Cultivate Business Growth Without You at the Helm

As Business Owners, we focus on a variety of strategies. Some focus on growing profits, while others are obsessed with sales goals. 

But have you ever considered making it your primary goal to set up your business so that it can thrive and grow without you?

A business not dependent on its owner is the ultimate asset to own. Why? 

Well — it allows you to have complete control over your time to choose the projects you get involved in. 

Plus, when it comes to moving into the chapter of your life, a business independent of its owner is worth a lot more than an owner-dependent company. 

Sounds excellent, right? 

So, how do you get started?

Here are five strategies you can begin to integrate today, so that your successors can tap into business growth in the future.

1. Give Them A Stake In The Outcome

Jack Stack, the author of The Great Game of Business and A Stake In The Outcome, wrote the book on creating an ownership culture inside your company: you are transparent about your financial results and allow employees to participate in your financial success. This results in employees who act like owners when you’re not around. By fostering a culture of active engagement and owner mindset, the business’s intangible assets grow in value. 

The fact that “the more you know – the more you own” transfers directly to your staff.

2. Get Them To Walk In Your Shoes

If you’re not quite comfortable opening up the books to your employees, consider a simple management technique where you respond to every question your staff brings you with the same answer, “If you owned the company, what would you do?” By forcing your employees to walk in your shoes, you get them thinking about their questions as you would, and it builds the habit of starting to think like an owner. Pretty soon, employees can solve their own problems. This continues to grow the owner’s mindset throughout your company.

3. Vet Your Offerings

Identify the products and services that require your personal involvement in making, delivering, or selling them. Make a list of everything you sell and score each on a scale of 0 to 10 on how easy they are to teach an employee to handle. Assign a 10 to offerings that are easy to train employees and give a lower score to anything that requires your personal attention. Commit to no longer selling the lowest scoring product or service on your list. Repeat this exercise every quarter. Too often, we hold onto products or services that no longer have a place in our unique selling proposition, but we are afraid to put them out to pasture.

4. Create Automatic Customers

Are you the company’s best salesperson? If so, you’ll need to fire yourself as your company’s rainmaker to get it to run without you. One way to do this is to create a recurring revenue business model where customers buy from you automatically. Consider making a service contract with your customers that offers to fulfill one of their ongoing needs regularly. 

5. Write An Instruction Manual For Your Business

Finally, make sure your company comes with instructions included. Write an employee manual, or what MBA-types called “Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).” These are a set of rules employees can follow for repetitive tasks in your company. This will ensure employees have a rulebook they can follow when you’re not around, and when an employee leaves, you can quickly swap them out with a replacement to take on duties of the job. 

This allows you to get the head knowledge of yourself and long-time employees documented so that people move and grow and not lose generational expertise.

Actively working on your business growth strategy to remove you as the focus has enormous benefits. It will allow you to create a company and have a life. Your business will be free to scale up because it is no longer dependent on you, its bottleneck. Best of all, potential business growth is worth a lot more to a buyer whenever you are ready to sell.