The Energy Matrix — What to Delegate First | 350

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Transcript

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Welcome back to the Business of Beers Podcast, your daily dose of strategies, tools, and tips to help you build an eight-figure business. Today's episode is a clip from one of my YouTube lives. If you'd like to hear the whole thing, there's a link below in the description. Cheers. Today I own 36 auto repair shops that do a million dollars a week in sales. And I have no day-to-day responsibilities in the business. My time is spent on the fun stuff, new store acquisitions, partnerships, investments, and now creating content online which helps accelerate all the things that I find to be fun. And so today I'm going to walk through the exact process that I've used to build teams and systems, to build a business that then can thrive without me. And so that's the goal. I'm hoping that there's something that you can get out of this to apply to your business because a lot of these principles, you know, why I'm in automotive and why you know it happens to be a franchise, uh, is universal because it comes down to really these three things. And so, first, you know, I've been in this business 16 years, uh, first six as you know, learning the business, working in the stores, and then I've been an owner for the last 10 years. So I've been doing this a long time. I think that's you know, one of the things that that I really value is you if you want to get in something and you learn it and you stick with it long enough that you can have some really good results. I, you know, I talk to people all the time and they're they're looking for the quick fix, they're looking for something that can just like get in and make money. And the truth is there are no shortcuts. You know, you you have intentional plans and you show up, and man, some some really good things can follow. And so I've been intentional in this process to say, what are the things that I can do to replace myself? And it has been my game plan literally from the day I became an owner, which was I knew to be able to grow, it had to go beyond me. But but when you're first starting out, everything is on your shoulders. And so what we're gonna walk through is kind of like what this looks like. So to start, every business has the same three like pillars that it has to do. We have sales, operations, and admin. And every business, no matter this, no matter the size, no matter the industry, at least all the kind of the trades and the services, uh, and even in even in tech and other things, you have these three divisions. And when you first start out, when I first started out as as an owner, and when you will too, or or are, every one of these has its own pieces that have to thrive. And in the beginning, you as the owner do everything, right? Like you are most likely the person who does all the sales. You oversee the operations and you make sure that everything is is up to standard. You do the admin, you do the bookkeeping, you do like all the payroll, all the things that have to happen. And you do it because you have to, right? It is the only way that you can grow. And in the beginning, when you launch a business, I think it's actually it's really good to do everything, at least from my experience, I mean this is this is what I did, is because then I could learn these different things. I could learn what it took to do sales and what a good salesperson would look like. I could learn what the operations would need to be in order to grow. I I could learn the admin stuff, which is super boring at least for me, but is really important because if people don't get paid, if things fall through the cracks, like that is where people can rob you blind. I've I've I've heard it, I've seen it many times from friends of mine who get who get robbed on the back end. And so you have to you have to kind of conquer these three divisions. Um, where are you spending your time? And so I I do this audit of of my time and and and I and I and I think through it and to say, all right, I've got um how much time do I spend on each one of these things? What am I great at? Like what fires me up that I'm I I would just like absolutely love to do, and what drains me? So the the process is pretty simple where you go through all the things that you're spending your time on throughout the day, throughout the week, and try to answer these questions of what am I doing that I'm spending a lot of time on or a little bit of time on? What are the things that I I'm great? They fire me up, like man, if I could just do this all day, that's what I would do. And then what drains me? What what is like completely takes the the wind out of my sails that I'm like uh stupid thing, I I have no interest in doing this, right? And you just like you just hate it every time that person calls you or you have to you have to deal with it. But you're the only person, right? So you have to do it. And the goal is we we want to log everything, and we we really want to figure out for you, because everyone's different, like what are these categories? And I've and I've got this this matrix that I that I think through. And let's go. Okay. And so I I get all these things on the list, right? And and I did this when I had two stores and I was smaller. I do this even today, I've done this every step of the way, is I've got a list of list, I'm looking at all the things that happen, and I and I think through these things. And first, the things that drain you and they take a lot of time, those are the first ones that we want to hand off. So think through, like for for some people, for a lot of people at least, especially like business owners, we're visionaries, we see big things, right? The things that drain us are most likely like that back office, the admin, having to do payroll every week, um, dealing with insurance, anything related to insurance, maybe negotiating with vendors or dealing with um, I don't know, just like paperwork. For me, anything that was like paperwork and and and lots of like details and all this stuff, like I'm like, hey, I got the big vision, I want to go. And if you're telling me I gotta spend three hours going through something, like I could do it, but I'm not gonna be very happy about it, and it's gonna drain me. Right. And so that is gonna be the first thing that I am going to look to hand off. That is gonna be my that is gonna be my number one priority. And depends on the role though. For some of you, like maybe for you, it's it's operation things. Like we go back to you know, these categories. We got sales ops and admin. And for some, it could be the project management, right? Where