Fire Yourself As Often As You Can

The President and Chief Operating Officer at BuzzFeed, Jon Steinberg, wrote a great post in LinkedIn, entitled Fire Yourself: The Goal is To Have Nothing to Do. You can read the whole post here.

This concept is near and dear to every EOS Implementer and the companies who run themselves on EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System). We call it letting go of the vine. The idea is simple. You can’t scale your business if you have to make every decision, close every sale, satisfy every customer, and so on. Put simply, the more you work in your business, the less it’s worth. Every manager must delegate to others the day to day running of the business. And as the business grows, those people must delegate too.

Steinberg offers us the five steps he uses to accomplish this goal:

1. Do the process and things yourself first.
2. Take the time to train others in the process.
3. Develop and coach the team on these tasks into being focused and self-sustaining.
4. Fire yourself.
5. Repeat again.

EOS gives all owners and managers the tools to actually accomplish these activities.

1. Document your core processes – the six to twelve key processes that make your business (or division or group) repeatable, scalable and profitable. Document in an entrepreneurial way. By that we mean document the 20% of the work that gets you 80% of the results you want.
2. Make sure that everyone is following the core processes.
3. Establish scorecards for those activities that yield success for those core processes. In this way everyone knows how they fit into the bigger picture and they can measure their own success, manage themselves if you will.
4. During regular meetings (EOS recommends weekly) review the scorecards to insure that the work is being done in the manner specified and that goals are being met.
5. In those meetings, remove obstacles that are hindering that work being successfully done.

We agree with Jon Steinberg and the man he credits with giving him the idea, Steve Case, that this is the most scalable and productive way of growing your company.

You can download our scorecard template and our recommended agenda for your weekly meetings here.

Photo: Iakov Kalinin / Shutterstock.com