Not convinced? You aren’t alone. Letting go and passing the torch can be extremely difficult. There’s a great chance that if you are reading this you ARE the business. People come to your business because of you. I have this conversation with entrepreneurs quite often. It’s usually with a very skilled individual that’s great at what she does and an even greater human being. She does what she says she’s going to do, she’s on time, she does great work and is very fairly priced. 

The fear we have here is when you hire a stranger your customer base will be disappointed in not seeing you on the job or in the office. We feel we are hurting our consumer and hurting our revenue when we try to scale. I believe the opposite is true. We are hurting our consumer and hurting our revenue when we don’t scale our business. 

Here’s my question for you:

If you hired someone to do what you do in the business and that person is hardworking, coachable, and you’ve personally trained them to do the job- how close is this employee to bringing what you can bring to the customer experience? 

Well…? 

Let’s assume you can get this new hire to 85% of where you’re at in regards to the value that you bring. 

My next assumption is if you are reading this you care enough to continuously work on improving yourself and your business. This leads me to believe you are a rockstar in your industry already. If you were to look in the mirror and compare you and your business to the competition, how much better are you than them? When you market and advertise your business do you claim to be just a little better? I bet you claim to be quite a lot better. Are you more than 15% better than your competition? Hell yeah you are! 

So here’s the thing, even if you were having a bad day and you were operating at 85% you’d still crush the competition. Let’s face it- there’s some good competition out there but there’s a lot more bad competition out there. If 85% of you is better than 95% of your competition you should have no fear of hiring your replacement in the business. Having a handful of employees bringing 85% of what you bring is still the best option for the consumer, in most cases, in comparison to one of you at 100%. The added benefit for the consumer now is that they have a better chance of doing business with a reputable, quality business like yours. If you are a one man band there’s a much smaller chance they get to hear the music! This is why, by choosing not to scale our business, we are doing more harm than good to the customers we worry about hurting. 

If you are a one man band there’s a much smaller chance they get to hear the music!

Lastly, taking this approach will allow us to decrease our hours spent in the business while increasing our profits from it. Everyone wins.