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Hey, this is Sharan Srivatsa. Welcome back to the Business School podcast. And every business owner I know wants the same exact thing. They want a team to take things off their plate. And then six months later, they're frustrated because they're answering more questions than ever. The weird part actually is that the business is actually getting bigger. They have more people, more customers, even more revenue. But somehow more things need the business owner. And I've been thinking about why this happens. I think most business owners end up solving the wrong problem and never replacing the right one. So. So in this episode, I want to walk you through the framework that changed the way I think about delegation, about systems, and even AI. I break this all down step by step for you, starting right now. One thing is for certain, just because it's tried and true doesn't mean it's working right now. So the big question is this. Where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how to. How to grow your business, how to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth. That is the question. And this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharan Trivata, and welcome to Business School. I'm going to ask you a question you probably heard before, but you probably have never taken seriously, which is if you got sick and you had to not be in the business for two weeks, what would happen to your business? Not, not forever, just two weeks. Say you had no phone, no email, no texts, you didn't have a chance to jump into, fix random fires, what would happen? And I'd say most business owners answer that question pretty quickly, right? And generally it's with a laugh. Some get kind of uncomfortable, some just shifty and don't want to answer the question. Some immediately start listing all the things would break. And that is exactly the reason why I want to make this episode. Because our business may have a problem. And I really think that a lot of business owners believe they have a people problem or a hiring problem, or a AI problem, or a casual problem or a productivity problem. I don't think that's what the problem is. I think your business probably has a different problem. And I think too much of it lives in your head and that's normal because you started it. You're the business owner, you're the entrepreneur. You have the things in your head that brings the value, so makes you feel useful. It makes you feel like you're adding massive value to the business. And the more successful you, the bigger the problem gets. Because the more complex web of things are in your head. So today I want to kind of try to give you a simple framework that's helped me think about this differently. It's helped me build, what, $2 billion companies, it's helped me build a bunch of teams, it helped me hand things off to other people, which I struggle with myself. It helped me use AI significantly better. This is the big deal. And most importantly, it has helped me stopped, you know, taking on work that should have never been in my plate in the first place. So let me try all of this. So the, the. A few years ago, I wanted something, I wanted a project done. And I realized that if you had to do it, you had to do most of it yourself. So you had to write the email, or you had to build the presentation, or you had to create the proposal. You're like, man, it's just easier for me to do it myself. You do the research and then you do the work and then what happens today I think that a little bit of that has changed, right? You can open AI and you can get a draft in minutes. You can get 10 drafts in minutes, in fact. And so if we all have access to the same $20 a month plan, why are people walking around right now and saying, wait a minute, AI is so amazing. I have so much extra free time. Why are people more busy than they have ever been for? Why? Why is that happening? Why is that we have the most revolutionary thing in our lifetimes in technology ever and we still are, you know, working more than we ever worked. And then I kind of, it clicked for me, right? I don't think getting the draft is the hard part. I think knowing whether it's good, it's the hard part. Because Anyone can generate 10 emails or a hundred emails or a thousand emails. Someone still has to decide which one of those ten or a hundred should go out. Anyone can generate a proposal. Someone still has to decide if that proposal is the right one, if the numbers make sense. Anyone can generate, you know, 300, 600, 900 marketing ideas and make you a bunch of Canva posts. Someone still has to decide if those actually are the right things for the business. And that somebody is usually you, the business owner, the entrepreneur. So what is the real job of you, the business owner? So I recently heard this and the idea was pretty simple. I can't remember where I heard it. And it said a humans notice things and AI helps things. And I was like, wait a minute, what does that mean? And the more I thought about it, the more I liked it because AI wasn't sitting in your sales meeting yesterday, even though it had access to the transcript. AI didn't talk to your customer. AI didn't hear the complaint someone made on Yelp. AI didn't see the hesitation when you were selling them something. AI didn't notice that a team member look frustrated or tired. You did. That's what the business owner does. That's what the entrepreneur does. That's what the manager does. You notice things, you notice opportunities, you notice problems, you notice patterns. You notice all of these things. And then based on the collective knowledge of the noticing of these things, you make a decision. And that's why it's hard to actually explain. There's no SOP for the decision that you make because