210 | Your Business Shouldn't Need All of You

What happens when your business grows but everything still comes back to you?

You can have a team. You can delegate the work. You can have employees, clients, and systems in place, and still be the person carrying the entire business mentally and emotionally.

In this episode, Erin explores one of the biggest challenges founders face as they grow: becoming the bottleneck in the business they worked so hard to build.

The skills that made you successful in the beginning figuring things out, making every decision, solving every problem, and knowing how everything works can eventually become the very things that keep you from reaching the next level.

Erin explains why growth requires an identity shift. You must let go of the version of yourself who did everything and become the leader who empowers other people to think, decide, solve problems, and lead.

There's an important distinction between delegating tasks and releasing control.

You can hand off the work while still worrying about every detail, correcting every decision, and requiring everyone to come back to you for approval. That's not freedom. That's simply carrying the business differently.

Erin shares how clear boundaries, better communication, self-trust, and intentional leadership can help you create a team that doesn't need you for every decision. She also explores the uncomfortable fears underneath micromanagement and why learning to tolerate that discomfort is part of becoming a better leader.

And ultimately, the question isn't just:

How do I grow my business?

It's:

What do I want my life to look like, and what kind of business will support that life?

Because your business is supposed to support your life, not require your life to support it. 

In this episode, Erin explores:

• Why successful founders can accidentally become the bottleneck 
• The identity shift required to lead a growing business 
• Why delegation doesn't automatically create freedom 
• How micromanagement can be rooted in fear 
• How to create boundaries that give employees room to lead 
• Why empowering your team requires trusting them 
• How to recognize when your team is overly dependent on you 
• Why a business should be designed around the life you want 
• How to make better decisions from a 30,000-foot perspective 
• Why more revenue doesn't necessarily mean more freedom 
• How to stop building a business based on someone else's model 

If you're constantly being asked questions, approving decisions, fixing problems, or feeling like your business can't function without you, this conversation is a reminder that scaling isn't just about adding more people.

Sometimes, scaling means becoming someone who no longer needs to control everything.

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Transcript

When Growth Still Depends On You

Erin Gray 0:01

You can have a team, you can delegate a lot of the work, and you can still be the person that carries the entire business, both mentally and emotionally. And if everything is still coming back to you, like the decisions, the issues, the questions, your business may have grown on paper or with people and team members and clients, but it actually hasn't become less dependent on you. So today I want to talk about the difference between being valuable to your business and then being the one that your business needs you to function because those two things are very different things. So let's dive in. I want to start off by saying I think that this is a very natural thing that I think this is kind of like the growing pains. Like, this is the stuff I think founders actually have to go through in order to get through the other side to recognize, like, oh, this is how it's actually supposed to be. I came into what a 30-year business. So I wasn't there from when my grandfather started the company. I mean, we definitely had growing pains at 30 years when I came in and all of the changes that I had to or that I wanted to make and that we did make. But I don't think that because I wasn't there from the ground up and you know, growing from no employees to 32 employees. So I didn't have that experience, but I did have the experience of having 32 employees and having a lot of the word that comes to mind is chaos, which is not necessarily the best word, but that's what it felt like when I came on. So the thing that I want to say here is that, you know, the the thing that made you successful can also become the thing that inhibits you or limits your growth to the next level. Because when you think about it, when you started your business, you were probably the only one. Like I think a lot of us start that way, unless you hire immediately, which I think that that's a great idea. I think that there's some sometimes there's some learning and some tweaking that we have to do in order to like within ourselves and within our business first, in order to start hiring people. That's a whole nother topic for another day. I don't want to get off on that tangent, but I think that, you know, because we are so capable, because we figure things out, obviously we're entrepreneurs, right? We're founders. We decided, hey, we had this idea, we wanted to create this business. We innovate and we ideate and we create. And so, because of that, that's an amazing skill set that we have. And in the beginning, we do all of it probably ourselves. And then as we start to grow, we recognize, listen, I can't do it all myself. I really need support in order to grow and to scale. I'm gonna need other people that are going to be helping me in my corner. And so when you start hiring people, when you start having people, a lot of times what we do is we don't make the identity shift of being a solo entrepreneur to someone that

