It’s pouring on the day everything was planned outside.

Welcome back to Simply Rich Shifts. 🌴💸

"How do I teach someone what I just know up here (pointing to her head)? I've been doing it for 10 years."

A client asked me that two Mondays ago in my Leadership Forum. I was in a cabin in the Georgia mountains, it was 38 degrees outside, and Florida had been 92 when we left, so I was already a little shocked to my system before she said it.

She runs large on-location projects for corporate clients. The coordinators she works with are good. They're organized, they communicate well, and they can follow a checklist without her. So when I asked her for one thing a new coordinator has to nail every time, start to finish, I expected a checklist item.

She gave me a bad day instead.

A key person doesn't show up while the client's lead is in the middle of the work. In one version of that day, someone runs over in a panic and announces it in front of everyone. The other version is the one she runs. She doesn't say a word yet. She calls for a replacement, reworks the order of the day around who is there, and only then walks over and says what happened, that it's handled, and what's next.

Or it's sunny today and pouring tomorrow, and the whole day was planned outside.

"It's not necessarily a hard system," she told me. "It's a way of how we show up."

Read that again, because almost every owner I work with around a million dollars has said a version of it to me. My people can do the tasks, and what they can't do is what I do when it falls apart. That part lives in my head, because it's judgment, and judgment can't be written down.

It can. That belief is what keeps the door spinning.

This is the Revolving Door. Your team is good, and they still come to you, because the part of the job that matters most has never left your head. You aren't a bottleneck. You are the last undocumented system in your own business, and right now you are the only documentation your team has.

Talk it out loud

I told her about another client of mine, a realtor. She said the reason she wins so many listing appointments is the way she does her comps, that they take forever, and that she wished someone else could do them. When I said let's teach someone, she told me it wasn't that easy. "It's how I look at things."

So I asked her to stop looking quietly and start talking. She sits at her computer with a comp open and says out loud what her brain was doing in silence. Both houses are three bedrooms, two baths. This one has an old kitchen. My seller just redid hers, and that's worth about this much. Every judgment call she'd been making for years, spoken while she makes it.

That is how you write down judgment. You don't sit at a desk trying to remember how you think. You say it while you're doing it, and something captures it.

For The Leadership Forum client, it comes straight out of The 16-Hour Owner System, the first 90 days of The Simply Rich Business Experience program, and it touches every pillar.

Structure comes first. Before she records anything, she decides the minimum standard of service every client gets, whether that client gets her or someone else. That's the line everything else has to hold.

Systems is the recording. She wears a small AI recorder on every job for the rest of the year and narrates. Someone didn't show. I'm not telling the client lead yet. I'm calling for a replacement first, then reworking the order of the day. Her next job with a bad day in it may not come until February, so she isn't waiting. She starts with the situations she already knows will happen and talks through how she handled them. AI turns each recording into a short list of what she did, in order, with her voice behind it for anyone who wants to hear it.

Support is how the coordinator learns it. She studies the library before the job, they role play it together starting with the rain, and on the day she has it in her pocket. Afterward they debrief from the coordinator's own recording. Our goal is, "They're not trying to tell you a story in a moment of stress afterwards. They're telling the actual story." I also told her to listen for whether she says "this is how I do things" or "this is how we do things," because what clients are buying is the experience of her company, the one they get whether or not she's on site.

Streamline wraps around all three. Every new bad day gets added to the library once, so it only has to be solved out loud one time.

Why I know this works

In 2010 a caregiver didn't show up for a 6am shift at my senior home care franchise. I did the shift myself, and afterward I sat in my car and sobbed. I had a million-dollar business, I was working 80 hours a week, and every no-show in that business ended with me.

That was the day I drew a line in the sand. I spent two years rebuilding, and in October 2012 I left for 30 days in my RV and the business ran without me. By the end my team was asking, "Why are you here? We don't even need you." We ran in the top 9% of the network by revenue while I worked the least of anyone in it, with 17% team turnover in an industry that averages 120%, and $3.3M a year on 16 of my hours a week.

I'm still away as I write this. Isabella runs every Scale Strategy Session using the onboarding process I built, and my client calls are recorded so the notes and follow-ups don't depend on my memory.

Your room

The Scale Strategy Session is complimentary, 45 minutes, one on one with Isabella. You'll walk away with:

• The three situations your team still brings to you, and who should own each one
• The first one to talk out loud and record, so it stops coming back
• The minimum standard of service every client gets, whether she gets you or someone else

This is your room if your team is good and still calls you on the hard days. If you've been doing this for ten years and have never once said out loud how you do it. If you're proud you can handle anything, and starting to suspect that's why nobody else does.

When you join The Simply Rich Business Experience after your call with Isabella, you work with me directly.

Remember to live your one life! 💗Sailynn...

P.S. My client has started Pillar One, and she plans to hand a full job to a coordinator in January. I haven't forgotten my promise either. I'm not back yet, and when I am you'll get the list of everything that broke while I was gone. If you'd like to find the bad day in your business that only you can handle, book a Scale Strategy Session with Isabella.