More team but not less work? What gives? 😣

Hi, and welcome to today's episode, my name is Tom Rolley of System IO, excited to be continuing a conversation that we've had over the last two episodes.

So in the first episode, we looked at the challenge that entrepreneurs face when the business actually works when a business succeeds, and they begin to bring on team.

And this typically ends up with them managing their people, which consumes all of their time, we looked at that yesterday, where you then become the source of not only the direction for the business and responsible for all of the business, but also, a chief person asked how to do everything.

And whenever there's a problem, your team comes to you, so you also become Troubleshooter.

Now, this is a lot to bear, this is a heavy burden.

But I want to continue the discussion around the challenges that come from managing people.

And that is that there may be an experience that despite hiring team and having ever more people, that the workload doesn't seem to go down.

It's almost like as you hire a team member, they get a little bit done for a while, and then their effectiveness drops down, and they join the other team members and not really knowing what they're doing this confusion, there's difficulties communicating, and everybody starts to come to you.

So you might think, Oh, my goodness, there's not enough people, we've got too much work.

So you hire yet another team member.

Now, this clearly has a downside on your payroll and decreases your profitability.

But I want to give you the analogy of what's going on here.

So if you imagine that you had a fishing rod, and you cast your fishing rod, and you wind it in and you cast it out, you wind it in and on about the sixth or seventh go it jams.

Now you don't know how to resolve that fishing rod.

And so instead of working out how to fix it, because it's pretty difficult to fix you like, don't really know, I need to go fishing, I need to catch more fish, what I'm going to do is go and buy another fishing rod and this one, now you get to cast, and then you get to cast and you wind it in, you cast it, you wind it in, and then it two breaks with the same problem that the first one had.

Now you've got two broken fishing rods that may be kind of work, but not really.

And so you're like, oh my goodness, I need to go fishing, I need to catch them fish, what I'm going to do is go and buy another fishing rod, even though you've already got two.

And unfortunately, you have to keep paying for these two.

But even though they're not really working that well.

So you get a third one you like great this time, it's going to be different.

And yes, the first cast the second cast, maybe you get 10 casts, but then it jams again.

Can you see the analogy here that the problem is that you don't know how to get those fishing rods working again?

And so buying a new fishing rod or bringing on yet another team member is not going to resolve your problem.

Perhaps even you're like, you know what, that fishing rod over there doesn't work, I'm going to throw it out.

And I'm going to get this new one.

And so you could end up cycling through fishing rods, also known as hiring and firing team over and over as you try and resolve the problem you like there is something wrong with these fishing rods.

But is that the case? Or is it really that you just don't know how to resolve the fishing rod issue so that you can get it working again, and start casting and start fishing.

The cool thing about this, if you actually know how to get fishing rods to work is that you can have two or three fishing rods that work instead of 15 Don't you can actually get far more done with your two or three fishing rods that work instead of having 15 that are jammed.

And this actually could be the cause of or at least one of the factors in the very high rates of business failure.

You know it I know it businesses fail 80% 90% Like it's it's a very small number of businesses that actually succeed.

There's a couple of solutions that could be done.

One is you just stay as a one-man band, or perhaps you just have one team member and never try and scale but those that are after more those that are after a business that will sell at a high valuation or you're looking for the freedom that income can come in you know that a business Beats property beats stock market if you could just get it to operate without you.

And so, you know hunting that down, you start to scale bring on people, but then you run into the broken fishing rod problem.

So, this is a challenge for you, what I want you to consider is, are you solving the right problem buying a new fishing rod, hiring a new team member, when your current team members are not working that effectively, or you recognize that you're solving all their problems, that you have to tell them what to do, you're wondering when they're going to grow up, you must recognize the actual problem that managing people should only be done after you have the instructions done.

And this begins with you, as the entrepreneur, if you are unwilling to follow the instructions that hopefully you created, then you're going to have a very hard time getting a team to do it, just not integrity.

And I get it like the desire of the entrepreneur is to solve problems.

But if you continue to solve the same problem over and over, and you have problem one, and you solve it, but you don't document so you move to problem two, and you don't document the solution, and then you move to problem three, and you solve it, but you don't document and then you go to problem four and you solve it, but you don't document and then problem, one recurs and you come back and you solve that, but you don't document and then problem two recurs and you don't document and you go round and round and round sale, solving the same problems, not recognizing that you've already solved them before.

This is also known as continually putting out fires, how about you actually solved it and you documented that problem solution so that somebody else in your team can do it.

And you can move to the problems that come at a higher level when you've actually sorted this stuff out.

This is a mindset shift that must occur.

For you to be able to scale to realize those dreams of not only Systemising this business and either selling it at a valuation, but that is also awesome.

You're like, oh, yeah, that was a great valuation, or you choose to take the ongoing profits as the owner as a reward for having set up this enterprise.

Because after that, then that frees you up to go again, I'd like you to consider that the first business is the hardest you systemize your first business then your next one is a whole lot easier.

And this is why serial entrepreneurs can go again and again and again.

Once they've got that first one dialed in.

Boom, they're away.

A lot of those processes that they used in the first one will come directly across to their second business, their third business, their fourth business.

The first one is the hardest.

If you need some help with this, head over to systemio.dev, love to help you and look at what is going on for you specifically in your business.

Head over to systemio.dev.

Thanks for tuning in today and I look forward to continuing this conversation about the power of systems and processes in business.

I'll see you then.