The Identity Shift From Doer

Erin Gray 3:00

leads a team or has multiple employees. I don't know how many employees each of you have that are listening or watching, but you know, like thinking about for myself and my family's business, like 32 employees, there were um five, four or five different departments that we had. And, you know, recognizing that you have to, the person, the identity that you are holding when you started your business, you really have to become someone new or return home to, or however you want to say it, you've got to let go of who that person was when they did it all themselves. And I think what a lot of founders do is they take that identity with them and they still try to micromanage it, carry it all, and they still want all decisions to be made through them. And this is where I think it's really important for, you know, because I have talked about on previous podcasts of you do want people to think like you. And when I say that, I don't mean everybody, every employee needs to think like you because that's not helpful either, right? Like you hire people for different ideas. You hire people because they do things in their specialty better than you do. Let me give you the example. Like right now, you know, I'm having someone help me with social media and I'm having to teach them how I think, like how they might create some of the stuff that they are creating for me might be different for someone else that they're working with, like that. Someone else might like that, the way that it looks, or the type of words, or the vibe that they're using compared to what I want. So when I say you want to teach someone how you think, what I really mean is would Aaron speak like that? Would Aaron make that decision? Would Aaron, so it's almost kind of like you got to give your team bumper, you know, like on the bowling balls when you bowl, you know, the bowling lanes or boundaries or something to work inside of so that they know that they can run free and they can exercise their self-trust, their leadership skills, their decision making, and know that you are there to support them. I think a lot of times what founders do is we aren't clear with them because we're not clear with ourselves. So we aren't clear. We want them to go do the thing, and then we want to come back and be like, well, why did you do it that way? And what were you thinking? And I would have done it this way. And you know, it almost feels very much so accusatory versus let me get inside your head and tell me what you're thinking or what you were thinking that had you leading to this decision. When you are growing, when you are having people that you are working with, you have to consciously make the decision that I'm going to let go. And that doesn't mean I'm gonna let go and I'm just not gonna take care of anything anymore and I'm just well that they did that. What I mean is let go of the control. You know, when you want to micromanage, you've got to turn that back around and look at yourself and think, why am I, why am I wanting to micromanage here? What is the fear here? Like you've got to start digging down and getting to the root of like, what is the feeling that I am feeding feeling that is creating the action or the thinking right now that I am having? Have I not been clear? Have

Clear Boundaries Beat Micromanaging

Erin Gray 6:10

I not said exactly what I want? I'm redoing my website right now. And the joke is, you know, the designer or the developer is like, Erin, you're very hard to please. And I said, I actually don't think I'm very hard to please. I think I know exactly what I want, and I'm not willing to settle until it looks that way. But I'm totally fine with ideas that he brings me because he brings me ideas and then I modify it and I use that and I, you know, my generator self like responds to it and modifies. But I'm totally okay with him creating and having these ideas and bringing these ideas to me. Like I want people to do that. That's what we want to do as a founder, right? We don't want to be the one that's carrying all of it. And I think a lot of times that's what we end up doing because we are afraid. You know, I told him the other day, I was like, no, I know exactly what I want. My work is to stop saying it's fine when it's really not fine, when I really want it to look this specific way. And I'm not actually saying that, no, this isn't when I say not good enough, you know what I mean? Like when it's not to what I actually want it to look like. What we need to really sit back and look at is okay, where have I been unclear with my team, with the people that I work with? Where have I not given them maybe explicit when I say instructions, I mean like boundaries and guidelines. Like, you know, when I had my sister was the bookkeeper, there were certain things that I wanted her to do because there was a system that I had regarding pay apps, which is what we would go and request invoices basically to the owners when we had our contracts. And but I let her into my way of thinking and I told her exactly what I wanted. And so I think sometimes we aren't clear with our people. That's first. Second, I think also there is fear that, oh my goodness, if they mess up, what's going to happen? And I think that it's a really good exercise for all of us to sit down and be like, okay, so what happens if they do mess up? Like I had to get to the point where it's like, okay, well, what happens if she doesn't do it, you know, the way that I've taught her to do it? Okay, well, then the pay app gets rejected. Okay. And then what happens? Okay, well, then you may not get paid that month for that amount of invoice. And I'm not talking like a couple thousand dollars. I'm talking several hundred thousand dollars that we may not get paid that month. Okay, so that was on me to teach her the reasoning behind why I was having her do what I was having her do. So really starting to communicate better with your team, to share with them, you know, what you your ways of thinking, and then letting them let their own ideas run free and bring some things back to you versus you being the one that carries it all. The second thing I think here is that delegating is very different than releasing responsibility, right? You can have a team and you can delegate all of the tasks, but if you're mentally and you're emotionally still invested and worried about it, and I know you might say, Erin, it's my business, it's my baby. Being emotionally invested and caring about your business is very different than control and gripping and, you know, like think that the world is going to like crumble if things don't happen the way that you want them to. Like that is the point that I had to get to because I was driving myself literally crazy because I wanted to control every little thing. I didn't want to hire certain people, I didn't want to hire, you know, have somebody help me in the books. Everything, I became the bottleneck and I created so much tension, literal tension in my body and tension for myself because I was not allowing other people to help me. And I think that if we are making all of the decisions, if we're trying to fix, and this is where I think everything is nuanced. Like you can't take one thing, one sentence that I say and just run with it. You have to run it through your filter, right? Like me explaining to my sister how the payups work, that was important for her to understand and to do it the way that we had that system set up, right? Because if it did not get approved by the engineer in time, then you did not get, and we're not talking about like, oh, well, then you get paid like, you know, in the next couple of weeks, it's a whole nother 30 or 60 days before you got that several hundred thousand dollar check. So that was important. Like, what is my tolerance, right? Like, where can my employees and my team air quotes mess up and it still be okay? What is that boundary or those bumpers, but you know, the bumpers that we put on for the bowling lanes? Like, what are those things that I can put in place that give

