Benchmark Business Group

When Life Happens

April 23, 2019

The fact is, life happens and you can’t always control when you might need time away from your business.

Some events are exciting and happy such as extended time off to meet your first grandchild or a chance to volunteer overseas for a few weeks. Other events are trying times such as dealing with an illness for you or your family.

No one wants to think about the trying times, but we’ve seen business owners who’ve struggled to keep their business going and balance it with life events.

You’ve worked too hard to allow life events outside of your control to threaten your business. Creating a business that thrives without you is about ensuring that you have options. Options to take time away from your business when you want to and in times that you need to.

In our Value Builder Assessment, the dependency of your business is measured by the key driver: Hub and Spoke. Taking this quick, no-cost, no-obligation 15-minute assessment will help you baseline how much your business relies on you. We recommend that every business owner take this assessment, but our focus today is on how you create the ability to have your business thrive without you.

We recommend starting with these three tips:

  • Flip Management UpSideDown. In many small businesses management is broken. It requires business owners and top-level managers to chase after information. Sometimes we even hear the dreaded, “it’s like babysitting my employees.”

    UpSideDown Management redefines the way information and accountability is structured in your business. It trains your employees to self-manage and to take ownership, which frees up you and any managers on your team. Imagine the difference in your business if every employee had ownership of their position. How much would that allow your business to thrive, without you?
     
  • Be Willing to Let Go. No one can do it exactly like you - or can they? Your business is important to you. Vital even. It’s hard to let go, but to have a business that can thrive without you, you must be willing to let go.

    If you flip management UpSideDown this will get easier. You’ll have the confidence that your team is doing what they need to do, but you’ll still need to get out of your own way. You need to pay attention and identify where you are the bottleneck in your business. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that no one else can do it. You must be willing to challenge this mindset. It’s okay if you don’t know how to hand this task off to someone right now. But if you don’t accept that you can hand it off, your business will never thrive without you.
     
  • Learn to Train/Delegate. The ability to have your business thrive without you begins with your ability to get your knowledge, expertise and way of thinking into a method that is trainable. If you can’t train others to do what you do or to think how you think, then you have to hire people exactly like you. And that’s what we call unicorn hunting.

    Chances are you have a unique way of working. After all, you have YEARS of experience. It may seem impossible to transfer that to someone else. We don’t know how to build a house, how to extract a tooth, how to fix a motor or a hundred other complicated tasks, but we have helped hundreds of business owners transfer what’s inside their head and create trainings that get results. And we can teach you how to do it. It can be done. It must be done. You just need to learn how.

Creating a business that thrives without you is something that all business owners need to consider. Life happens. You can’t always control what happens, but you can control if your business is able to thrive without you IF you want to be away or need to be away for an extended time. The bonus is that having the option to be away from your business makes the business easier to manage and one day, when you’re ready to exit your business, it’ll make your business more valuable. You really can’t lose by creating a business that thrives without you.

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