EP219 – Want to Grow Your Business?...
Then Leverage Your Team
with Julie Hutchison & Ian Luckett

IAN: In this episode of the IT Experts Podcast, we help you work out if you want to grow your business, then you need to leverage your team.

INTRO: Welcome to the IT Experts podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million and if already there, get to 5 and go fast. At the end of the day, isn't it all about building a business that works for you rather than you for it? I hope you enjoy the show.

IAN: So good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to the IT Experts Podcast. Today, do you know what? I'm going to say by popular demand, we have Julie Hutchison back in the house, our leadership MSP Growth Hub. Good afternoon, Julie.

JULIE: Hiya. How are you doing, everybody?

IAN: We're all good. We're all good. And if you don't know who Julie is, then you've been living under a rock. And we're not going to explain who she is, but she's our incredible Leadership coach who helps our clients out here at the MSP growth hub. So today, Julie, we have been talking to some clients recently about obviously growing and scaling their business which is all very good. And, you know, we talk about the E-myth and everyone talks about, the accidental business owner and all this sort of thing, but the thing we're going to overcome today is we want to bring to the forefront of everybody's minds that your people and your team are so important in your ability to deliver any goal that you've got, because you can't do it all on your own. That's kind of the essence of the show, isn't it, Julie?

JULIE: It is, although I don't need to say anything now. You've just said it all, haven't you? Yes, absolutely.

IAN: What's the problem that we see in the community with this then? What's the common ways that this shows up?

JULIE: So when we've got technical experts who are running a business, you know, often we think, oh, they come because they're feeling like they want, you know, they want to grow a business, but often it's not that at all. It's that they were probably frustrated when they were working in their job and they thought they could do it better themselves, basically and the problem is that they can do and probably could do the technical stuff by themselves. But what they didn't realize is actually running a business and growing a business is not just about that technical expertise and what happens to get a surprise when initially, when you start your business, you've got a little bit of, you know, where you can manage all that issue, whatever. And then as your business grows then, we get this. Oh, hang on a minute. I can't do it all myself, but I haven't necessarily got the skills or I didn't know I needed to have the skills to bring in people and enthuse them in the way that I am enthused about my business. And so what we see is so many people are like, well, I, nobody seems to do it the way I can do it. So there's either a lack of trust in that, or it's a reality that at that precise moment in time, they're not doing it the way you might do it, let's say. And you know, I don't know how to get them to do it in that way. And we've talked before about how to grow people. We're not going to talk about the detail of how to actually do that today. But what we're looking at is, well, who do you need to be to make that happen, really? And how do you need to change your mindset to be in a place where you can leverage the people around you? Because if we are really good at what we do, then there's only 24 hours in a day and we're not supposed to be working all 24 hours of those days anyway. So our business is limited to what we can do, the minute we bring somebody else in and we can develop them to a point where we can trust them to go ahead and do something either as well, maybe even better than us, then we can leverage that and it is infinite in a way. And therefore we can bring more people in, but that requires a different mindset. And it requires a different skill. And you mentioned the E-myth, you know, whether you're the technical expert, the manager or the entrepreneur mindset in your business. And initially you need to be all three of those. And you need to be able to step into those and be conscious of knowing which one am I supposed to be in at the moment. And they're always when your business is not huge. There's always a time when you have to be the technical expert. You've got to jump in, but you've got to do it consciously. In my opinion, and not just because you like it.

IAN: That's right. And it's interesting, isn't it? Because some people take on the kind of thinking that to grow your team, you just need to put more people in it. Right. But what we're actually talking about here is enabling that team and connecting it to the thing that you're trying to achieve. And this is where we've got to, you know, the language that we use is kind of like step into your leadership. Style that you may not know you've even got, and bring that team along with you. Cause many times we just see, well, we were just talking about one conversation right as soon as before we got on the call. It's just about an MSP we were discussing and that leader didn't believe that he was in charge of that department. And when we asked who was in charge of that department, it was kind of tumbleweed moment. And it was like, this is, this is not going to end well, is it?

