210 | Your Business Shouldn't Need All of You

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Why do successful founders become the bottleneck in their growing business?

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 wanna start off by saying I think that this is a very natural thing that I think this is kind of like the growing pains.
Erin Gray 0:53
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 had 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.
Erin Gray 1:38
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.
Erin Gray 2:18
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. 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 leads a team or has multiple employees.
Erin Gray 3:02
I don't know how many employees each of you have that are listening or watching. But you know, like thinking about for m for myself and my family's business, like 32 employees, there were Mm five four or five different departments that we had. And, you know, recognizing that You have to, the person, the identity that you were 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. Be made through them.
Erin Gray 3:46
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.

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