How Do I Build A Business That Doesn’t Depend On Me Being On 24/7?

0:02Mazda has been named Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. It starts with our approach. Every Mazda comes standard with proactive safety features. So you're more aware of what's around you, more focused on the road ahead, and ready before problems ever start. Mazda. More of what matters most to you. Go to mazdausa.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse or promote any product. You know that moment when a meeting ends and someone says, let's circle back on that next week. Everyone nods, but no one actually writes it down. The next week rolls around and it's radio silence. Nobody remembers because nobody took a note.

0:44That's why Granola exists. We love Granola in our business. We use Granola in every single meeting. And let me tell you why. Granola is an AI-powered notepad built for the way real people actually meet. Here's how it works. You take rough notes like you normally would, and in the background, Granola securely transcribes the meeting. Then it turns everything into clean, structured, actually useful notes when your meeting ends. I just came out of a meeting where we were discussing events that we're going to be planning for this year here at the$100 MBA, and Granola wrote meticulous notes for us so that afterwards, we know who's doing what.

1:20So zero balls are dropped. And here's an amazing feature that I absolutely love about Granola. You can ask any questions about anything that happened during any meeting you're using Granola with. And in fact, it's so powerful, it caused me to start thinking about our next hire. I actually asked Granola, hey, what's a reoccurring challenge that keeps coming up in all our meetings? Granola told me straight out that I was the bottleneck when it came to scripting episodes. So guess what? We made a hire and now Molly helps us out with scripting. Thank you, Molly and Granola. If meetings are eating up your day, granola is a no-brainer.

1:56You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash MBA. That's granola.ai slash MBA to get your time back. Try it for free at granola.ai slash MBA. Today's Q &A Wednesday's question comes from Gail, and Gail asks, How do I build a business that doesn't depend on me 24-7? Gail, Nicole and I live this. for years. And we're going to share with you how we got out of that life and what it cost us in that process.

2:36Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zinhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you start, grow, and scale your business. Hey, if this show has helped you in any way, it would be amazing if you dropped us a quick review on whatever app you're using right now to listen to this podcast. It helps me and my team bring you new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover the podcast so you can help someone else start their journey. Nicole, do you remember the days of Webinar Ninja, our software company, which we started in 2014?

3:14What did our life look like when the business depended on us 24-7? Yeah, I remember a lot. I wrote a lot of notes. Sometimes I get sweaty palms when I think about those days. I think the thing that I remembered, the first thing that came to mind was the notifications that I had on my phone. We had all our tools and app on our phones, of course. But one of those apps that stands out is our customer support inbox. And I had that. Intercom. Intercom, yes. We used Intercom. And I had that on my phone and I could just go into any inbox at any moment, every minute of the day to see if there was an issue.

3:53It was 24-7. Yeah. The memory that comes to mind is we went to Italy with friends of ours, Jason and Caroline, please forgive us for the story. But we were going from city to city, went from Milan to Tuscany, went to Florence. And then from there, we went down south and went to Sicily. But as the trip progressed, the more and more I was tuning in back into work. So I remember vividly we were out in Florence and we're walking around in a food hall and I had to leave our vacationing with them because I had to do like a quick meeting with the engineers, the developers to sort out some sort of issue.

4:34So I had to like haul back to the Airbnb. I thought it was just going to be like 30 minutes, but it ended up being like four hours. And I remember, you know, that happened. And then when we got to Sicily, I was on my phone constantly trying to solve some problems or work with my engineers to try to figure out the next feature release. And I remember like Jason just kind of looking at me like, dude, we're supposed to be on holiday here. Like, what are you doing? And I felt so embarrassed and I felt like maybe I need to do something about this. That's a really standout moment. I remember how tough it was on you because you felt the obligation to the business and it's like you had no choice.

5:11And I was like, okay, don't worry, you go and I'll, you know, stay with the guys. It's like we, you know, split our roles. But I remember when we were out that night and, you know, you said you'd come back after like four hours and I just kept looking at my watch going, oh, he should be here soon. He should be here soon. and it's like I was constantly taken out of the moment with just hanging out with friends because, you know, obviously I felt bad that you were back at the hotel room dealing with, you know, that thing that had come up. And it was just, yeah, it was just really awkward. And I felt we'd let down our friends.

5:45But at the same time, I also felt like, what else are we going to do? Like that was, we had no choice. Yeah. I mean, I think we told ourselves like, this is just what business is like. You know, we have to sacrifice our holiday because who else is going to do it? You know, who's going to care as much as I am and all that kind of stuff. And I think we bought into that narrative, which kept us stuck in that situation. I don't think we learned that lesson in the moment. I think when we got back home and, you know, the team depended on us even more as the team started to grow. You know, at the time, I think our team was about, you know, 12 people.

