If You Didn't Show Up Monday, Would Your Business Know What to Do?

Reading a Business Between the Lines — Friday

There’s a question I want you to think about going into this weekend.

And depending on how your business operates, it might make you a little uncomfortable.

What would happen if you didn’t show up Monday morning?

Nothing is wrong with you.

You’re not sick.

There’s no emergency.

You didn’t sell the company and move to an island somewhere.

You’re simply unavailable.

No answering your phone.

No checking email from the couch.

No responding to the text that starts with:

“Hey, real quick…”

😂

You’re not there.

Now imagine Monday morning starts without you.

Who knows what needs to happen first?

Who knows what jobs are scheduled?

Who knows what has already been promised to customers?

Who knows what needs to be ordered?

Who knows which jobs are profitable and which ones are already starting to go sideways?

Who follows up with the quote that hasn’t been approved?

Who handles the upset customer?

Who makes the decision when something happens that isn’t written in the playbook?

And maybe the biggest question of all:

How long would it take before somebody had to call you?

Before We Beat Ourselves Up…

This entire week we’ve been talking about reading our business between the lines.

But I want to make something clear.

We’re not doing this because we’re trying to pick our businesses apart.

We’re not searching for evidence that we’ve built something wrong.

We’re trying to understand what we’ve built well enough that, eventually, it can operate without us standing in the middle of everything.

And if your business struggles when you aren’t there, there may actually be something positive hiding inside that problem.

You became incredibly valuable to your business.

Think about everything you know.

You know the customers.

You know the equipment.

You know the vendors.

You know the processes.

You know which employee is good at what.

You remember conversations nobody wrote down.

You remember promises made three weeks ago.

You can look at a job and know immediately that something doesn’t look right.

You’ve spent years collecting information, experience and instincts.

That knowledge has value.

The problem comes when too much of it lives in only one place.

Inside you.

Your Business May Be Borrowing Your Brain

That might be one of the biggest things we discover when we start reading between the lines.

Some businesses have systems.

Some businesses have processes.

Some businesses have documentation.

And some businesses have…

the owner’s memory.

😂

Someone asks a question.

You answer it.

Someone needs a price.

You know it.

Something goes wrong.

You fix it.

Someone doesn’t know what happens next.

You tell them.

And because we’re good at solving problems, we keep solving them.

The business keeps moving.

The customer gets taken care of.

The job gets finished.

So everything appears to be working.

But read between the lines.

Did the business solve the problem?

Or did you solve the problem?

There’s a difference.

So Monday, Let’s Run an Experiment

I’m not telling you to stay home Monday.

I’m not staying home either. 😂

But when you walk into your business Monday morning, I want you to pretend for a little while that you aren’t there.

Observe.

Pay attention.

And every time somebody needs something from you, write it down.

Not their name.

Not what they did wrong.

Write this:

Then fill in the blank.

Maybe they needed you to know a price.

Maybe they needed you to know what happens next.

Maybe they needed permission to make a decision.

Maybe they needed information about a customer.

Maybe they needed to know where something was.

Maybe they needed you to solve a problem nobody else has been taught how to solve.

Don’t get frustrated.

Get curious.

Because every interruption is information.

Every question is information.

Every decision that cannot happen without you is information.

Those moments may not be telling you that you have bad employees.

They may be showing you where your business is missing a system.

Your Next Playbook May Already Be Hiding in Those Questions

Earlier this week we talked about Coach Klein realizing something important.

He wrote the playbook.

His old plays didn’t define the limits of what he could create next.

The same thing applies here.

You built a lot of what currently lives inside your head.

Which means you can build the systems that move some of that knowledge out of your head and into the business.

That doesn’t make you less important.

It changes where your value lives.

Instead of being the person who has to answer every question…

you become the person who teaches the organization how to answer more of those questions without you.

Instead of solving the same problem for the hundredth time…

you build something that helps solve it the hundred-and-first time.

And little by little, something changes.

The business starts learning how to carry some of the weight you’ve been carrying for it.

So Here’s Your Homework

Enjoy your weekend.

But when Monday morning comes, bring a piece of paper.

Every time the business reaches for you, make a mark.

Don’t fix the list yet.

Don’t build an SOP yet.

Don’t reorganize the company over the weekend. 😂

Just collect the evidence.

Because Monday morning, we’re going to take that list and start figuring out what it’s trying to tell us.

Getting yourself out of the middle of everything doesn’t mean walking away from your business.

It means building a business that doesn’t fall apart

when you do.

Come back Monday.

Bring your list.

I have a feeling mine is going to be pretty long too. 😂