JULIE: No. And I think that, you know, one of the things that I see an awful lot is like there's a blame on, or one I can't trust, but two oh, they're no good. They didn't do the job. They didn't do the thing. Yeah. And the reality is, is that the reason why we need to step into, like you said, step into our leadership style, is because I truly don't believe that anybody comes to work, to not do something.

They come to do their best at something, but if you don't know what you're supposed to do, you basically do whatever you think you should do. And you're guessing, yeah? So as an employee, you're guessing. So our job as a leader is to help them to really understand, you know, what's the direction I'm going in here? And how do I apply my skills and my knowledge in the best way to help you? If you don't tell me where we're going, or you don't tell me what good looks like and give me, you know, a direction and a, you know, what result are you looking for, then I'm just going to do whatever I think is the right thing. And now, you know, doing really loads of work in the wrong direction is not going to help. And that's when you get the business owners like, oh, I didn't do what I wanted to do. Or they're rubbish because you didn't give them direction that you wanted them to go in. So you're paying all this money for people you think you're leveraging, but what you're not, is you're just allowing these poor rogue employees to do whatever.

IAN: Yeah.

JULIE: You've actually got chaos.

IAN: Yeah.

JULIE: You haven't been the leader you need to be. You need to be able to step in and say, this is, I am the leader for a start. I'm the mindset of the leader. I'm not going to do it for you, but I'm going to enable you to do it by showing you what I want done, how I want it done, and making sure that you've got the skills to do it. And then communicating all of that in a way that motivates and enables people. When you do that, you are leveraging, but you've got to get that in your mind that you're not there to do it for them. You're there to enable those other people to do it.

IAN: And this, this is where it gets a bit tricky, isn't it? Because you know, we're talking about the three different mindsets of all the three different types of business owners, you know, the technical expert, you know, the manager and the entrepreneur. And just talk to me, Julie, just about the, different types of people can one owner be all three? Do you have to change between them? Can it, and how do we, I guess, understand. Cause it's really easy for us. Cause you know, particularly me, not technical. Right. So you sit and go, Oh, these techie business owners. Right. And you kind of got this broad brush and it's like, you wipe everybody with the same brush, but there are very, very different grades of that. And there are some people who are so technical, you know, that they're not really interested in anything else. And then you've got different, different variants of this. When we talk about the leadership, self awareness and the type of the leader that you are, this is something that can play on that, doesn't it? So we've got these three different types. How do we identify and work with this?

JULIE: You mentioned there about being conscious. I think that's the first thing is, is to understand the difference between the three things. You know, what does that actually mean? Because it's, you know, unless you understand that there are three things then, or three, three states that you might show up in, let's say, then you aren't going to recognize them. So understanding what do they mean? Well, technical expert, that's somebody who is doing the do and has a mindset of doing the do. I show up, I do what I'm asked, or I do the thing because I'm good at the, you know, pressing the buttons in the right way. And then, and then, well, hold on. Then there's I need to show up as a manager. Why do I need to show up as a manager? And what does that look like? Well, I'm showing up as a manager because I'm now stepping back and making sure that things are going in the direction that they're supposed to be going. So it's like a, like a tactical person who's going to, you know, man, manage literally the team or whatever it might be. So I'm managing the business. I'm thinking about how it's going, what's happening. I'm not in it. I'm a little bit more on it as you know, we've heard that before. Yeah. And, and so I'm managing things as they go and making sure that they're going in the right direction.