6:19And then we started to go from 12 to like 16 to 17 to eventually 30 people. And I think that we both have different moments where the, you know, the penny dropped and we were like, OK, this is not sustainable anymore. What was that moment for you? There were a lot of moments. I think, you know, holidays is a good example of how we were constantly on at times where we felt like, you know, I just wish I could enjoy the moment. And you know that Christmas is my favorite holiday of the year. I love Christmas. And I remember one particular Christmas where mom had had major surgery, had come out of surgery.

6:52It was great. It was pretty close to Christmas. And I just felt so grateful that, you know, everything had gone well. She was with us at Christmas. And there was this moment where I was like, oh, you know, this time is so precious. But we had support staff still operating during Christmas hours because... We're 24-7. We were 24-7. We understood as a company and as a service software that provided a service around the world that, you know, not everyone is celebrating Christmas at the same time. And people who are using our service, our customers would be on at that time. So of course, we're going to be able to deliver, you know, customer support, even if it was reduced.

7:30And I just thought, oh, how many more Christmases? I know it sounds a bit dark or a bit depressing, but how many more Christmases am I going to have where I'm not fully present? My mind is somewhere else and it's, you know, in the support inbox. It's worrying about my team, making sure they're on, even though we had an amazing team. It's just all these little things that kept coming up. Yeah, 100%. I think for me, the penny dropped when we were doing an all hands meeting, which is like the whole team got together on Zoom and there were like 30 boxes. Like, you know, I think Daki mentioned it in an interview once, like several pages of Zoom.

8:07And I started to realize that, like, why am I feeling so needed in this company? Why are people depending on me so much? We have so many people doing so much, doing so much work. Why am I still like on call and I realized that nobody here is empowered to make decisions You know, like at the end of the day You and I are only ones making the decisions or like at the end of the day when things get escalated or we need to make a call You know they come back to us. So that's gonna happen several times a day seven, you know, seven days a week Yeah So I think that's when the penny dropped for us and we made a hire and I think that first hire is really important to kind of start shifting the responsibility.

8:51And I really think that you need to start thinking about who can start making decisions because really decisions is ownership. It's really like you own now a part of the decision making process and I don't need to worry about this anymore. And that first hire for us was Giuseppe, who's our CTO for the company and kind of took over the tech side and a lot of the managerial side of the business. So when you say our first hire, you're talking about someone, Giuseppe in that case, CTO, Chief Technology Officer. He's at the level that we trust to make high-level decisions outside of us. Because like you said, up until that point, we thought, oh, we have to make all the key decisions.

9:30So he was a key hire because we felt like he was almost an equal, really. I think the reason why a lot of us, I'm going to speak to this problem. I think a lot of us, we have this dependency or the, sorry, the company depends on us because we believe that we are like the best person for this job. And I think a lot of us, we look at the team that we're hiring. We feel like, oh, nobody's going to be able to do this. And the honest truth is that you're just not hiring high talent people, right? When we found Giuseppe and we're willing to pay his price, we realized, oh, this guy's very talented. We were just like not trying to find high level, high responsibility, high agency people.

10:12The reason why this was so key for us is because we're a tech company. We're a software company. There's so many decisions that are dependent on my decisions on what's going to happen, whether it's customer support is telling us about a bug. Who's going to communicate that to the tech team? How does that fit into the sprint? How do we triage all the, we call them like tickets or, you know, use this tool called JIRA to prioritize what the engineers are going to work on this week in the standup, run the stand-ups, basically be the voice of the technology and the reliability of the software. So I think when we started to rely on Giuseppe, hired him and gave him the power to make those decisions, things started to change dramatically.

10:50Yeah. So for us, because it was a tech company, that was our key hire. I think it's, and what a person or a business owner needs to think about, a founder needs to think about is like, who is that key hire that can make the level of decisions that's required. And just for full transparency, like we continue to do this. Like we do this right now with our media company at the$100 MBA. You know, for us, one of the biggest key hires that we made is like hiring Josh, who's, you know, our video producer. And he's in charge of making sure that everything's shot properly. And we all the, you know, the data is saved and sent and edited properly, all that kind of stuff, right?

11:26So that is the bread and butter of this business, you know, is creating content. So you know your business, who can take that responsibility off your shoulders, who's competent enough to make decisions on their own. They don't need to go back to you and ask you questions. So I think that's a huge, huge, like, unlock. And you get what you pay for. There's no diamond in the rough. I always say this, like, a lot of people, they look for the diamond in the rough, like, I'm going to find this person that's, like, undervalued and no one knows about and blah, blah, blah. Like, they don't exist. They don't exist.