you make it with the feeling. You make it with a sense of gut of all of this. And a mistake that a lot of business owners make is they spend all their time doing the work and very little time noticing what's happening around them. And that's the problem, because now with AI, you're more in the screen. You're like, man, give me 20 more subject lines for this email. And I think that's where the businesses get stuck. So let me give you an example. Let's say every week you send an email to your customers, right? I call this the deal of the week. I hope you do it. A lot of owners do it. They'll be like, oh, I need to think about a topic. I need to edit, right? Edit the email. I need to, like, you know, maybe put it in AI. Then I need to send the email, then I need to respond to the replies. Then I had to repeat and do this every week, and it's on my calendar. And I'm like, man, I really don't want to send that email this week. The whole thing depends on you, the one person, because you have the taste, you have the knowledge, you have all the things associated with it. Now, look. Now let's say you look at the same project a little differently, right? Let's say you as the business owner, you decide what matters, and then you decide what the message should be. And then someone else builds it. Maybe that's AI. Maybe it's a team member, maybe it's a contractor, maybe it's whoever. Maybe it's a. Then you get to review it and then it gets sent. It's the same outcome, but the workload is different because it's hard for a lot of people to think about it. Big the difference, because you think that you have to Think about it. And you have to do it, because in the past, when someone else has done it, they've not done a good job. And the question is, why did they not do a good job? They can't be that much smarter than you. Like, you're not, you know, you can't be one per. You know, there's. There's something there. Why can you do it and they not do it? There's hundreds of people in the world who can do it. If I can write your email, why can't someone else write your email? And I think that's an interesting question to ask. So this is actually the smartest people. I call this the curse of capability. The smartest people often create this problem for themselves because you are capable. You know, you are good at sales, so you stay involved in sales. You're good at marketing, so you stay involved in marketing. You're good at operations, so you don't want anything to break, so you stay involved in operations. You're good at solving problems. You're like, man, I'm a problem solver. So every problem. So if you're a problem solver, every problem will land on your desk. And then you complain that every problem lands on your desk. But you said to everybody that you were the problem solver. And at first it kind of works because you have no other choice. And the business grows and the team grows and the customers are happy. And you're like, this is working. And at some point, everyone's like, bro, I need something from you. I need your approval on this. I need your direction on this. I need your answer on this. I'm waiting on this email. And everybody's to do list becomes your inbox. I'll say it again, everybody's to do list is now in your inbox. And that's what sucks, because the owner, the business owner, the CEO, love calling yourself the CEO, actually becomes the busiest person in the business. Not because they're doing something wrong, because no one showed the business any other way. It's not that you're micromanaging it. You just. You were doing it all in the beginning. You can't do it all at the end, right? So I don't know if I. If you ever. If I ever shared the story with you. Yeah. Many years ago, I had an assistant named Ava. She was my first assistant. The funny thing is that Ava never existed. All right? There was no assistant. There was no employee. There was no hire. There was just a role. And. And I. Ava had her own email. Ava had her own Email signature Ava. I even made like a picture of Ava. And before Ava never spoke to anybody. She did everything on email. And before I hired anybody, I did that role, Ava's role, myself. I documented the tasks. I actually logged into her email and responded. I, I, I was like, hey, what would be Ava's processes and all of these? And then finally I actually hired my first assistant. I was like, hey, here's Ava. She has been doing all of this. She's not here anymore. You are. And then you can just pick up where she left off. And then my new assistant just picked up where Ava left off. Just like I would off board Ava and onboard Helen. I offboarded Ava and onboarded Helen. That's all I did. And the, the reason this was good because one of my mentors told me that he just said, you know, separate your work from your assistant's work because one day you'll get an assistant and then you'll not know how to separate the work. And that was a really good thing for me. And that taught me this lesson that I use today. Because most people hire a person and then they try to create the role. I've just found it's better to create the role first. I just assume that I have a marketing person. I just like, you know, I set up their own inbox, I set up their own email. I start doing the, doing the work that they would do. And then when the person comes in, you already have everything. It's easy to hand off because they already did the thing. I think this is what is important that we should all know. And there's like a four part framework for this. Let me actually break it down for you so it's easy enough for you to think about it. I'll probably make a video on this so you can see it visually. But whenever I look at a project, I try to put it into four different buckets. The first bucket is there's some decision that needs to be made, right? What