And then the entrepreneur side of things is saying, well, what do I want with my business? How am I going to grow my business and all those things? So that's even more stepped back looking in. So if you think about it from a sort of, imagine where you're standing in your business, technical expert, I'm right in it. I'm in the moment. Yeah. Manager is like once removed from that. And he's looking in on things and making judgments about things. An entrepreneur is perhaps two steps back from that, which is, oh, this is where I'm trying to go. This is how I'm going to change things. So there's a level of understanding, like looking in on things, but also a level of movement in terms of how much somebody is trying to change or make improvements, let's say, yeah. So from tech experts, just like I'm just going to do the thing and you hope they might make some more changes because they've got some ideas, but they don't necessarily, whereas an entrepreneur is looking future and looking, how do I make change? Well, once you understand that, the biggest thing I think we see, especially with the MSP clients is that they are comfortable in their comfort zone in technical expert. Okay. And so what happens is they're busy and they and who isn't, but because when you're busy, it's very easy to say, oh, well, I have no choice in this matter. So they're like a leaf blowing in the wind in a way of like, I've got this stuff coming at me. So I've got to be the technical expert. I have no time to be a manager. I have no time to be thinking about an entrepreneur being an entrepreneur. Yeah. And so I am this kind of like, You know, a done to person who has to do this thing, you know, I'm not in charge and, and unfortunately , that means that you're just going to be reactive to whatever happens. Yeah. So if you start to recognize that and go, actually, this is where I am, then suddenly you can say, I need to, but I need to choose to stop for a second and step out of that. You know, I said about being once removed or twice removed. I think it's a mindset thing of like, I am going to remove myself from this bit here so I can think about, well, how do I be a manager in my business? Or how am I being the entrepreneur in my business? So I start to use stepping out of that environment and also that mindset, to be able to then take a different viewpoint. No, I'm always saying, watch yourself on TV. Managers and entrepreneurs are looking in on stuff asking, is it the right thing? Is it what we should be doing? Do I need to make a change? Yeah. Technical experts are just getting on with the thing that needs done. Yeah. So it's a very much a sort of a dissociation of stepping out. And so when you can do that, and it isn't easy, I have to admit, because when you get, you know, your customer come in or whatever, and you don't have massive resources, it's not easy. So you asked the question, can you switch between them or can, you know, can I be all of them? It's not always that easy initially because that's what you're used to. Yeah. It's like a habit. You know, it's like if you always eat a cheese sandwich at lunchtime, it's hard to change what you do. So you have to create a new habit and then you need to create new neural pathways in your brain to tell yourself that's what I want differently. Yeah, I want to do this differently and I'm going to practice being the manager. I'm going to practice being the entrepreneur and I'm going to take time out of my business to do that. So even if it is 10 minutes, I am going to stop and get off the hamster wheel of being a technical expert and just stop for a second and ask myself, are we going in the right direction? Is this the right thing or whatever it might be that you need to ask yourself? And then you get, better at doing that. You get, you can, you can do that for a day or you can do it for a week or whatever you want to do, whatever you need to do, but you have to practice conscious movement between those three things. So understand them and then practice that and call yourself out or at least get someone else to call you out. Cause you know what it's like if, you know, you say you're not going to eat sweets or whatever, and then suddenly your hand's in the, the sweetie jar on the table or whatever it is, or is that just me?

IAN: You're not a camera, are you?

JULIE: No, because you forgot, that's a habit and you kind of just forgot. So what you might see in MSPs is, you know, suddenly Bob is. He's dipped into a, you know, a client thing because he finds that comfortable. She finds it comfortable. It's easy. You know, I'm in there , and it's like, Oh, you know, you need that elastic band on your, on your wrist to remind you that that's not your job at this precise moment in time. You know, that would have to be like, you know, something's hit the fan to need to be in there and you need to be able to trust people to do their job because you can undermine the team anyway. And you're not doing the thing that you need to do to grow the business. So you've got to practice being the right, how you show up essentially, being that leader, being that manager or being the entrepreneur and being the leader in your business.

IAN: Because when you, when you're creating that gap, as you just sort of said, you're stepping out, you're creating that gap, you're creating those new habits. There's then going to be a void that you then need to fill with your team. don't you? And you do actually have to be able to trust them. Yes, that's right. And I was just going to, I was just going to talk about the T word in a minute. So, which I know is probably going to lengthen this podcast out to about four and a half hours, but you know, instant trust had or not instant trust, but you know, you've recognized the issue you've been a bit self aware. You've said, okay, I'm moving in between these different types of business owner here. I need to put a team in here. I think that person can do it. But I just kind of got a little bit of a reservation. I'm just going to give them a little bit of work to do. How do we build trust with our technical teams essentially to fill up with doing the work so we can then be a bit more strategic?

JULIE: Well, as I said earlier on, people need to know what is it you want? What do you want done? What actually is the result that you want and how do you want it? And what I see like. And as you said, we were discussing a lovely couple of people this morning who were struggling with this and that not there because they're not clear about those exact points. What does good look like?