Delegate Tasks Then Release Control

Erin Gray 10:50

them the freedom to make those decisions? You know, I was telling a client, this is probably a couple months ago, I was like, there are certain things that they can make a decision on that they don't need to ask you. And if your answer to me is no, they can't, then you haven't given them and haven't empowered them with any decision. Like they have to be able to have some autonomy. They have to be able to start trusting themselves because this goes back to like what I'm helping clients learn is to self-trust. You're also helping your employees do this as well. And so when you don't tell them, like, hey, pretty much everything is gonna be fixable, it's not a problem, and empower them to trust themselves, to understand the way that you think, to know that they can figure out the, I don't like calling them problems, but they can figure out the problem if they need to and that they don't have to come to you. And this is going to take you feeling uncomfortable in your body. So if you are always the person, but like I was, always the person, the joke was, oh, just go ask Aaron. Like they almost sometimes would call me like, go ask mom, go ask Aaron. I'm like, that's actually not healthy to be that way in the business. You know, if the business doesn't run because I'm not there, I'm not a very good business person. You're not a very good leader. And I don't mean that from a place of shame. It's just what have we been conditioned to believe what a good leader is. A good leader is someone, I believe, that empowers their people, that has them thinking on their own, that has them problem solving and thinking about things and making decisions and standing by their decisions and feeling empowered. Like that's a really good leader. I call it like leading from behind, right? It's not this showy, like, let me tell you what to do kind of leader. It's like this quiet, like, I believe in you, I trust you, like run with it. Let's see how it works. So I think if you're constantly checking, if you're deciding, if you're fixing, you know, what you are probably quietly saying to your team is I don't trust you, right? You may not be coming out and saying that, but that's the message that they're getting. If she's always coming behind me and she's always correcting something. Now, again, this is nuance. When you're hiring someone, when you're training someone, like I've been training a couple of new people, okay, there's gonna be this back and forth for a little bit. But at some point, there will come a time where you know what, just run with it. You know the way I think, you know I wouldn't allow that to go out on social media, or you know, that's not my vibe that I'm sending, or I would never put that type of copy on my website or whatever it might be. There's that training ground for that. And then there has to be the part where we let go. If you want people to lead, you have to be willing to do that. You have to be willing to feel, right? Because this is the work that we need to do within ourselves. What are we afraid of? Are we afraid of that, you know? Because when I was talking to a client, I was like, What are you afraid of? And she said, I'm afraid of what he might say to a client that I would never say. And I said, Okay, well, then that starts with you having a conversation with him. Obviously, he is his own person. He's going to show up, you know, in his vibrant self. And also, what's the worst that's going to happen? Okay, he might say something to the client that the client's like, you know what, this company isn't for me. Okay, but how can you use that as a learning experience versus, you know, hovering over him all of the time? So then that tells me that you need to either communicate with him more, you need to train him more. There might be need to be some more communication between the two of you and working on some inside stuff before you let him go off and work with clients one-on-one without you there. But you can't grow. I was telling her, like, you can't grow if you're always going to be sitting at every single client consultation. That's just not humanly possible. So you're gonna either have to get him on your page with your vibe, or maybe he's not the best fit for your role or in your company or whatever it might be. But this is when I say it goes back to really having to sit with some of those uncomfortable conversations with yourself, right? So have I hired him and and I hired him because I just needed a warm body to do consultations? Did I hire him because I thought at the time he was what I was looking for and now I'm a different person and we're not in alignment? Like you've really got to do some of that inner work with yourself first, right? Because your people are just a reflection of who you are or who you were at the time. And either your people will rise with you, which is totally okay, which is what we want, or your people will fall away, which that is okay too. Like one of the beliefs that I had to really embody was like, it's okay for people to come in and out of my life, whatever that might be. So if you are attached to someone, if you have thoughts or feelings around letting someone go, like this is where all of this stuff gets churned up that we are we're controlling because we don't really want to look inward and look and see, oh, okay, this is what I'm trying to avoid. This is what I'm trying, and we're always trying to avoid a feeling. And the final thing that

