Let's break that down. At one point, you did have to do it all yourself. There wasn't anybody else, so you had to figure out how to get all the details in order, and you did it.

You Did What You Had to Do

You figured it out, and you began to get some momentum. Now, as you began to get momentum, the 1 task a day turned into 10 tasks a day, turned into 100 tasks a day, turned into 1,000 tasks a day, and it just, was just too difficult to maintain all those different tasks at the same time, so you began to hire help, and you began to hire help as fast as you could possibly do it. I mean, you were just giving tasks away, trying to get some help.

Now, the fancy word for this, or one way of saying this, is the word delegation, but the fancy word for this is abdication, meaning you weren't really strategically assigning tasks. You were truly just giving them away as fast as you could. As you were giving those tasks away, you hired these people, they're all helping you get this stuff done, but because they weren't really sure on what you wanted because you were giving tasks away so quickly, mistakes showed up. Now, out of these 1,000 tasks that you're trying to get done, 80% of them have mistakes in them somewhere.

You Tried Hiring Help and It "Didn't Work". What Gives?

Now you find yourself back into those tasks, trying to redo what someone else messed up. You end up saying to yourself one of the most dangerous phrases ever. You end up saying, "Well, if I'm going to end up doing it all myself, why don't I just do it all myself?" That begins the nasty loop. There you are again, doing all these tasks yourself, trying to do something that is really just beyond your ability. You're a human and you cannot do it all, but you've given yourself that responsibility. You're back to being Chief Firefighter.

How do you resolve this? How do you take those details, how do you break them apart so that you can take back your job as leader and get support and get help in the places where you need to?

Step 1: Reorganize Around Your Critical Path

Here's the first thing you've got to do, is reorganize your business around your critical path. There is a process for client acquisition. There is a process for client service. There is a process for client retention. Those things should be spelled out, and those things together become the critical path. That's where money gets made, that's where your reputation gets built, is around those things. All the jobs that you have in the business should be supporting that critical path in one way or another. You need clarity on that critical path, and you need to hire people who specifically can contribute to that critical path. That's thing number 1.

Step 2: Challenge Your Employees to Do Great Work

Thing number 2 is that you need to challenge your employees, challenge your team members, to do excellent work. The reason why you hired them is because you think they can help you do an excellent thing. You think they have excellent skills that can contribute to your excellent thing. By all means, allow those people, challenge those people to do great work. Be clear on what your expectations are. Challenge them to meet those goals. Give them the space to meet those goals so that your critical path can happen in a consistent way, over and over again. You've got to hire the right people and you got to challenge them to do really high level work.

Step 3: Go Sit Down

Now, here's thing number 3. You have to go sit down. You've got to get out of the way. You have built the critical path. You have hired people to execute on that critical path, and now you need to remove yourself so that those that you've hired can do the excellent job. Your job now is to go be the leader. Go find the 10x opportunity. Go find the 10x partnership. Go find the 10x vendor. Go find that next level opportunity that will keep this wheel moving, but fundamentally, you've got to get out of the way and release those tasks, release those job descriptions, so that you can fully embrace your role as the leader of the company.

Where do you start? What's the next thing that you should do? Right now, let's use the comment box below and let's admit where in this process you currently are. Right now, should you be reorganizing your business around the critical path, or should you be actively hiring people to support your existing critical path, or 3, should you be working on getting out of the way and fully owning your job as leader? Where are you in that path? Just admit that, and we can use the comment box as a place for some conversation.

If you happen to be on the blog, you can scroll down a bit and you can download an outline that I've provided that will show you what the critical path looks like when you've built your whole organization around it, so you can download that. Please, comment below so we can begin that conversation. Download the resource if it's useful to you, and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.