Lia (00:00)
Most of us are feeling spread really thin right now. Not a day goes by when I don't get an email or a call from a client or a prospective client saying, gosh, I feel like no matter what I do, I've hired people, I'm paying them, I've been clear, I'm setting expectations, I'm doing the stuff that you say to do, but I'm still the final sign off. I'm still in too many meetings. I'm still making the decisions I shouldn't have to be making. And what am I doing wrong? And we're feeling hopeless. We're thinking,

In extremes, should I get rid of my whole team and just be me and a bunch of AI agents? I blow this whole thing up? We're getting extreme because we're feeling out of answers and out of options. And yeah, I think we all had some stretch of our imagination know that delegating is part of the answer here, but there's something that has to happen before we get to that. And that's where we're getting stuck. And that's what I wanna talk about today is the blocker that is keeping us

as the point person for everything. And it's the thing that until we clear that, we can't even begin the conversation on delegating. That's where we dive in today.

when it comes to solving this issue before we can even delegate, it really comes down to three focuses. And that's what we're gonna dive in today, right? First and foremost is we've got to have the right people. And let's be honest, a lot of us on our teams, especially my business owner friends listening, we have people that we've had in our teams for a long time. It's a friend, a family member,

a really

team member who was a fit at some point.

And slowly it stopped being a fit and we haven't had a conversation. Now we cannot delegate to them or we cannot improve their performance because they don't even know that something's wrong. Or maybe they kind of know but they get defensive or we don't want to hurt their feelings or we don't want to approach that so we haven't even talked about it. Now of course you're going to be feeling stuck in the weeds. Of course you're going to have to be doing more than you need to be doing because you're not holding them to the same standard as you would someone that you hired tomorrow let's say.

And so this is gonna be our first biggest blocker. And the solve to this obviously is having that conversation as resetting expectations, as saying, hey, evaluating is this person a fit for where we are right now? And that's actually what I do with a lot of my clients is we look at the team, say, hey, are people in the right roles? Do we actually have folks that need, is it just feedback or do they need some kind of professional development? Or do we need them actually shift into another role?

So it doesn't mean I come and we're like slashing all the roles. No, we're evaluating how do we get the most out of our people who want to be here and are doing good work, but maybe there's some issues that are preventing them from doing their best. That's the first thing we gotta do. We gotta look at the team and say, whoa, who are we even working with here? Are there team members that we've given clear feedback to and they're not implementing it and they're not improving? And that's a tough conversation that might have to happen.

Are there people that are struggling but they have so much potential and we know there's a couple unlocks, that's a very different conversation. So the first thing is always looking at who are we working with? I talked about it last week, we're talking about AI employees, agents and automations and they're just not quite landing, is it the onboarding? Did we not train it the right way? Are there expectations to be setting more context to give it? Same conversation, right? Is there some piece of missing unlock that needs to be here?

that is the first place. And we figure out that, we start to see, okay, it's not about just getting rid of everybody and starting over, because hey, again, if we had to use agents, and I've said this, we got to train them in the same way. And if you are evaluating bringing on agents to supplement your workforce or anything like that, please reach out, liagarvin.com slash contact. Let's have a conversation about how to do that effectively and thoughtfully.

so that you can make decisions that are based off of strategy instead of feeling like, no, I'm behind on AI, I gotta just do this right away. Like spending a day doing a hackathon about AI is gonna get you nowhere if you don't actually understand what tools to use and what you're trying to get on the other side of it. So that's what I do with folks when we're evaluating the team and where to plug AI into to give your team members superpowers is let's figure out what we're actually trying to achieve. What are the right tools for that?

what skills to set up in Claude what automations, what agents, and then we get the whole system running. So if that's appealing to you, if that's the problem you're stuck on, reach out liagarvin.com slash contact. We will set up a call to talk about what that means. Second piece, once we know, okay, do I have the right people is, where do I want to be focusing as a leader? This is another challenging one. How do we delegate when we don't even know what we're trying to hand off?

