I often get overwhelmed in the evening.
I’ll reflect on my workday and look at the list of all the things I didn’t accomplish, the calls I didn’t make, the emails I didn’t return (the newsletter posts that I haven’t written yet…).
I wrote about this last week: the ways overwhelm holds me back (and the strategies I use to work with it).
Overwhelm is a common problem for the entrepreneurs that I work with, often because they try to do everything themselves. Although that may work for a while, it is ultimately unsustainable.
Instead of doing everything themselves (and getting overwhelmed and burned-out in the process), entrepreneurs should consider scaling the system.
Here’s one definition of scale.
scale, verb: to quickly grow a business to unsustainable levels, often while losing lots of money. Principally used in Silicon Valley.
Of course, this definition is cheeky — but not too cheeky. Some major challenges in technology (hate speech and fake news on platforms like Facebook and YouTube, for instance) can be traced to unconstrained growth without adequate systems to support it.
But, as someone who runs a small-but-impactful business, I’m interested in a more practical definition of scale.
And so are my coaching clients, who are more likely to run medium-sized firms than they are to lead big tech companies.
For me, scale has a very simple definition: work gets done without me being involved.
Passive income from things like book royalties or the sale of online courses is a form of scale. Profit happens without people doing anything.
But even businesses that don’t generate passive income can scale. Here are three strategies that I help my coaching clients use.
Create systems and automation
Automate what can be easily automated. For dollars a month, you can use tools like Zapier to add customers to your CRM, add payments to QuickBooks, and just generally make your life better.
But automation is a double-edged sword.
I’ll be the first to admit that I sometimes suffer from “automation fever,” whereby I spend an inordinate amount of time building complex automations for trivial tasks.
There are two cures (three, if you consider the placebo effect of more cowbell):
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Develop clear criteria for when a task should be automated. Before you decided to automate something, understand how much cost a manual task actually takes. Is time the principal issue? Inaccuracy? Opportunity cost? Or does manually doing a task interrupt your creative flow?
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Automate parts of a task. My executive assistant manages my calendar, but I also have a scheduling link that I send to people who are more likely to self-schedule than to respond to an email from her. The hybrid solution is better than being entirely automated or entirely people driven.
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Remember that systems and automation don’t have to involve technology. For example, batching content creation is a powerful way to get more done in less time (incidentally, shifting to batching will be part of our work next quarter).
Hire great people and let them make mistakes
The next aspect of scale is hiring great people and letting them do great work. Plenty of business owners I know hire people and then proceed to micromanage them.
So much of micromanaging is about fear: fear that a detail will be missed, fear that the task won’t be done as well as you would do it (although “as well” often translates to “the exact same way”).
Let me let you in on a secret: the people you hire will make mistakes.
But that’s OK!
Don’t forget that you make mistakes, too. And, for 99% of tasks, mistakes are not catastrophic (or even particularly impactful).
The best people you hire will be better than you at their jobs. They’ll know marketing better than you. They’ll be more organized or more detail oriented than you. And, if you do it right, they’ll actually be less likely to make mistakes than you.
Part of the reason why hiring a good team is so effective is because it allows a leader to focus elsewhere. Your goal is to home in on your area of greatest impact: connecting with clients and delivering outstanding value to them.
Make sure you have a clear, actionable vision so people know what their best work is.
What’s better than hiring someone to support you in your job? I would argue that it’s hiring a team that works well together.
This doesn’t happen by accident. Sure, you need to hire people who aren’t jerks.
But you also need to define a clear, actionable vision. There are lots of ways to do this; last week I mentioned using the Objectives and Key Results approach (website, book) to define your strategy and let the appropriate supporting actions emerge.
When this is done in a collaborative way, you will have achieved something that few businesses do: distributing ownership. People will define what they are going to do, sometimes in areas that break new ground for your business, and they will do it better than you — all without your involvement.
In my business, we have a positive example of this. This quarter, my executive assistant, who I mentioned above, saw an opportunity to use paid traffic to promote my coaching business (to date, I’ve grown it through organic networking and relationships).
She’s done a fantastic job creating an entirely new way for us to engage with potential customers, all because we had the clear objective of expanding the coaching business and she had the skills to work with an outside partner to develop and execute our strategy.
That’s the true path to scale.
Before I end, I want to ask you something: did this article overwhelm you? I know that yet another article about what to do better can be really tough.
If so, not to worry. Remember: you are enough and you are doing enough right now.
The work of scaling isn’t just about systems, people, or an actionable vision. It’s about realizing where your own overwhelm sits, where your own fears sit, and learning to work with them skillfully.
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