I'm gonna talk to you for a second. If you are moving someone around multiple times or you keep shuffling them because they aren't making it in this role or the other, the actual problem is you're afraid to fire them. That's what's going on.
- [33:15]
B
Yeah. So. Yeah. So next week we'll do how to fire your first employee, which really still sucks, but. Okay, go ahead.
- [33:21]
A
It is hard to fire someone. You're eventually going to have to do it. And if you move them multiple times, the problem is not them. The problem is you are afraid to fire them. They may be a great employee of some other business, but they're not a great employee of your business for whatever reason. Right. And so I've always used those types of situations as an opportunity to say, look, I like you a lot, but the reality is I just can't find a fit here that makes any sense.
- [33:47]
B
Right.
- [33:48]
A
Let's. Let's see what we can do to find another spot. So we'll, we'll dive into more detail.
- [33:52]
B
Save that for next week. For next week. I think there's a lot there and how to do that well and how to help them keep their dignity in it. And so we'll, we'll dive because it's tough if you, if you haven't. And this is something as an, as an owner, you should practice. And so anyway, yeah, we'll get into that next week. Okay. So any kind of closing thoughts there on things we haven't touched on that we need to touch on?
- [34:12]
A
No, I think the only other thing that I'll say is as they rise in the organization, say they're, they're good. You know, we're. We're off the track of the ones that, that are struggling, but they're. They're good. Everyone will eventually hit the spot where they don't, they don't know enough and they are going to need more training. When that happens, be sure in your organization that you've got opportunities for them to take on outside training that are outside of you.
- [34:38]
B
Right?
- [34:38]
A
So there are lots of opportunities for people to get better at these various roles and that includes conferences and all that kind of stuff. But there's sure everyone's going to run into that problem too. And in small organizations we probably at some point need to have the conversation about what does it mean when you scale an organization. And you need to do this thing called top grading, which is something that people talk about all the time. It's a weird word that is used sometimes.
- [35:00]
B
It's how we hire from the outside, it's how we do performance reviews from the inside. But it's.
- [35:05]
A
So maybe we do firing and then maybe we talk a little bit about top grading after that. So there's some, some idea what that looks like.
- [35:12]
B
I would just say that my, my last wrap up point, Chris made the great point that if you're moving an employee around and you can't find a fit for them, they're just the wrong employee for the business. You got to let them go and you're scared to fire them. But the other thing that I see is that more often even or as often is that the owner is scared to truly delegate. And so absolutely where that will often present itself is you just keep working on the SOP forever because it's easier to work on a piece of paper or a plan or you know, whatever, some instructions than it is to actually give it away. And what I would say is much like has been adopted by the tech industry of, of minimum viable product of an MVP. You should have an MVP SOP. Do the best you can, but the SOP should not take you 10, 20 hours to write. Get the MVP SOP out and delegate it and start training right then. And what you really need is the first step of that SOP to be pretty tight and teach them and train them on the first step and let them ask the questions and that will help inform step two. And so I don't think you should go into it with just step one of the sop. I think you should have a basic outline, but the SOP can actually be just an outline in the beginning and you continue to fill it over time. It's a living document. And so start delegating today. Don't spend all your time, don't spend the next six, six months or a year writing SOPs. And doing no delegation, like get the outline of the SOP written, delegate and start training right now. And then as you're training them, you'll make additions to the sop, but you also give them opportunities to make additions to the sop, which also is a great tester, that they're actually understanding the skill set needed for the job. They start to see the holes in the SOP or places where steps need to be added or taken away or changed in chronological order. You give them opportunity for that. And this is why something like as simple as a Google Doc is so great. Because you can have multiple people making, making changes at the same time, while also if they make a change that you hate, you can go back to the history, you can go the version history and go like, oh, let's go back two versions and clean this up. You can also give them rather than editing rights, you can give them suggesting, so they can just make the suggestions like delete this sentence and add the sentence and then you can accept it. So those are all again parts of the trust equation where it's like, how much do you trust them to write this up, to actually make the edits and make the changes? In the beginning it may just be like, make comments and make suggestions and we'll talk through it on the next call. Last part of this is this, the training. If you don't do this, you're not going to train them. The training needs to be scheduled and reliable so they need to know that it's coming, right? Not just like, oh, we're putting out a fire because the sales team sucks right now. Again, I'm not talking to my sales team using as an example, but like, hey, this, this part of the business isn't working so we're gonna start doing some training there. No, no, no. Training should have been happening all along with the team. And so those things need to be regularly scheduled. And you know, there are times when you'll get to a point as you build trust where it doesn't have to be weekly and it doesn't even have to be bi weekly. Like maybe it's monthly or maybe they know that once a month a standing standup meeting all the time is not always good and sometimes it's a time waster. But in the beginning of training I think it's excellent because they need to know it's coming. It'll give them an opportunity to brush up on things a little bit. Just like you would back when you were in college and you were studying, you knew a test was coming on Friday on Thursday, and on Friday morning, I would often get to school an hour early and sit in my car and do one last hour of studying. So everything was super fresh in my brain and then go in. Good employees will do the same thing with the, with the training. And so they need to know it's coming and not just surprise them out of the blue on occasion, whatever. And so that's one of the things that again, I'm not great at with the, like the sales team. As I've continued to write the SOPs and a lot of stuff has changed and AI is changing the way the SOPs are that we're trying to get on a good schedule of training my sales team. And then I also have the issue that you also probably have of. I've got two members of my sales team. They're in the uk, right? I've got one that works a regular day job and then works in the evenings and on the weekends for us. And so finding the time to do that because again, I'm trying to get orders of magnitude of output. I don't want to train each sales member individually. There will be some of that, especially with the ones that are struggling with certain pieces of this. But as much as I can do in the group, if I can train 6 people at once or 10 people at once, I get 10x on my time. And so sometimes that can be a challenge as well. But work around it and figure out a, figure out a way to do that for me. I'm, I'm pretty hardlined on my schedule for my sales team. As I've gotten back from vacation, I said, hey, you guys, tell me when you're available and I'll make sure I'm available. If I need to do an evening, which I normally don't work. If I need to do a Saturday morning, which I normally, you know, I'm not gonna typically do that. I'm like, I'll, I'll do it because it's that important to the team. We've gotta start this training. So start delegating today. Don't be scared to delegate, Delegate and train. Write the sop delegate, train. And also don't be scared to fire. If it's the wrong person, fire em. And we'll talk about that next week on how to do that. How to do that. Well, both from the perspective of the boss and the perspective of the employee, that can be done. There are good ways to do this and poor ways to do this. If you do it poorly, you'll ruin a relationship forever. If you do it well. My experience is 80 to 90% of the people that I think I have fired well, I still have excellent relationships with today. Like, there's some sting. There's some sting. There always is. Yeah, but. But time heals the wound. And then a few months later, you know, they reach out on, you know, Instagram or send me an email or something like that and, you know, thank me and update me on their new job. And they're doing great and I'm genuinely happy for them. I want that to be the case. So.
- [41:09]
A
Yep, definitely.
- [41:10]
B
That's it. All good.
- [41:12]
A
All good.
- [41:13]
B
Awesome. That's another episode of the build your business podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Catching us this Friday. I'm home for a while, so I'm good to keep recording. We should be able to come out with new episodes. I thank you for being patient with us when we have to do a re release with. Life's just been crazy with business ownership over the last couple months and things are starting to slow down. So we should be able to get these out fresh and new every Friday for you. So we'll see you guys next Friday. Teach how to fire somebody. Have a great weekend and a great week, everybody. We'll see you next Friday.
- [41:47]
A
Sa.