IAN: Yeah.

JULIE: You know, is that now I'm going to make myself look silly now? I don't know. Getting my help desk tickets down to 12 when I've got 400 of them or whatever. What does good actually look like? What do I want them to actually get done? And how do I want them to do it? Which is in the style of my MSP, you know, with my values and vision or whatever it is and, you know, being nice to my customers or whatever the way is. Yeah. And until they have a clarity around that. And are motivated to do that, you can't trust them. Okay. And that's when I see, I mentioned earlier on about like, oh, we're blaming our team for not being any good. But if we were to take that step back and say, am I being the manager at the moment? What should I be helping them with? What, how do I enable somebody to achieve? It is, have I been clear about what I'm looking for? Do they want to be in the room with me? Yeah. like in my building with me. Yeah, exactly.

Do I, you know, am I helping them or hindering them? Yeah. So I need make sure that they know what it's, they're meant to achieve, make sure they've got the skills and the tools to do the job, and then they want to be in the room to do that job, or on their screen or whatever they want. Okay. And if we can't answer yes to those things, then how do we even expect them? We can't blame them for not doing the thing. So we have to set that up. But what we see so often is, oh, I haven't got time for that. So we have a short term thinking of like, I don't have time. It's quicker and it's easier to do it myself. And, that's why we have to step out of it. We have to step away from that and say, right. Unless it is super emergency, I might have to have a little bit of pain to have all of the gain. And this is a massive mindset shift for people because like today we're talking about like, we've got to do the vision and the values. We've got to, and we've got to do our KPIs. We've got to set up and we're not having one to ones. And it's like, if you're not having any of that, You're not actually helping that person to succeed and then you're going to blame them for being absolutely useless. And so you have to step back and take that pain and do a bit of work that shows that you know what it is you want of people. And you're willing to let them get on with it.

IAN: And it's, around connecting, you know, we're always talking about the vision and values and how you connect that through in a natural fact next week at one of our two day client intensives, where we're going to help connect all of the, you know, the things that you've got going on in your head as business owners, all the way down to the individual people as Julie eloquently says pressing the buttons at the bottom, which is the sort of thing that I'd say, and then I'd get torn to pieces for, but how do you then connect the right people, the departmental plans? How do you make sure that, you know, you're having those regular meetings, those regular sessions and things like that. And as you say, stepping back to have a look and put that structure in place that you need to be accountable for. And, you know, understanding, I think the big thing for this podcast is understanding when you are either one of the three business owner types or when you're moving between the three, because if you're in a strategy day, for example, you're going to be all entrepreneurial, but then the next day you might be bolted down and you're forgetting about work and you're not forgetting about that sort of thing. And you're just going to be just look quick. We've got to shift these tickets. We've got to get this project done. And all of a sudden everything else flies away. And then three months later you go, God, business hasn't grown much. What's going on here? You know, and it's because you've let your, you know, your hands off the rudder and you're going around in circles, aren't you?

JULIE: Yeah. And I mean, at this stage, at an early stage in your business, and I'd still say quite a lot of this is fairly severely stage, let's say, is that you are going to have to flip through each one of those, you know, that regular consciousness with which you do it is going to be the success. Okay. But as your business grows, you might say, I blooming hate doing that. I actually really like being a technical expert. If you have the right set up, then you could still own a business and do that as your main role if you wanted to, if you put somebody else in to do the other bits, you see what I mean, because you could just, you could, I know a much bigger organization where the guys, you know, he started the business, but he said, I like being a techie.

IAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we hear that a lot.

JULIE: Removed himself from the role, you know, of the entrepreneur and everything. It's like somebody else can do all this lead and stuff. I don't want to do it. I'm going to go and be this. I still own the company, but this is my role. That's fine, cause it's clear about that. And he has somebody else to do it. But when you don't have somebody else to do it, you have to be able to flip between these roles consciously. Yeah. You don't go and step on Bob's toes just because you forgot yourself and you feel like, oh, I'll have a little bit of a go at that you can't do that because you undermine people.