11:54I heard this example before. I forgot who said this, but, like, the Yankees, who is, like, a very popular baseball team in the U.S., they win so many championships and they also have the highest payroll. Like it's not a secret. They pay for talent. That's the thing. I think it's being so clear and being strategic and kind of smart about who it is that you're going to bring on and invest in. Because I think one of the traps that people fall into is that they need to build this massive team. But you can do a lot with a very lean team if you've got the right players. Exactly. That was a sports analogy.

12:28Yeah, there we go. This refers right there. I just want to go back to like that first month when like, I just want to give people what the after picture looks like when you actually implement this, that first month when Giuseppe kind of took over and knew the ropes, knew how to run the standups, knew how to do the meetings, knew how to report to, you know, customer support team and make sure that they're communicating smoothly. I saw a dramatically less number of messages on my phone. Like every morning I would wake up and see like my screen filled with notifications from base camp which is our project management tool from intercom from you know customer support from dms from customers that know me personally all kinds of stuff so when giuseppe started hit a stride after that first month that's the first thing i noticed i'd wake up in the morning and like i'd have like one message just from my mom like this is great like i used to hate looking at my phone because i looking at my phone always equaled problems i had to solve yeah you you raise a good point there where people had access to you.

13:27I think maybe when you're starting out, you do give people a lot of access, customers, clients, because especially when you're small. And I remember that was one of the things that we were a bit mindful of. Like, you know, when people reach out personally, where do you kind of draw the line? Right. Of like, am I obliged to respond to them because they've DM'd me? I know this person, but really it's 11 o 'clock at night right now. 100%, 100%. Fall is here. And if you've been thinking about replacing your windows, doors, or siding, now is the perfect time to give your home a fresh look and prepare for the cooler months ahead with Window World.

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15:13Visit schwab.com to learn more. all right so let's talk a little bit about like what gail can do moving forward and i kind of like to kind of break this up into three steps we experienced all three steps to kind of be able to make that first hire and and that's really where it starts like figuring out what responsibilities do you want to offload when i started responsibilities not just tasks not just like i'm busy answering emails well you want somebody to take care of a whole department the thing that's keeping you up at night, the thing that's blowing up your phone, the thing that hinders you from actually doing your best thing, your secret sauce, your talent.

15:52Or I would say working on the business, really. The leadership, whether it's increasing the business, networking so that you've got more opportunities out there versus actually working in the business and doing the tasks, running meetings. Yeah. And I would say the three criteria to identify what those things are or or that thing is, is what's taking most of your time, energy, and attention. Those are the three things I find to be the killer things that kind of sap everything. So every business is different. You need to audit your business and what it takes to run your business. You know, we give the example of Giuseppe and him kind of taking over the engineering side of things.

16:34And that was sapped a lot of my energy and stressed me out and blah, blah, blah. Here at the 100 MBA, you know, Josh is somebody who's taking care of a lot of the stuff that used to take a lot of my time and energy and didn't allow us to kind of just produce content. And then obviously, this is just the first step and you'll have other supplemental pieces that you hire. But what's that main person? What is the thing that makes your business run that you can be able to then outsource and give to somebody else? Yeah, for us, I mean, the tech side for you and the CTO, that was a key hire for us. And for me, on the customer support side was putting in CJ, who was running our customer support team, because that was a massive drain of time, reading support tickets, answering.

17:15I mean, that was training the team, training, auditing what's happening so that you can point out, hey, next time we do this, you know, you know, you can't be doing that if you're in the ticket and actually responding, which in the very, very early days we were doing. So we appreciated like, oh, what a huge relief it was when we had someone who was capable of taking that off our plate. Exactly. And at the end of the day, as the owner of the business, you have to start realizing, hey, I have to start orchestrating a team to do the work for me and not only do the work, but take on the responsibilities that I'm taking on.

17:47Now, it's hard to do when you're first getting traction, but as a business starts building, you have to start shifting with that mentality. Yes. Yeah. I think one of the things we did was to be clear about, especially when you're starting to let go, what decisions still need your involvement? And a clear example for me that comes to mind now that you're talking about this is anything to do with billing, revenue, money, money, basically money. Finances still came back to us. Yeah. If it was a question that dealt with that in the early stages, as we were training the team, then, okay, that, that can come back to us and we can make that.

18:20And then eventually we just gave them the responsibility. CJ, who's the manager, like, Hey, you make the call. You know, they had like a budget of like, okay, you know, X amount of money that they have, you know, the ability to make a call on. So yeah. And that relieved us a lot. Yes. Yeah. So step one. OK, find that position, find that person, find that role that will alleviate a majority of your time, energy and attention. And then the second step, a lot people think is to find this person and hire them. No. The first thing you need to do is document everything that you do right now that pertain to this role.