are we trying to do? Are we trying to get more leads? It's not that. Are we trying to do marketing? Like, why are we trying to do the marketing? Are we trying to get more leads? Are we trying to get more sales? Are we trying to build a brand? What is it like? What are we trying to do? Why does it matter? And what outcome do we want? So we have to make a decision. Unless you make the decision, you can't actually start the conversation and say, hey, we want to get more leads, therefore we're going to do blank, right? Making the Decision. Stating the decision is really important. So, number one, like, make a decision. Number two, you got to build something. All right? So if I say, hey, I want to get more leads, now I got to go create the thing, the vehicle, the mechanism to go get more leads. I got to create the thing, write the. I don't know, write the copy, design the marketing campaign, put it all together, and then, like, maybe shoot the video, right? I got to build a thing to actually give me the outcome. Well, once I do that, what do I need to do? I got to check it. I got to check it's accurate. I got to check there's no typos. I got to check that I didn't. There are no odds and ums. I got to check that it's useful. I got to check that. Would we be actually proud to send it? Would it actually be good for our brand? I got to check it. I got to validate in some way. And last but not least, when I've checked it and everything's good, I. I got to run it, right? I got to, like, push it, push it, live, deliver it, schedule it, send it, I don't know, repeat it, whatever that. I think that's. People forget the sequential kind of framework of, you, one, decide. Got to make a decision on what you want. Number two, you got to build something. Number three, you got to check what you build, whether what you build is good. And number four, you got to run it forever, right? A lot of times people just want to, like, say, oh, cool, I want to do marketing. And they just run it. And this is the ready, fire, aim process, right? Because I think every process in your business fits somewhere inside of those buckets. And I think the first place to look is to just pick one thing that you do every week. Just crazy. Just. Just one thing. Maybe it's sending a marketing email. Maybe it's onboarding a customer. Maybe it's a. I don't know, creating a proposal. Maybe it's following up on leads, maybe, whatever. Maybe it's like checking your email. You take out a piece of paper and you draw four columns. You divide the paper into, like, four vertical parts. You're making it. You just. Same exact four parts. You decide. You got to make a decision. You got to build something, you got to check something, and you run something, right? So first you got to decide, what is the decision? Hey, I don't want any emails to drop. Great. What is the Build something? You're like, hey, now I'm going to build an algorithm in some way that Says how to not drop emails. Then I got to check it. I want to make sure that this algorithm actually works. And I got to run it. I run it myself. Then I can actually hand that to somebody else. When you write down what happens in each column, like most people will discover something insanely interesting that you are going to be end up doing all the work in all of those columns, that's where the problem actually starts. The problem is not the fact that you're doing the work. The problem is that you're doing the deciding. You're doing the building, you're doing the checking, and then you're doing the running. And then you're like, oh, crap, I need to do the deciding again. So when you're doing a bunch of decide, build, decide, run, decide, check, check, run, check, decide, check, build, you're like, this is insane. And the crazy part is I don't share this story very often. Probably like, I don't know, maybe eight, 10 years ago. Eight years ago, 10 years ago, I was in a hospital bed, I was sick. And it forced me to really think about something where I couldn't really work. I didn't have. I could use my phone a little bit. But there were parts of the business that only existed in my head. The team was great, hired new CEO, the team cared, the team worked hard. That was not the problem. The issue was that there were questions that nobody could answer that I had never like written out a plan or a documentation or a, or if then statement to do it. I had explained it, I had talked to people about it, I had trained people on it, but I hadn't. I, I never turned that into a thing that someone else can use. And so people always think that, hey, they hire a new marketing person, hire a new coo, hire a new director of ops, hire a new va. And then they're like, this person sucks. And I'm like, bro, you never, you never helped them, you never taught them what to do, you never told them what to do. Like, how is that possible? And the issue is that if you hire somebody great, you got to like tell them what to do. If you don't hire somebody. Like I always think about, let's say you have a great athlete and you want them to, and they can play any sport. And you're like, but you got to teach them the rules of the sport to play the sport, right? So if you bring somebody from India who played cricket and then they come to the US and they're like, what is baseball? They can play the sport, they Have a bat and a ball. They can run, they're good, but they don't know any rules of the sport. They don't know what to do. You got to give them the rules. You got to give them the SOPs. You got to give them the thing. And the problem is, the thing is in our head. And I think that is the big issue now. Where does AI come into all of this? The way AI comes into all of this is I actually believe that a lot of business owners ask AI to do the wrong thing. They ask it to think. And you may be