Do we need to be having the conversations with the clients? Do we need to be the final one selling and closing calls? Are we the primary service provider? Clients of mine that run production companies or for events or photography, things like that, sometimes they're the big creative thinker They are the one thinking, essentially operating as the creative director and the business owner. And they enjoy that job of creative director. They don't want to step out of that. So when we figure out,

how to delegate and offer the right things. We don't do that at the expense of keeping them in that role that they want to be in, right? That's not the goal is to take you out of the things that actually you're great at or help you thrive. Then it goes back to the first piece. We gotta get the right people around you to free you up so that you have all your time on that creative piece. For clients that work in med spas or spas, salons, if they're the primary producer, same thing. We say, okay, well, first,

are you the primary producer because none of your team members are actually stepping up to that level? That goes back to the team question. Or is it because, you are developing new ways of treating folks or new methodologies or new way to service clients, or you love doing this. Then we say, okay, well, what are the places that you want to be focusing on as that producer? And then what can you hand off that's actually taking you away from that? And that's actually where some of this automations can come in.

training up your team members and getting really clear about delegating. But we cannot do that, obviously, until we figure out what you actually want to be working on. What is your highest and best uses, they say? What gives you, like what kind of gives you energy? What makes you feel really passionate about your work? Where are you feeling in the flow state? That's, know, we say we started business for all sorts of reasons, but ideally, hopefully.

we can be enjoying some of what we're doing every day. And we wanna get you back to that. what are you really the best at? Are you, you get on the call with a prospective client and you can understand them so deeply that it's like a yes. Well, until we find someone that can do that, you know, that's really a good use of your time to be that closer, so to speak, or that business development person. But because you have to do some of the work your other team members are doing, like on the service delivery, you're still in the weeds.

You see what I'm saying? So we're trying to figure out where are you really best situated? Sometimes it's not the ultimate answer. I'm to be really honest with you. Sometimes you don't have, this huge built out team. You don't have the budget for it. If you're in a corporate team, you don't have the back fills, you don't have the head count. So you're doing, some of the things that maybe you don't want to be doing long term, but we want to identify, where are you best situated to still operate at that strategic level? But the third piece, my friends,

and this is going to be the one that gets you out of the weeds again and again. It prevents you from being ultimate decider even when you've handed things off, even when you've talked until you're blue in the face about how you want people to be accountable, have a sense of ownership. Is you gotta have systems. You've got to have some sort of like sort of record for folks to come back to. How do you know that people finish their work? How do you know that people are focused on the right priorities?

How do you know that things are moving along as they should be? That's systems. And again, I talk about a lot, it's not making things more complicated, it's actually making things simpler because they're more clear.

Now take snippets for example, this was born out of business owners needing a bird's eye view. I wanna know what my team was working on at a high level. I don't want the tasks. I don't wanna be digging in like, wait, how does this connect to that? I wanna know at a glance, people are focused on their priorities, what their wins were and places they're stuck so that if they need to talk to me, I can make time for that. So I built that exact tool and started as a Google Doc.

Hey, have a rolling document your team members fill out five minutes a week will give you this total clarity, total visibility. It works because it's simple. Now super excited to share. I've recently rebuilt this as a web app, keeping it just as simple, but it gives you insights over time.

so your team members log into the tool.

and then you're seeing all of it in one place in one dashboard. Now, as you can imagine, over time we can see patterns. Hey, what priorities are showing up week after week? Where people actually spread too thin? Where are the same issues coming up? That's why the web tool is so powerful. But again, it's not because I packed in a bunch of features, it's because we said, what is the goal? Bird's eye view to see status and capacity. That is the reason it works. So when you think about systems, we always go back to what's the goal.

Right, why do we have meeting agendas? Right, so that we don't talk for three hours and realize like, do we need to get together at all? Right, a meeting agenda is a system. It's not complicated. It's not adding hours of time. It's saying, hey, before we go to a meeting, let's know what the heck we're gonna talk about and like make sure that we do talk about that. This is how easy it can be. And I think I got so passionate about simplifying systems because I did spend so much time in the corporate world.

