The Entrepreneur Trap - Why you Need to Sack Yourself

The Entrepreneur Trap - Why you Need to Sack Yourself

One of the key faults of many entrepreneurs is that they create a job rather than a business.

It all seems to make sense in the beginning. You’ve started your business and you do everything from the accounts, to the marketing, to the sales and making coffee. It saves additional costs and you know the business better than anyone else. As you grow your business, you may take on extra staff for certain tasks and you gradually let go of the areas that you’re weakest on. But you still like to be involved in everything.

After all, it’s your business, your investment, your baby. What if someone else doesn’t take as much care of it as you would? What if someone else neglects it? So you keep your finger in every pie and make sure you’re consulted on every decision.

And what does this do to the staff you employ? If they know you’re checking everything then it can cause them to become conscientious and make sure that every thing is ship-shape and proper before it gets to you. However, if they’re doing it just to avoid getting caught out by you then it’s likely they’ll stop as soon as they figure you’re not looking any more. You need to make sure that your staff understand why they need to pay attention to the details and which details are important. They need to “get” the business like you do.

Also, if you’re involved in every decision and you always have the last say, then your employees may come to rely on you and stop making their own decisions. They become dependent on you and the business continues to be dependent on you. This means that if you’re not there then the business can’t function.

Here’s the bad news, if you’ve created something that can’t function without you then you’ve created a job and not a business. A business is an independent entity that can survive on its own. A real business allows the owner to take three weeks leave and be confident that the business will continue to run without them being there. A job needs you there all the time otherwise it simply doesn’t get done.

Although feeling you’re indispensable to the business can be quite an ego boost, do you really want to be tied into that business for the rest of your (or its) life, just for the sake of your ego?

If you ultimately want to sell your business then you need to take yourself out of the day-to-day running and create a business that works on its own. You need to sack yourself.

This will probably require you to employ someone to run the business for you, which can free you up to do all the other things you wanted to do, including expanding the business. This is also the real test of whether you have a business because if you can’t afford to employ someone to run the business and pay them a salary then you never really had a business. All you had done was create paid work for yourself. It’s a classic mistake that many entrepreneurs make, when they don’t pay themselves a salary and they do most of the work in the business. It means there is no business without them providing their essential services for free or for little money.

Now it can be hard to let go and step away from the business. And it can be risky if you don’t have the right people. You need people who understand what you want from the business and appreciate what needs to be done and why. I’ve seen multi-million pound businesses fail when the owner stepped away and stopped conscientiously checking everything because the staff below had come to rely on his checking. So they didn’t do it when he stopped. This is why it’s essential to get good people that your can trust and educate them in the critical elements of the business.

One of the hardest things about stepping away from the business is feeling that you’re not needed anymore. And that’s what keeps most people tied in for so long. So if you want to create a real business that you can sell, here’s what you need to do:-

1. Put your ego on the shelf
2. Hire a great team
3. Teach them the essentials of your business and motivate them
4. Sack yourself
5. Provide the guidance and input that they need to grow the business and take it to a sale.
6. Smile and relax

You will need help and guidance to do all this but it’s well worth it for what you can achieve.