As a Boss You Get to Create The Life You Want

It’s your business remember. You’re the one taking all the risk. You’re the one with everything on the line. If your business fails your employees will just move on but not you — you’ll be stuck with a big financial debt.

You’re the courageous warrior!

So with that risk — you deserve to create the life you want to live. You deserve to have most of your day to yourself.

But most business owners are stuck not knowing how to do that. They don’t know how to pull themselves away from the day to day operations. From running around putting out fires all day only to finish the day exhausted and questioning why they’re doing this to themselves in the first place.

As an expert at helping business owners free themselves of their business — I have a ton of conversations that start off like this:

“I want to change but I don’t even have time to do a discovery call”

If you don’t have an hour a week for your own growth you’re slave to your business. You don’t own a business, the buiness owns you. You got your priorities wrong and you need help.

Here is how you start to get out of this mess:

It starts with acknowledging that you’re the problem.

Not everyone has the humility to recognize that and in that case they’re not ready to grow — and may never grow.

To lead is to take accountability and responsibility for where things are at. Until there’s acceptance of reality there can be no change. The reality is that where you are right now is a result of the decisions you’ve made or avoided in the past.

Choosing to lead is no small endeavor. It’s a path of honour. On the deepest level it’s a path to self actualization. It’s a return to order and to your essence.

How you do one thing is how you do everything and to be a great leader will demand that you become the greatest version of yourself. And don’t think you can just hire someone to clean up your mess for you.

Someone like me can help guide you with a compass and a few maps but ultimately you’re the one that has to make and uphold the changes.

Hiring someone to do the work for you or even brining on a buiness partner on board is generally a crutch and the result will be temporary as you’ll fall back to your old leadership standards.

You need to rise up!

Your business is an expression of you. If it’s messy, fragile and unorganized it’s because you’re messy, fragile and unorganized. It’s a mirror to what’s going on inside of you.

We don’t rise to the level of our goals, we fall to the level of our systems. ~ James Clear

Are you consistently:

Working out?
Taking time to clear your mind?
Learning to get to the next step?
Eating healthy?
Planing your week?
Planing your days?

Organizing yourself is the starting point - and discipline is the ultimate act of self-love.

Once you’ve started to re-organize yourself it’s time to start organizing your business and that starts with “The Work” you do. The work your clients pay for.

To start requires an understanding that all work no matter how complaex and unique it is has a system within it, a way of doing it. That when you cook a pancake and you think it was random — it actually wasn’t and we can break it down into exact steps. 1. Open box. 2. pour in in bowl. 3. Add 1 larrge size egg. There’s a way of doing things and the first step is in documenting every possible scenerio.

I get a lot of resistance on this sometimes, especially when working with artistic type of businesses. They don’t like to feel that their work can be boxed into a system but it can.

A hair dresser for example has a way they approach a clients head. They have things they say that make for a nice experience, they may ask what the client wants, they know their limits on what they do and what they don’t do, they have their way of looking at the shape of the head and face, they have their own rules on where to start and when it’s done and how to use the scissors. In essence this is what a school would do, teach systems.

So you need a school within your business about your method of doing things the way you do things. Of course that requires confidence.

You need to deconstruct the work you do and the decisions you make in your head with clients and document it down on paper for others to follow a standard you will have to uphold.

Never set a rule you’re not willing to uphold

I often hear business owners say they are the only one’s that know how to do it right — so if that’s true — there’s your opportunity to put it on paper and to show your team how to give your clients a consistent experience they can trust.

Documentation is the affirmation of order

Your team wants your recipe, they want your leadership, they want your guidance, they want to do the best job for you.

At least the one’s who respect you will.

A heads up: Will you be resisted by some who want freedom to do their own thing? But the truth is you didn’t hire them with this expectation and those people need to either adaprt and respect the dynamic or you’ll have to send them off on their own.

Having a system in place for the work you do is the starting point to becoming a great leader as now you will be moving yourself up to the coaching role. You will be showing them how to do the work as well as you do it. This will make them better at their craft. They will trust you more and you will trust them more to do jobs in your physical absence.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ~ Aristotle

In my short e-book “TRUST …how to earn it” I write that one of the 3 pillars to earning trust is consistency.

Just think about when you go to a restaurent. Imagine that you order bacon, eggs and toast. You love the toast, the type of bread is just right but when you return the next morning they use a different bread. The following day the bacon is under cooked.

It doesn’t take long before you’re frustrated and looking for another breakfast spot. They lacked consistency in their service.

Having systems in place is about delivering on your pomise. It’s about integrity which I define as doing what you say you will every time.

Comit to documenting the work and customers will also trust you more as they are receiving a consistent experience. You will get more reviews and more referrals, more raving fans as you gain more trust.

Once your team is following your system impeccably and you know that for sure — it will be easy to remove yourself from the front line operations and focusing on higher impact problems.

Not only will this give you your time and life back but it will also create ripples to all those around you. Less stress, more time for family, for growth. The list is goes on.

Working on yourself and documenting the work is the starting point to creating the life you want. And remember that you deserve it.

It will allow you to sit in the leadership seat where your work will have the greatest impact on the world.

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For a complete step by step guide to systemizing a remarkable service business Download my Business Freedom RoadMap. Inside you’ll find a complete outline of every system your business needs to run like an orchestra. An overview of the “three stages” required to develop your business. A clear picture of what systems can do for your business.