In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley explains why he's intentionally working less in his ecommerce business and aims to "fire himself" within 18 months. Rather than stepping away, Josh is building a self-sustaining business by implementing five key strategies: delegating decisions to capable team members, developing leadership through extreme ownership principles, investing in his leaders' personal and professional growth, implementing scorecards focused on leading KPIs, and documenting his decision-making processes to eventually create an AI system that replicates his judgment, freeing him to focus on higher-level opportunities.

Bullet Points:

Transitioning from hands-on involvement to a more strategic role in the ecommerce business.
The goal of "firing himself" from daily operations within 18 months.
Importance of delegating tasks and decision-making to team members.
Developing leadership skills and promoting a culture of extreme ownership among team members.
Investing in the personal and professional growth of leaders through coaching and mastermind groups.
Implementing scorecards and focusing on leading indicators for performance measurement.
Documenting processes and decision-making criteria to empower the team and reduce reliance on the founder.
Leveraging AI to replicate decision-making processes and enhance operational efficiency.
Creating systems that allow the business to operate independently of the founder's direct involvement.
Building a resilient and autonomous organization that can scale sustainably.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction: Working Less to Grow More
Josh Hadley explains his goal to "fire himself" from his business within 18 months by building systems and empowering his team.

00:01:50 Strategy 1: Do Less, Delegate More
Focus on delegating tasks and decision-making authority to capable team members, even if you can do the work yourself.

00:04:11 Strategy 2: Develop Leadership and Decision-Making
Teach your team principles like extreme ownership and allow them to make mistakes, which is a crucial part of learning.

00:07:42 Strategy 3: Invest Heavily in Your Leaders
Invest in your leaders' growth through masterminds and coaching, which boosts their skills and acts as a powerful retention strategy.

00:10:22 Strategy 4: Implement Scorecards and Leading Indicators
Focus on leading indicators (KPIs) for each team member to proactively measure progress and ensure clarity on roles and responsibilities.

00:14:11 Strategy 5: Document Your Judgment
Record your decision-making processes using tools like Loom to extract your judgment and create systems others can follow, ultimately cloning yourself.

Links and Mentions:

Books
"Extreme Ownership": "00:04:38"

Tools for Documentation
"Loom": "00:14:37"

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00 I'm going to share with you why I'm working less in my business today than I was last year and the year before that. And why? Ultimately, I'm trying to fire myself from the business in the next 18 months. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I'm Josh Hadley. I've scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I'm actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. My name is Josh Hadley. First and foremost, I'm a man of faith. I'm a husband to a beautiful wife and a father of four children. I've been selling in the e-commerce space for over a decade now, doing over $20 million in annual revenue and selling multi-millionaire on Amazon, TikTok, shop and Shopify. And last but not least, I'm the host of the number one business strategy podcast in the E-com space, and that is E-com breakthrough.

Josh Hadley 00:00:54 Today, I want to dive into why I'm working less in the business today than I was a year ago, and why I'm ultimately trying to fire myself from the business 18 months from now, and the specific action items that I'm taking inside of the business, to be able to get to a point where I'm able to fire myself as the CEO of the brand. Now, you may be listening to that and thinking like, why in the world are you trying to, like, fire yourself? Like, are you no longer interested in this business? I've never been more bullish in optimistic about my brand than ever before, to be honest with you, I'm more excited about what the future looks like for the business than I have ever been in the past, and that's the and the reason why I am more excited about the future of the business is because of the focus that I have had to replace myself in the business and focus on putting smarter people around me inside the business than just myself. So I want to share with you five different things I am focused on inside of my business.

Josh Hadley 00:01:50 To ultimately fire myself and work less and less inside of the business within the next 18 months. So let's start with number one. I am doing less work, even though I am more than capable of doing the work inside of the business. Let's take this for an example. Can I go make a decision about how much inventory we need to purchase for the next, you know, back to school season or for the next, you know, holiday Q4 season? I most certainly can. I could certainly make that call. I've got a decade of experience selling. I know my brand. I know the peaks and valleys, and I know the mistakes that I've made in the past. However, what I am adamantly focused on, and especially if there's something simple that I could do in the business, like, let's take this as a really good use case on Amazon. You have like there's the forms that you have to register for it to be like, hey, this is a woman owned business or a minority owned business, or to register for trademarks and things like that.

Josh Hadley 00:02:45 Typically you would say, hey, the CEO should be responsible for that. That's confidential information. But for me, can I easily go do that? Yes, I can, but the way I approach it is, I say, number one, the people at Nike, like most certainly there's not one guy that is going around to me like, oh, sorry, this is too confidential. I have to do this myself and hording all of that information. So how does it work with the largest corporations? Number one, they're delegating authority to others. And so my biggest thing that I have been focused on is asking myself the question before I do any task inside of the business, whether it's inventory, planning decisions or it's as simple as like a trademark related decision, I am going to ask myself and say, can somebody else make this call? And if so, I'm going to let them make the call, and then I'm going to coach them afterwards. And ultimately, I want to ensure that this person has at least been familiar enough with the process.

Josh Hadley 00:03:41 Like they're not brand new. They didn't just start yesterday and they're walking into it blind. What I'm referring to is, you know, the supply chain team members that that have been here in the business for the past 3 or 4 years, instead of continuing down this path of like, needing my approval or my final blessing. I'm pushing more onto them to say, no, you can go do this. You can go make this call. You can go get this data piece. I want you to be the final owner of that. So that's number one. Ask yourself the question before you ever fire off that next email or go solve the next problem in your business. Could that be better done by somebody else? Number two, the second way that I'm trying to fi...