No question entrepreneurs have a hard time giving up authority, or letting go. Check out this article by Jason Fried of 37 Signals. You often hear business owners say things like “No one can do it as well as I can,” or “It takes longer to teach someone to do it than it does to do it myself.” People assume it’s because we’re control freaks or power hungry. Sure some are. But after working with entrepreneurs for almost 20 years now (and being one myself for much longer) I think there’s a different explanation.
I think it’s because entrepreneurs are intuitive. We know instinctively how things should be. Like a chef that can make a great meal by tossing in a handful of this and a pinch of that and cooking it at just the right temperature till it looks the way it should. It may be a wonderful meal, but that chef will never get out of the kitchen. If he or she didn’t care about quality, it would be easy to let someone else do the cooking. But we do care so we cook.
But there is a better way – well, let’s hold off on the judgment – there’s a different way. It’s only better if you really want to get out of the kitchen, if you want to build a business that works even when you’re not there. Some people don’t and that’s their choice.
But if you do, you need a special tool. It’s called a recipe. That’s how the famous chefs get out of the kitchen. How they open up more than one restaurant. Some even write books and star on TV shows. And, at the low end, that’s how they serve billions and billions of hamburgers that all taste the same year after year no matter who’s working what shift.
A recipe is a way to take the intuition, and wisdom, and experience you’ve gained through long hours and hard work, and put it into a form that others can use. Even if they aren’t as smart as you, or haven’t been at it for so long, or don’t care as much as you. But here’s the thing – not every recipe is the same. Some are so simple even a caveman could do it (presuming he could read). Others require more finesse, skill and even creativity to apply.
Consider the Blue Man Group. If you haven’t seen them; go. They are a wonderful show. It’s three guys all painted blue – faces, hands, bald heads – and they act on stage without any words and no plot. They make music, they throw (and spit) paint around, they flash lights and make amazing sounds. It’s lots of fun and very funny. The music has no written score.
At first it was the same 3 guys doing every performance six days a week for three years without a break. But they wanted to expand. As I write this (June 2013) they perform in New York, Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Orlando, Australia, Berlin, Brazil, they tour the US and perform on Norwegian Cruise Lines. No way 3 guys could do it all. To keep the consistency, they needed to write something down. According to Rob Walker “[What they wrote] is not so much a how-to manual as a why-to manual; it’s not about stage directions, but rather tells the story of the show step by step, from the point of view of the Blue Men.”
But I digress. My point is this. Entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go, not because we want to hold on – but because we don’t know how to translate that stuff we know intuitively into tools we can use to train and monitor and ultimately trust others to do it right.
And that’s the good news. Because learning how to take wisdom and turn it into processes and procedures and training etc. that just requires learning a new skill – or hiring a ghost writer or consultant. Turning a control freak around – that’s a bigger problem.
How to Get Started
First pick a platform. I suggest something electronic that lives on a server or the cloud so everyone can access it. Google docs is a good example.
Second pick a simple place to start. Don’t try to make it complete or even systematic. Just start somewhere. The beauty of electronic documents is you can search them – they don’t have to be organized the way paper does. Just make sure each section, or task or “dish” (to keep with the cooking analogy) has a name, a description of the goal or purpose and a name and date of the person and time it was last updated.
Third write a checklist. Take a simple task and start enumerating the steps, in order that need to be done. You may think this is too simplistic for people. But it’s not. Pilots use check lists. Doctors in ICU’s are starting to. It frees people’s mind to not have to remember all the details.
When a checklist is too simple, describe the parameters. This is often the purpose of what you’re trying to accomplish, or the qualitiative measures – like with Blue Man. It’s a way to set the boundaries of quality that you’ve learned over the years. This may be the hard part for you because you tend to “know it when you see it”. But work with someone on describing what you see; why one thing is “right” and another isn’t. Imagine you’re explaining it to a person who’s unfamiliar with your industry.
Rinse & Repeat. Keep on adding to the list. Change things as you need to make them better. You’ll end up with a document that’s often called Policies and Procedures or as I’ve sometimes called it The Big Book O’Wisdom.
Then use the document. Use it for training. Refer to it when people have questions. Make it a living document.
It will allow you to give up authority, and trust that things will be done the way you know they should be. What will you do when you can get out of the kitchen and know the food is just as good as when you’re cooking?
