If Your Phone Dies, Does Your Business? – Service Business Coach in Edmonton

If your phone dies, does your business die too? That is not a tech problem. It is a leadership one.

Too many service business owners are running what looks like a company but functions more like a controlled breakdown. Boss of everything, in control of nothing. Bruce Baker of The Business Builders by Workplaces on what happens when a business cannot breathe without you, and how to fix it before it implodes.

The Mexico test

Why every owner believes the place falls over without them

Trevor: Why do so many owners feel their business would collapse without them?

Bruce: I have always called it the Mexico test. If the owner could go to Mexico for a couple of weeks and lie on the beach without worrying about the business collapsing, you know you have succeeded.

Close to every owner initially feels the same way. If I leave, something is going to happen. And the operative word is I. That is a symptom of a business where every part relies on you pulling or pushing a lever. As the business grows it demands more of you, with more levers to push and pull. That is where the problems start.

Hustle versus chaos

A race car with no guardrails

Bruce: Hustle is not a bad thing. It is a key characteristic of being an entrepreneur, and if you are not prepared to hustle you will not grow. But hustle has structure. It has a routine that is repeatable, and the repetition creates results.

Chaos is doing the hustle thing, but it is like a race car at incredible speed without guardrails. It moves out of control. We do not want that wobble as we try to get traction.

What people are actually managing in chaos is a symptom, not the issue. When something goes wrong our minds flag it and we respond. So we get very busy because of the problem and the further problems it creates. Eventually you are not managing your business. You are managing the outcome of a band-aid, every time you react to it.

How the owner becomes the bottleneck

The engine where every part waits on one person

Bruce: The success of any business is efficiency, and efficiency is the effective use of money and time.

I think of it like an internal combustion engine. A perfect system that relies on all its components, where each part knows exactly what to do and works independently of the others, but as a coherent whole. What happens with an owner is that the entire system and every individual part of it relies on one person.

Clients come to me saying, I am about to implode. I cannot handle the different moving parts, and whenever I look up there is another new part that needs to move, and I have to control it.

The bottleneck shows up like this. Let us just fix that for now so things keep moving. We will come back to it next week. Next week arrives and there are two or three more, and the owner does it again. So you end up with band-aids everywhere and no proper fixes that last.

The first system to build

Role definition, and the question that stops owners cold

Trevor: What is the first real system an owner should build to get out of the chaos loop?

Bruce: Role definition. It sounds simple: what do I do, and when I look at all the different parts of my business, what do they do?

If I hire an admin assistant or a salesperson, we tend to hire quickly without defining what they actually do. Most owners are shocked when we sit down and ask what this job does. They start to answer, and then realize they do not really know.

What that causes is people tripping over each other and getting frustrated with each other. If it is not fixed, the chaos becomes uncontrollable, overwhelm sets in, your mind gets hijacked emotionally, and you do not know where to turn.

So the way out starts with asking what you should be doing. What a lot of owners do instead is, let me just take this on, it is quick, I can do it fast and get on with everything. Over time that compounds until it is so big that you are overwhelmed.

Take a breath. What are we actually trying to do here? Get this widget to that customer so the customer is happy. Why am I overwhelmed? What should I be doing? And then, if I should not be doing this, why are they not doing it? There are many reasons, good and bad, and that is where it starts. I hired these people for a reason, and I am doing their job.

The duct tape problem

One step forward, two steps back

Bruce: I hear it constantly. Bruce, I move one step forward and two steps back. A client of mine, Nick, said exactly that several years ago. I asked him what it actually meant. You gain one week and lose two or three the next. Is that because you are doing something wrong? He said he did not know what he was doing wrong.

It comes back to duct tape. Let us just do this, we will get it sorted for today, tomorrow we will fix it properly. But because it is fixed, you become blind to it. And over time, and all of us are susceptible, you become blind to the accumulation of everything you were going to come back to.

Then, the week after, when you ask what caused you to step back two steps, the first answer is, I have no idea. But when you look at it critically, and this is liberating for an owner, you notice that you have been saying you would get something sorted for the last month and nothing has happened.

I always tell people to ease off giving themselves a hard time. What actually happened is that you have been the quick fixer over and over, and you have forgotten the quick fixes. Quick fixes die fast. They break, and as more of them break, you do not connect it to why you are stepping backwards today. You averted crisis and went home feeling fine. But averted crises accumulate, and they become a blind spot.

Ten minutes of critical thinking

Bruce: To do any of this there has to be a certain level of critical thinking, and that is where entrepreneurs struggle. I ask owners for ten minutes. A full ten minutes, sitting in the car in the parking lot, or a very long hand washing session in the bathroom.

Use it to ask, if there is one thing I could do that lasts longer than a day, maybe a month, what could I put in place? If people give themselves that ten minutes without assuming it will destroy the day, it is phenomenally effective. We have these big brains and we are not using them, because we are reacting.

Stepping back too soon

Why it fails, and why owners then refuse to try again

Bruce: There is such a thing as stepping back too soon, and what causes it is training.

I have a client who is a tremendously good leader with a tendency to get overwhelmed. She takes things on herself because it is quicker and it gets done the way she needs. So she gets overwhelmed, and the training component gets skipped. Then she reaches a point where it looks like people are doing it well enough, and she steps back. Things falter. And then it becomes, I cannot find good help these days, I may as well do it myself.

They step back because they think it is the right thing to do, but it is too soon, and they get punished for it. Then they conclude that stepping back is a bad thing, which creates a vicious cycle.

Stepping back too soon just means the system you used to empower others was not effective yet. It does not have to be one hundred percent the way you do it, but effective enough to produce the result and the standard you expect. Once you have determined that, step back.

And when you step back, it is not out of sight, out of mind. There has to be a communications bridge. Continuous coaching, continuous support. How is it going? Do you have the tools you need? Am I supporting you the way you need? That is ongoing.

The owner who wants to be the hero

Bruce: Human beings learn and evolve through adversity. I am a nurturer by default and I do not like seeing people in pain, but a lot of owners become the hero. And you are not the hero. Your employees and your clients are.

Owners will say, no, I have got this, I think I can do this. And no matter what I say I cannot convince them otherwise until they sit in the pain a little. I do not allow or disallow anything, I can only encourage and discourage. But staying in that position gives us both the chance to talk about the pain points, because in time they see it. Like Nick. Yes, you were right. Yes, you said that.

It is not enjoying someone being uncomfortable. It is asking, what is painful, and how would you like to change it, because you cannot continue this way. If it is not helping you as a leader it is certainly not helping your employees.

What a healthy team looks like

Still hustling, but with guardrails

Bruce: You are still hustling as a team, still moving forward, but now with clearly defined systems and ways of doing things, and the great part is that they are repeatable.

If I am the owner with a salesperson and an admin, they know exactly what to do by virtue of procedure and policy. Procedure is how. Policy is why they do what they do. They are competent and they understand the standard. All I have to do as the leader is make sure they have the support and tools they need, and keep communicating.

That does not mean the three of us are not extremely busy. It means we start the day with a huddle and ask what we want to achieve today, and at the end of the day the thing we wanted to achieve was actually achieved. Not a perfect silo. But we committed to a couple of things, ninety percent of it got done, and we know what we are doing tomorrow.

The reason the huddle matters is the narrative running in each of our heads. We all have a story we are telling ourselves, and when we are busy we assume Bruce has got it, James has got it, and we move on through our own filter. That filter lets us down, because we do not know what is going through their minds. The huddle is where three independent minds align on the slight nuances, and it is exactly those nuances we take for granted that derail things and cause chaos.