1. Replace yourself by niching down.
The reason most owners can’t replace themselves is that a substitute would be too expensive. Trying toreplace your breadth of experience would likely require a very high-salaried employee. If you can’tafford to replace all of what you do, niche down your core offering.
For example, Casey Cavell’s baseball business, D-Bat Academy, could have catered to a broad range ofplayers: professionals, softball players, slow-pitch beer leaguers, fast-pitch...but instead, he got specificabout who his business was for: 5- to 10-year-old kids.
Sure, he could have charged more per customer if he catered to college athletes and aspiring pros—butthose elite athletes would expect to get a hitting coach with years of expertise, and Casey would havehad to staff for that.
On the other hand, when you have a business where one of its primary objectives is to give an 8-year-old an awesome birthday party, well, an entry-level employee can deliver on that.
When you narrow down your offering, you can bypass the high salary that comes with someone with awide breadth of experience.
2. Create a question diary.
When Jodie Cook was building her social media agency, she made a conscious choice every time anemployee came to ask her a question.
The easy thing to do would have been to answer the question, but she forced herself to write eachquestion down. She turned that question diary into a business manual that documented how to doevery single task required of her employees.
Her manual came in the form of an Excel spreadsheet with 50 tabs, each one documenting a specificprocess, like payroll for example.
Challenge yourself to do the same: When an employee asks you a question, resist the urge to justanswer and move on. Document those queries, and turn them into a standard operating procedure(SOP) that enables your staff to develop expertise in their role. The go-to reference becomes themanual...instead of you.
3. List your employees alphabetically on your site.
Most companies list their employees by seniority, with the owner and CEO as the top listing. However,this communicates that you are the most important person in your company, which will triggereveryone from salespeople to suppliers and prospective partners to want to go straight to the top bycalling you.
An effective strategy to downplaying your role in your company (and getting others to step up andshoulder more) is to list employees alphabetically rather than by seniority on your company’s website.This approach can minimize the spotlight on you. Additionally, using titles like “Head of Culture” and“Head of Product” instead of “CEO” or “Owner” can further obscure your seniority, making it less likelycustomers will call you by default.
Getting your business to thrive without you gives you the freedom to cherry pick the projects you wantto work on or just own your business and collect passive income. A business that runs without you isalso a valuable, sellable asset if you ever choose to move on to a new chapter in your life. Niching down,creating SOPs, and downplaying your role on your website are all tactical things you can do today to getyour business running more independently in the future.