IAN: Absolutely. And I guess if you are interested about how this, how this kind of works and we call that part of the MSP scale system around amplifying the capacity makes you got the right people in the right role. I'll put a link into the show notes here, but you can always take the scale with confidence quiz, takes three minutes and it gives you a report on what you need to focus on. And particularly, it could give you a little bit of a score on where you're at with your people side of things and give you a bit of an idea on kind of what to do next. Very interesting conversation, Julie, very interesting indeed. And I think this is really getting , into the details of really bring into the four light if you want to grow your business, which I'm guessing you do. Otherwise you probably wouldn't be listening to this.

JULIE: We won't be listening.

IAN: Well, I hope you're not listening. Cause if you are, then there's other things you could go and listen to you know, then it is around leveraging that team. What's the kind of the top three takeaways from today that people have got to go and do when they've taken their ear pods out.

JULIE: First of all, number one is understand those three different mindsets of a business. There's three different roles. And well, three different ways of showing up. Let's say, understand it and then observe yourself. That would be number two for just take a day or a week, wherever you fancy and observe, how am I showing up? And you could, if you fancy writing it down, you could say, well, I'm 20% this, 20% that, or, or maybe it might be, you just say, I'm blooming all over the place. Yeah. But get an understanding of where you are and then get conscious. So once you've got your understanding, go, Oh, right. Okay. This is what I do now. Actively think in this moment, do I need to be the technical expert? No or yes, do I need to be more this, the entrepreneur? Do I need to be the manager in my business? What is the role I'm playing here? When you've done that. Then you're going to get more conscious about, oh, actually I need to practice showing up. And if it is on avoiding the manager or the entrepreneur because I don't feel comfortable in that role, then get some help because you are going to need to do that.

IAN: Which is quite normal, isn't it? Right. You know, it's very, very normal to have someone to say, you know, to a techie, hey, you've got to go and do this. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. And everyone will say, yes, start when you go hide in the cupboard.

JULIE: Well, we've, we've had many a conversation about understanding. what it means to be a leader. And there's other podcasts that as well. But yeah, it's like, that's the next thing once I've decided, oh yeah, actually I do need that. The next question is, but Julie, how do I do that? Cause I'm not comfortable. And so the next thing is, well, let's look at what does it actually mean when you're being a leader? How do I set people up to succeed? So that they do, and they, you know, we create team performance and then you can start to understand what impact I'm having as a leader so that I'm like, well, okay, I need to do more of this, but I need to do it better. Yeah. So I think there's just some elements with that that you need to look on.

IAN: I thought you were then going to do a shameless plug for the most successful podcast on the IT Experts podcast that you recorded, Julie, we recorded together. That was by far, we don't really know what happened by far, the most 2000 downloads in a week, which was all around having difficult conversations, which I must say was an incredible show. So if you've got to the end of this episode and you're going, yeah, but how do I have those conversations? Go and listen to Julie again. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. But it was a great show. And yes, Julie tells me every time we speak about how's my most successful podcast.

Julie, as always, a pleasure to dive into your incredible extensive brain around the leadership side of things and pull out some golden nuggets for the MSPs today. Anything else to wrap up?

JULIE: I think you should also listen to the Can't do, Won't do, Don't do podcast as well, because if you've then got to be the leader, that'll be the next one you need to listen to, which is how to understand why people aren't doing what you thought they were going to be doing, which is they either can't do it, they won't do it, or they don't do it. So go watch that one as well.

IAN: Lovely stuff. Great stuff. Thanks again, Julie. Great show. Look forward to catching up with you soon. Take care.

OUTRO: Just before you go and if you're curious about how this episode links with the ability to scale your MSP to a million or, or if you're already there, accelerate to five, then we want to invite you to come and take the MSP mastery quiz. And in just three minutes, you're going to get a 360 degree scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engaging along your people and help generate more leads in your MSP. It's really simple. Just click on the link in the show notes. And if you have enjoyed this episode, we'd love to get some feedback from you by means of a rating review on Spotify your podcast platform of choice. We really appreciate every single one of them. Now you can go and enjoy the rest of your day and we look forward to catching up and connecting with you soon. All the best.