Design The Business Around Your Life

Erin Gray 15:50

I would say, and this is what I always start with with clients, is that your business is supposed to support your life, not the other way around, right? Not require your life to support it. And you really have to start with, what do I want my life to look like? Not how much money do I want to make. That will come, you know, through the process, but like, what do I want my life to look like? Very rarely when I ask that question, do I get, I want to be tied to my phone, I want to be on Slack all day, I want to be answering my employees' questions. Like none of those answers ever come up when I'm having a conversation with a client. Like, what do you want your life to look like? It's more like I want more freedom, I want to be able to have fun in my business, I want to be able to support my team, I want to be able to travel more, I want to spend more time with my kid. Like those are the conversations that we have first. And so when you are looking at it from that place, when you start from the end and you work backwards, then it can make your decision-making process so much easier. Is it easy? No, but does it make it easier? Yes, because you're so much more clear. Because more revenue doesn't necessarily equal more profitability. It doesn't necessarily mean less headaches. And I'm not saying that more revenue equals more headaches or more problems. I'm just saying that if you are not clear on where you are going and why you are going there, you'll wake up one day and you'll be like, How did I even create this? One day at a time, not paying attention, not being very specific on to what you want when you are making decisions. And that is how we create everything in our life. So when you think about why am I going to hire this person? What is the purpose of having, you know, this team? What do I want to empower them to do? Like, really, you have to get big picture 30,000-foot view, which is what I love doing with clients, because then you start to zoom out and you start to see, okay, I want to be able to let, you know, this part be fully, you know, we're always going to be in our business. But like you really have to start letting go of making those decisions. Like I said, the delegating is very different than letting go of responsibility. So really start to spend some time this week to think about like, what do I want my business to look like? What do I want? Even bigger than that, is what do I want my life to look like? And am I creating and having offers that allow that to look like that? Am I setting up a team that is conducive to that? I think sometimes we also hire from a place of money versus hiring the best person intuitively that we connect with and knowing that the money is going to follow from that hire. Because if you hire someone from a lower income standpoint, but let's say you have two people that you're looking at hiring and one is asking for more, but they take care of everything. Like I used to joke, I'm like, my family's business, obviously, the construction guys, I'm never gonna do any type of that work. But you have two or three errands in your company, yeah, you're gonna pay them a lot more than you would pay other employees, but you're never gonna have to wonder, is this getting taken care of? Or like, I took care of so much stuff in my family's business because that number one, that's the type of person I am. And also like an employer, right? So when you have an employee who thinks more entrepreneurial-like, who actually is in it for the long haul, who isn't there to just take a paycheck and go home, there is a different vested interest that you have with employees. So, really, I would highly encourage you, you know, if you're hiring people, is to hire from an intuitive standpoint. It doesn't matter if they look great on paper, if every time you suggest something, they want to argue with you. And arguing and communicating two different things, but you know what I'm talking about. When you have a contentious employee, right? Who you have someone who's not really happy to be there and they're just there for the money, they aren't necessarily there for like your vision and why you are there. You know, being around everybody else that they are around, it makes for a different type of environment, a morale in your organization. So really start to play with what do I want my life to look like? And are the decisions that I'm making every single day in my business are they supporting the lifestyle that I want? Or am I getting more in the weeds in my business, or am I taking more of a 30,000-foot view? To summarize, I want you to think about the three things, right? The thing that made you successful, that got you to where you are,

Three Takeaways And A Next Step

Erin Gray 20:25

are currently isn't probably gonna be able to, like that identity, you need to shift the identity. You need to become someone new, you need to return home to who you truly are, however you want to say it, but the identity needs to shift in order from where you started from to where you are going, right? Your business cannot be dependent on you. If if you are the bottleneck, that is not a great business model. Second is delegating tasks is not the same thing as responsibility. We're letting go of responsibility. So, where can you release more responsibility? Where can you empower more of your employees and your team to take care of things? Where can you entrust? Where can you like give them more self-trust? Like allow them to trust themselves more than what they currently are. Zone out to that 30,000-foot view is like, what do I want my life to look like? And how do I want my business to fit into my life? Am I making decisions like this every single day? We don't look at just how to grow the business. We look at one that actually feels good to be inside of and that works for you. You know, one of the things that I used to do all of the time is look at everybody else's business and try to make their business feel, you know, fit into my business model. We need to stop looking outside of ourselves and we need to think what do we want for our life and create the business that works for us. And if you are a seven figure founder looking for a strategic thinking partner, you can find the link in the show notes to work and to apply with me. Okay, I'll see you in the next episode.