Working at places like Google, Apple, Microsoft, process to the limits. Like you understand where it can go full, full extreme. in those roles, working in team operations in big tech I actually started to simplify and remove steps and say, hey, wait a second.

how can we get this answer faster? How can we make it easier for people to understand what they're supposed to work on? That was my passion and my strength that I now bring back to small businesses is saying, hey, wait a second. We all, nobody wants to be corporate. Nobody wants all the bureaucracy. So how do we make it easier to clear the runway for people to get their work done? And that's systems because all we mean is predictability. When we make it predictable of like,

I know where I save my files on the server when I'm done. I know what deck to use to send out a client pitch. I know the email signature to put in. I know where I fill out my expense for it when I get my receipts. I know when I get a raise or bonus. So I'm not asking you every day whenever we have a one-on-one, like, I get paid more? These simple systems are what frees up, I would say 95 % of your brain space. I'm not even kidding.

because the things that you feel like, why am I in this conversation? And I'll give you a quick list. We already talked about why am I approving everything? Why am I making every decision? Like that's kind of like the same one. But a really big one is why are my team members asking me every week about when they can get a raise or promotion? Why do I have that conversation to the extent that I want to avoid them completely? And now I'm back to thinking I don't need a team at all. Cause an AI robot's not gonna ask me unless I use all my tokens and it wants more subscription money.

the reason you get asked that is because they don't have a system. They don't know when they're ever gonna get paid more or how to ask you about it. That's why it's coming to you. Same thing with, why do I keep having to this conversation again over and over is because you don't have a feedback loop. There's not a process for like giving feedback. Like, we check in on, you every Monday we have a one-on-one. That's a system, literally. That's how simple it is.

and it can feel like, I don't even know where to start, I don't know what to do here. That's why I built this stuff, because I get it. I've been in big companies where even some of these I mentioned, Google, Apple, Microsoft, even Big America, where people were applying these kind of big systems very differently and inconsistently, and it gets just as confusing. So it's not a property of working in a small business or a large business or whatever. It's what I do for folks is,

make it simple so that we can apply these things regularly and it's not confusing, it's not overwhelming, and it's not heavy handed. And so when you do these three things, when you first evaluate like, okay, do I have the right people? And maybe it's flipped. say, maybe you start with the second piece, which is thinking first, what do I need to be working on? Where am I best positioned to grow this team, grow this business? Then do I have the right people around me? And what conversations do I have to have with folks to really make sure that I'm getting that?

And then what is a supporting systems infrastructure I have to put into place? Now, you know, I can't help it. You you can take, you take the girl out of corporate, but you can't take the corporate. I'm saying things like infrastructure and systems. And these words might feel like, like heavy handed. I'm talking about clarity. That's all it is. A meeting agenda, a one-on-one template, snippets so that you have a bird's eye view. This is what we mean. Clarity. Does my team have clarity to know what is,

what done looks like that they're gonna get the same version of me on Thursdays they got on Monday. That's what we mean. And when they have that, that clarity, that's where you can start to delegate. You can start to make things for them super clear. Here's where I'm involved, here's where I'm not, here's how I sign off. This is how we know it's done. When it's not done, you're gonna get the feedback. It starts to feel less personal, starts to feel less emotional, less subjective. You just have this flow.

So this is what's going to get us out of this feeling of, I just can't and I think it's time to just stop and start over and get rid everyone. No. And the way you get support, if you need a little bit of help, a lot of us do because it's really hard to see the forest through the trees. Reach out, liagarvin.com slash contact, share where you're at with your team. We'll have a conversation. Can talk about a couple quick wins you can implement right away because usually there's a...

a few tweaks that you don't even need my hands on support and that's gonna open the floodgates. So that's what I love actually doing on these calls is like saying, okay, this is dialed in. But then if you're like, hey, I want the system, I wanna figure this out, that's where we talk about how do we really get you up and running to scale and free up all of this time, all this brain space. Because the reason you have a team, whether again it's people or agents or whatever, is to free up your time. So if you're still making all the calls,

and you're still doing all this stuff that somebody else or something else can be doing, then that is never gonna get you that freedom that you started this business to have or that you became a leader to have. right, liagarvin.com slash contact. We will get you the answers you need. And in the meantime, try this out. Answer these three questions. What should I be doing? Who's the right people? And have I had my conversations? And then what systems do I have? Those are things that I can leave you with feeling empowered to try.

and I assure you, this is going to be game changing. All right, see you next time.