18:53Right. So it's easy to hire and train this person. So this literally means like just writing down the steps of those tasks, how you make decisions what is your decision framework one of the things i did when we were hiring giuseppe is like we would record the meetings so that we can document how does the meeting run how do we run a stand-up how do we make sure people are responsible and they hit their targets what happens when we don't hit a milestone how do we communicate to customer support when something is fixed and is ready for them to go back to the customer say hey this is Now you can enjoy this new feature.

19:28All these small little steps, that takes time. It takes about, I would say, a good two weeks. You know what's wild, though? We were doing this and we were recording all of those processes and creating. I know we're going to talk about SOPs and standard operating procedures. We were doing those manually. We're in a world now. Oh, I wish we had AI back then. I know, right? I mean, think about how fast-tracked this process is now using tools that we love, like granola to record your calls and to document all of those processes ai to trend you know translate all of those notes into a process that then you can check of course you know we run through we can but it's a huge time saver yeah we did this all manually we're doing it manually for every single process but that was key to have those systems in place so that you started to let go yeah and one of the things that we used to do is we used to you know with the new hire get them to document it themselves.

20:24Like, so we would run the meeting or run that process. They would document it. They would write the SOP, the standard operating procedure, which is basically a document in a Google doc. And then they would show us, Hey, this is what I came up with. We'd make some edits. No, do this, do that. And then they would then run the SOP, like do the thing next time and run the meeting or run the process themselves. So, so yeah, step two is to document everything that that role entails. What is step three? Well, step three is to hire for the role. Yeah, I agree. One of the things that I want to just really push is if you can't hire somebody who is talented, that is highly qualified, you need to find a way to afford it.

21:05Meaning you might have to cut costs. You might need to take a reduction in your own salary, right? Because this is going to increase the value of your company, which will eventually get you more revenue, more profit and be able to reap that benefit. But the point here is that like, Again, there's no diamonds in the rough. You need to pay for top talent. That's just how it is. And you're going to save time, money and energy by doing this. Yeah. And be OK with maybe the first person not working out. But also, do you remember we had a friend who told us about being happy with 80 percent? Yes. Carl.

21:34Carl Taylor. Carl Taylor. That was game changer, like a game changing piece of advice that stuck with me. Because to your earlier point, we think that no one can do this thing that I've started, that I've been doing for X amount of time as good as I can. And that's just a mindset you've got to let go of because there's no way your business is going to grow. And so those first hires, when they do take on a task that you've been doing, I remember him saying, you just got to be happy with 80%. Yeah. If it's 80 % good, it's better than you doing it yourself because you completely take care of that.

22:06Imagine you're doing five jobs and all five of them you hire for, all of them are doing it 80%, but now you don't have to do that job anymore. And now you're free to actually bring in more money and grow your team and be a better leader and be a better thinker. 80 % is good enough, is kind of what he said, yeah. And what's wild too is oftentimes someone will do it better than you. Yeah, and that's why you spend. That's why you spend money on these hires. When we started to adopt this philosophy, it's like, oh, it's not that I don't like managing people. I just don't like managing untalented people, people that don't have the skills.

22:40Yeah. And a lot of it might have to do with the way you've trained people as well. You've got to take that responsibility. But for sure, if they're phoning it in or just taking up your time, asking you the same question over and over again, you've obviously hired someone who's not autonomous, who's not willing to take initiative, really. And we're going through these steps, like the logistics of this, like this is like the step by step to do this. But we're going to talk about what's beneath this and what's holding you back right now, why you're doing this in a moment. Like, why do you feel fully dependent on this business or the business is fully dependent on you, I should say, and how to break through from this?

23:15Because there was a mental shift we had to go through. We're going to get into so much more. But if you're listening, if you're watching, make sure you subscribe to the podcast because we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. It's an episode where I share the five big mistakes I've made creating and selling live events. If you ever want to run a live event, which is probably going to happen if you run a team because they're going to do professional development days, parties, whatever it might be. You don't want to make these mistakes. I made every single one of them. So learn from my mistakes.

23:42And these are pivotal mistakes because these mistakes will either make or break your event. Hit subscribe so you don't miss it. So we're going to shift into some hard truths. These are things that I wish somebody told us when we were struggling with this. And I believe that you're in this position where you feel that the business depends on you 24-7 because of two things. And it's one of these two things. It could be both even. One is the economics of your business don't allow you to hire out, meaning that you're just not making enough profit. Whose fault is that? That's you as the founder's fault.

24:15I'm just going to give it to you straight. You need to fix the economics of your business, meaning that maybe you need to raise your prices. Maybe you need to lower your expenses. Maybe you need to think about how you can extract more from your customers, meaning offering upsells, offerings, other offers inside your business, solve other problems for them. The point here is that you're just not making enough profit for you to reinvest in your business. Most successful businesses they see around you, they're making healthy margins, and therefore they can hire talented people to take things off their plate because they can afford it.