like, whoa, should you not. Well, it doesn't know what to think, right? They ask it to think. I just ask it to organize. Here's what I mean. Most owner. Most business owners hate documenting processes. I get it. Like, there is nothing fun about writing a freaking sop. There's nothing fun. Nobody wants to spend a Saturday writing an sop. But every business owner explains that their business all day. Like, all day long. They explain it to their employees. They explain it. They explain their business all day long, right? They explain to their employees. They explain it to customers. They explain it. Zoom meetings. They explain it in zoom calls. No one writes anything down. They start by talking it. So the big thing for me is, especially in this new AI world, is I just talk it. So you can either talk it on your phone as a voice note, you can use a app like Whisper Flow, and you just start talking it, and I just talk the whole thing. It's like, hey, when I want to write a marketing email, here's how I start thinking about it. I do blah, blah, blah. And then I think about it. Then I come up with four topics. I write the four topics down, and I figure out which one actually works, and I go into my email and I check which, you know, person has actually responded. Then maybe there's a customer testimonial. And then I take that, and then I make that the headline. Then I make that the proof. Like, I talk the whole thing when you talk the whole thing. And then I drop it in AI and say, hey, this is what I do. Can you, you know, can you. Can you take this and organize it so that someone else in. In my absence can actually do the thing? So this is the best part. I. I don't think we talk the thing often enough. And the crazy part is, let's say you do a lot of sales calls, right? And you're like, man, no one else can sell like me. If you just record your Sales calls after 10 of those recordings, you just feed all those recordings at AI and you say, hey, tell me the framework that I use in all of these. And then you have someone else look at it. I honestly will tell you two things will happen. One, you will get better because you will understand this invisible framework that you end up using. And second, they will be like, oh, I can do. I can do this. Now, no one's going to be as good as you. But if, let's say you close, you know, for every 10 appointments that you get, let's say you close eight of them. All right, well, what if for every 10 appointments, you get someone else close seven of them? Like, would that be okay? And you got 100% of your time back. That may be very interesting for you to say. That's okay, right? Because that's where it's fun. So my point in all of this is, number one, talk your thing. Number two, you got to map your world into, like, four columns. You got to decide something, build something, check something, run something. And it's really hard to say what. Once you have that, you can then ask, does this actually truly need me at some point? I know this is really boring, but I think the gold that you have is sitting in your. In your fathom grain, you know, notetaker, granolas. It's sitting all in there. If you just find all the things that are in there. Things at times you met with customers, the times you met with your coach, the times you met with your therapist, the times you actually met with your team, the times you did your team meetings, all of the stuff is there. If you just did that and just looked at that one process at a time, one workflow at a time. Like, if you just told yourself, hey, over the next 12 months, I'm going to do one workflow per month, your life would be so much better. Because now you have the tools so that you don't have to do any of the hard work. You don't have to sit down and in our Word document and write the thing. Because once you realize that you can talk the thing, everything happens. Because the main thing I want to tell you in all of this is AI has reduced the cost of. Cost of generating ideas and increased the cost of verifying ideas, Right? Which is why you can generate 100 subject lines to your email. But now you have to go in and read 100 email subject lines to figure out which one you like. And then if you pick the three, you don't know which one you like. You're like, you're not sure which one will actually even work? Now you're like, man, I, I could have spent all that time just writing the first one myself. And I think that is the big problem for business owners. I, I wanted to take you through all of this because I think that there is a really important opportunity for us. And the important opportunity, the real job, if you will, is to understand that the we accidentally have the entire business in our heads. And if we can find a way to get it out of our heads, everything, life gets a lot easier. So welcome to my TED Talk. Hope this is helpful. By the way, if this was interesting to you, if you liked anything tactical, that was good. Can you do me a favor? Can you screenshot this and tag me? That way I can make more like this for you. So if you like this, do me a favor, screenshot this and tag me and I can make more like this for you. Or if you want to send this to your team so that they know exactly what you're going to be doing the next week or two, then that would be good too because they can help you with this. Again, if you like this, screenshot this and tag me and I can make more like this for you. Hey, this is Sharon. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I've got a chance to build two billion dollar companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It's on my sub stack called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three peat and build the next billion. So everything's free at my Next billion dot com. Please check it out. My Next billion dot com.