we're you know, I'm a partner in a um artificial turf franchise in Texas. It's called Waterloo Turf, and it's a franchise. And you know, I've I've got a partner, Rick, and he's kind of in this solo uhpreneur uh mode. He he does everything, he does sales, he does operations, he does this, is that. And like there's things that he's really, really good at, and then there's things I know he does that he, you know, drain him. And so for him, it's it's looking to hand those off, uh, which could be, you know, the the project management, like all the details, because he wants to go out and build relationships and be like the captain of the team, which is like what he's like amazing at. And so look to do that first. Number two is the second thing I start to look at is what are the things that fire me up and take almost take minimal time. These are the things that you want to max out. So, for example, in my business, like I've scaled it from you know a handful of locations to 36. Most of mine have been acquisitions. So in the franchise business, it is it is, at least in my business, it is very easy to do acquisitions because franchisees generally want to sell to other franchisees, somebody they know, like, and trust. And it's just like way, it's just way easier to do that deal than to deal with an outsider. And I, you know, I know this. And so the highest value time for for me would be building relationships with all the other franchisees that I can, like that I would potentially want to partner with or acquire or you know, whatever. And so, you know, getting lunch every two months with somebody, that hour that I get lunch with that person has led to deals that are, you know, today are worth millions and millions of dollars. But take almost no time at all, or for me to have an idea to share with another owner to add value because I'm trying to build an authentic relationship with that person, and then order to eventually get a deal, right? No, no time at all in comparison, but extreme leverage. And what fires me up are doing deals. Like I love doing the deals, I love the acquisition, I love like the challenge of putting it all together. Uh, and then I want to hand it off. But so find the things in your life, like what are the highest points of leverage that you can have that take no time at all that you can potentially max out? That would be like my number two priority in as I go through this matrix. Number three are uh up here. Slow, I'm gonna call it the slow roll. So things that fire you up, but also take a lot of time. Okay. So in my business, uh, for example, like training salespeople, training our managers. You know, for many years, like I was really good at, I was I'm really good at identifying talented people, you know, selling them on the vision of what we're trying to create and they can be part of it, getting them on board, working with shoulder to shoulder with them, right, to kind of try to transpose as much of my knowledge in in into them as I can so that they can see what I see. They can be excited about it. When they have challenges, they you know, they they know what overcome or that because they they really understand. And that fires me up because I love to see the progress of people. I love to see that somebody can come and join our organization and then you know, within weeks or months, they're they're already at the top, top of the charts. And like, you know, it's like much better than the way they came from. And and uh, you know, we see the potential because for in our business, we unlock value by building great teams at every level, at the store level, at the operational level, at the at the at the leadership level. Uh and so that fires me up, but it also takes a tremendous amount of time. And the bigger you get, like it's it's less and less, you just don't have time to be able to work with as many people, right? And so that is something that that I slowly rolled off of. So like in the beginning, I would hire a lot of, I mean, I hired everybody directly. I trained everybody directly, and I kind of felt that all right, if I could get a couple of these like locations settled, then I could move on on to the next ones. And you kind of like build it and then then go on to the next. Uh eventually, so so it was like I want to slow roll that process because it's it was so important. I was good at it, and it's very important. And so then it's like, can I hire somebody who can be 80% as good as me? Right. And then I give them a shot. I let them hire a couple people. I see how they do, and I see what they mistakes. And now I'm spending more of my time investing into that person, the the person who is now replacing me to make those hires. Because if if I don't, if they can't hire people as good as I was gonna hire people, then the whole thing starts to crumble, right? Because if you if you're in the people business, like every service is in the people business. We say we're in the car business, but like we fix cars, but we're really in the people business. And if the people are the most important thing, as the owner, it's your job, it's my job to make sure we have the highest quality people. And so it so it's like so important. You can't just that's why I say you have to slow roll it and invest your time into the people that make the hires. A lot of time. Those are so important, and you don't you don't want to mess those up. And then finally, what I'm gonna call the slow bleed. So things that drain you, but don't take that much time, right? These are gonna be the like all these random one-off tasks that you get that's like, you know, that there's so much context that someone would need to know that it's it's really kind of hard to just be able to hand it off to a single person because it connects to a couple different things. Uh, this could be some annoying vendor that you have this one-off deal with. This could be some sort of like compliance call. This could be maybe dealing with a landlord about something. This could be, I don't know, something that like it doesn't take that much time, but it like totally, it's like death by a thousand cuts. And it's not worth the payroll cost or the time to get somebody else to do it. Um, and so it's something that you'll eliminate it later. You'll eliminate it when you can. But it would be for me the like the the third um or the fourth priority after we're able to hand off things that take a lot of time that totally drain us. That would then we're spending time on low effort things that fire us up, slow rolling the stuff that fires us up but takes a lot of time, but but but like we get a lot of leverage if we can continue to scale it. And then finally, the slow, the slow bleed.