Your Abilities are your Achilles

What’s up, all you beautiful people? Welcome back to the podcast. I want to share with you today a very simple idea that as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a business builder, I think can save you from a lot of heartache just by becoming aware that your abilities is your achilles. So what does that mean in business? When you first start, whether you’re creating a product or a service, it doesn’t really matter. You’re probably doing something that you had some natural proclivity towards. You maybe worked a w two as a number of years in a particular domain. You built up an expertise that then you thought, hey, I can go off on my own. I can start my business and maybe I can take my tax expertise and I can go start my own accounting firm. Or maybe I was, everybody likes to use the copywriter, graphic designer.

You were doing these things in a marketing context for a bigger business, and you decided, I’m going to go out and I’m going to build my own thing. You have a particular skillset that you’re very good at, and in the beginning, you are going to utilize that skill set to go out there, get customers and deliver a product to them. Right now, the way that we can grow is we can use capital, we can use labor, and we can use technology and media. Those are the other form of leverage. But the two that I really want to think about here is your time and your capital, because that’s really in the beginning what you have at your disposal. You have your time, you have your capital and you have people, but you can’t really get people to work alongside of you in the beginning unless you have a very compelling, persuasive argument to get them to come in and work for free, for equity, assuming that you don’t have capital, that is, if you don’t have capital and you can’t get people, then that leaves time. That’s you to go do the thing that needs to get done. So what most people will do is they’ll go off and they’ll start their business and they will do everything.

They’re going to be the lead generation. They’re going to be the sales, they’re going to be doing the operations, the product delivery. They’re going to be doing the finance. They’re going to be doing all of this stuff. And it makes a lot of sense. And then as you grow, you’re going to be like, I have more money coming in now than I have time, so I can use my money to buy back my time. And we do that then by bringing in other people to help take things off of our plate so we could focus on growing the business. So what typically happens then is we bring in people around us into the areas of the business that we’re not very good at.
Right. So maybe if you’re a designer, the first thing that you’re going to hire is somebody to help with the admin and the skills, scheduling, the marketing, the sales. Right. And you’re going to keep that thing that you were naturally very good at that, the thing that you have, the skill, the competency around, and you’re going to keep that for as long as you possibly can in this equation because it’s harder for you, it’s more expensive, rather to hire somebody with a comparable skill set to what you have in that particular thing than it is to hire somebody to go do one of the other things, accounting, bookkeeping, marketing, whatever. Right. Because you don’t have a skill set in that area, it’s easier for you, cheaper for you to go and outsource and pay somebody else to do it. Makes sense now at around one to $3 million, you can grow your business in this way. You are kind of the product, the fulfillment person, and you have a team around you that are making all the rest of the pieces of the business.
Hum. Now for a lot of us, the last thing that we’re going to outsource is finally when we’re in a financial position to justify it, we’re going to bring in people to help with the fulfillment, we’re going to start outsourcing the thing that we were the best at. Now here’s the problem is when that particular area of the business breaks, all areas of the business inevitably break. One of the things that owners and founders and entrepreneurs get pulled into is because it was your domain of expertise, you swoop in like Superman to save the day. Now this is problematic because instead of taking a step back when the system breaks and asking yourself, how can I fix this in a way that doesn’t require me to go in and fix it? We just swoop it and we fix it. But the problem is the business then is always dependent on you to come and be the hero. And that is not a sustainable machine. The example that I would use here is if I owned a restaurant and the chef died, I can’t go in the back and start cooking.
Right? It’s not, it’s. That is not a viable solution because I can’t cook to save my life. Now reverse that and let’s say I’m running a marketing agency and the head of marketing, head of branding, they. They leave for some reason. Well, because I know that area very well. I would be tempted to swoop in and just start doing it. If you were running, say, a yoga studio, you started the yoga studio in the beginning because, you know, yoga and teaching, and that’s what you love doing. And then as you build the business, you realize your job is to build the machine that builds the machine.

That is, you build the people that help you build the thing, right? And so you start to not teach the classes and you hire people and you train those people. But what happens when those instructors don’t show up to teach the class? Well, because you have that domain experience, you’re tempted to swoop back in. But what are you not doing when you do that? You’re not working on the machine that builds the machine. And we can see this so clearly in the areas of our business where we are not naturally skilled, and we’re like, I can’t swoop in and save the day on the accounting team. Right? Like, I need to solve that in a different way. And so that problem will get solved in a way that inevitably should scale. But I. The biggest trap that we can fall into is this idea that our abilities are our achilles.

So what you’re good at will be the thing that limits your growth in the end, because it’s the piece of the puzzle you refuse to give up. It’s the hardest one to outsource. It’s the hardest one for you to find ways to scale it outside of you just stepping in and doing the work. Your abilities are your achilles. So keep that idea in mind. The last thing you can afford to do as you scale to that one to 3 million range, and you try to go above that to 10 million and beyond, you cannot be the superman, the person who swoops in to try and save the day when the machine inevitably breaks. You have to maintain the mental fortitude and discipline to stay out of it and let the team fix it and to fix the machine that fixes the machine. That is your job as the business owner.

So hope this brings you guys a little bit of value. As always, thank you for being here. We’ll catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends.