She's done it five times. She still asks you how.

THIS WEEK'S MESSAGE

• Why the same question keeps landing on your desk, even after the task has been done five times
• The difference between handing someone a task and handing them the job
• The one-week test that shows you exactly what breaks when you leave

Welcome back to Simply Rich Shifts. 🌴💸

Ten days ago I sat on a consult with two owners who run a business together, five people in the office including the two of them, and one of them said a sentence I have not been able to put down since. Her team member had done the same task five times. And she still came back to ask how.

Her words were close to this: she comes back a hundred times to ask how, how, how, even though she has done it five times before.

Here is what they had already tried, because they are smart owners and they did what smart owners do. They built a Google Sheet. Every task, every person, written down, so nobody had to walk into the office with a question. And then every single day, one of them was still walking the floor asking what happened with this one, and hearing some version of "I called, nobody called me back."

Her husband is the strategic one of the two. He is the person who should be sitting with the big decisions about where the business goes next. He was spending his days chasing small follow-ups on a spreadsheet. Five salaries going out every month, and she said it plainly: they were paying more every month and not getting much out of it.

Then she diagnosed the whole thing herself, without knowing that is what she was doing. "They do not have a proper handbook or something that she can follow."

That same week I talked with another owner. Nine contractors, around 70 hours a week, and she has been working like that for years. When I asked what her team keeps bringing back to her, she described a first draft that comes back wrong every time, so now she does it herself. "It literally takes me five minutes."

Those two calls were about completely different businesses, and I heard the same thing on both. I know the pattern from the inside, because in 2010 I was living it. My open door policy was more like a revolving door at Macy's on Black Friday that never stopped until 5pm when my team went home. I had a million-dollar business and I was working 80 hours a week, and the coach I finally hired told me something I did not want to hear. The business was not failing because of my team. It had no systems, and I was a teller, not a leader.

If the same questions keep landing on your desk no matter who you hire, that is the first thing we look at in a Scale Strategy Session. Book yours here →

What the spreadsheet was missing

Here is what nobody teaches at this level, and it is the reason the spreadsheet did not work.

A spreadsheet tells someone what. Call the vendor. Follow up on the project. Send the invoice. That is a task, and a task is all most owners ever hand over.

A job tells someone how often, in what order, where it gets written down, and whose name goes next to it when it is done. Text them first. If there is no answer by noon, email. If there is still nothing the next morning, call, and log it. When it is finished, you sign off on it and it goes in the done pile. That is a system, and it is the difference between delegating a task and transferring ownership.

When your team only has the task, they come back to the only documentation in the building. You.

Read that again, because it changes who you are in this story. You are the last undocumented system in your own business. Your team is under-equipped, and every question they bring you is a piece of your head they cannot open without you in the room.

I had a preschool owner come to me with a six-figure office manager, and one afternoon that office manager texted her: we're out of paper. The duct tape answer is to order more paper. The owner fixes it, and next month she gets the same text and fixes it again. What we do instead is look at it with a wide-angle lens and ask why. Is it on auto-ship and the school is using more? Then the frequency changes, once. Did the office manager know and have no company card to buy it? Then she gets the card, the limit, and the rule for using it, once. Either way, nobody texts the owner about paper again.

That is the first 90 days of The 16-Hour Owner System in one small example. Structure, Systems and Support, with Streamline wrapped around all three so they never bloat back into work, and every repeat question fixed permanently instead of patched.

The pushback I hear most at this level is that your work is judgment and judgment cannot be written down. A realtor client told me she did not know how to teach someone else to do comps. It took her forever and she was the only one who could do it. So we walked her process through in different ways until what was in her head was on paper. Her assistant runs the comps now, about 90% accurate, and she brings them to the owner and asks what she thinks. The owner gets to say, amazing job, here's one tweak, and here's why. Your approach is always the same. That is a system you have not written down yet.

And the five-minute task is the trap underneath all of it. It only takes you five minutes, which is exactly why it is still yours.

It's not a people problem, it's a structure problem.

What it looks like on the other side

I spent two years rebuilding my franchise from the ground up. In October 2012 I loaded up my RV and left for 30 days, and the business did not fall apart. By the end I had 17 women in the office and 150 in the field, 17% turnover in an industry that runs 120%, and I was running $3.3M a year on 16 hours a week, remotely. My team started asking me, why are you here? We don't even need you. I learned to love that question.

It is not only my story. My client Jennifer had to leave town for about a year to care for her mother-in-law, who was dying of cancer. Her team ran the whole business on roughly an hour a day from her, and it was still there when she came back.

THE AFTER, IN NUMBERS
80 hours a week in 2010
30 days in the RV, October 2012
17 in the office, 150 in the field
17% turnover against an industry norm of 120%
$3.3M on 16 hours a week

A Scale Strategy Session is 30 minutes with me. It is a diagnostic. We find where owner dependency lives in your business and what shifts first, and you leave with clarity either way. If your team has a spreadsheet and still has you, book it here →

Your room

The Scale Strategy Session is complimentary and it is with me, one on one. In 30 minutes you will walk away with:

• The one repeat question costing you the most hours right now
• Whether you have a people problem or a structure problem (it is almost always the second one)
• The first system to build, and who on your team should own it
• What your week could look like once you are out of the daily operation

This is your room if you have a team, a business everyone calls successful, and a phone that still rings for everything. If you have hired good people and still end up redoing their work. If you want to be replaceable in the daily work and irreplaceable in the direction.

BOOK YOUR SCALE STRATEGY SESSION

Remember to live your one life!

💗Sailynn...

P.S. Here is the test I gave both owners before we hung up. Pick one question your team asked you three times this month. Write down every step of your answer, in order, the way you would say it out loud. Hand them the page and let them run it without you. That is your first system, and if you want help finding the rest, grab a Scale Strategy Session here.