EP273 - Owner Not Needed - Are You Ready to Stop Being the Bottleneck?

IAN: In this episode of The IT Experts Podcast, we ask you, are you ready to stop being the bottleneck in your MSP?

INTRO: Welcome to The IT Experts Podcast, the only podcast to help MSPs scale to 1 million, and if already there, get to five and go faster. 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. I hope you are all doing good today. Today, Break Fix Edition. Quick jab in the ribs. Why have we got this podcast going on? So bottlenecks, everyone talks about the bottleneck, the business owners, MSPs kind of stalling their own growth. We have a phrase in the MSP Growth Hub called ONN stands for owner not needed. And one of the most important things around, you know, going through the MSP journey as we talk about building your profitable MSP, is that whether you like it or not, one day you will sell your MSP. And one of the key areas, one of the key factors to getting a decent multiplier on your EBITDA is the fact that you are not needed in the business. Now, okay, that's the end in mind. That's the future. That's the end. You might not even be thinking about that today, but what you might be thinking about today is, why am I still the person holding everything up in the business? Why am I holding the growth? Why am I still working 80, 90 hours a week when everyone else is going home at five o'clock? You know, what's going on here? You know? Is the business working for you or are you working for your business? And I know that it's resonating with you because we hear it every single day.

So let's just go into just a quick, quick little blast today just to help you to understand and over overcome some of these fears. You know, one of the big things is that, you know, you're going to fear that if you do let go and you do delegate correctly, by the way, and you get things in a good space, then you'll lose control of quality and your clients and your standards. Now that might be the case if you don't do it properly, but making sure that you do it properly and you've got a structure will help mitigate that risk. It's kind of like risk mitigation. This, you know, you worried that the team are going to make costly mistakes that are without you. And because of that, every single day there's someone standing at your desk saying, Hey, can I do this? Hey, I need to do that. Hey, I need to do this. And they're giving you what we call 10 pound tasks. And they're coming to, you're going to talk a bit little bit about this later on, but they're coming to you with what they want you to make a decision on when in actual fact, most of them should be making that decision anyway. I had a great analogy over the Christmas break from a book I was reading about a 1-3-1 rule. So when someone comes towards you, they come with one decision that needs to be made. I want you to gimme three options and then I want you to give me your recommendation. What do you think we need to do? Because while you are still making all of those decisions in the business. The business revolves around you. We talk about it, you know, all the time. The business is centered around you. And when you do get that confidence to start to let go and let other people flourish and flow and get into their own flow, then you know, the magic really just does start to happen. Another thing, you know, you might feel that the business is going to fall apart if you step back. When you go on holiday and you get that buzz when you get back and everything's been work working well, you know how many of you're feeling like that or how many of you do feel like that? If you don't feel like that, there's a bit of a sign. I always call it the, here we go, I've just realised, just worked it out, the Huff Monitor, every time you huff is every time you need to look at one of your SOPs. When you hear that, when you hear me talk about Huff Monitor, it's this podcast that, thought popped into my head. So think about your Huff Monitor. How many times is it going off? So you go on holiday, you come back, everything's all tickety boo, great. But has the business grown while you've been away? Has the business developed? Has new income come in? There's a pretty good chance it may not be. There's also a bit of a worry that you're going to become irrelevant and disconnected from the business. Well, is that the case? You know, what got you here is not going to get you there. When you look at, you know, where you've come from the business and being very, you know, normally very, very technical, and now you are moving back and starting to work on it. I've had a conversation this morning with the next client if you're listening, hello. And, I think he was having breakfast watching the podcast, which was crazy and a bit weird. But anyway, he was enjoying the podcast and I had a call with him and he was telling me I was, I say, oh, you should be, have a look at this. The clients are getting some really good results from this. This is a guy who left the goal, left the program actually doing absolutely amazingly well, which is kind of why we get up in the mornings. But anyway and he was, I said, I want to, you know, I need to tell you about this thing that our clients are working with now with another consultant. And it's doing really well. And he goes, Ian, I don't need more things to do. I need to stay focused and I kind of got it now, right, kind of got goosebumps on my arm because we spent three years trying to keep this guy focused and now he'd kind of got where he needed to be and he was on his own and then he's now telling me how he wants to control his time, which was so cool. So, but he's in a very different place now, so he has been disconnected from his business, he's been disconnected from the technical side of things. So it's a really real great shift.

I guess the last one I've got here is just about replacing the firefighting. You know, with boredom, if you are going to be worrying about losing, what am I going to do if I don't have time to do this, what am I going to do if my team don't need me? I suppose it's a little bit of FOMO as well in that lack of purpose. As we say many times, if you've got that clear vision, you've got that clear mission, then those are the things, you know, whether it be acquisitions, new client acquisitions, you know, and not buying another MSP, looking at where you can add, you know, increase your profitability, working on the business, is that really important time that we can do this. But however, if you do this wrong. You can get yourself and stay in validation because you're still saying yes to everything. Now remember, there's another great phrase, I'm kind of throwing them all in on this podcast, not deliberately, but when you say yes to something, you are saying no to everything else. So just think about that for a minute. Someone phones up and you've decided to take that call, but you're already really busy. So you're saying yes to giving them your time, and then you're saying no to all of the other tasks. The client one, you know, the client account management, the one-to-ones all the other bits and pieces in time. So when you say yes to something, you're saying no to everything else. Just pop that one in your peanut for the minute and have a little think about that because it's really, really powerful.

So the other thing is that you know, you're letting go of the task, but you're not letting go of the decisions because you need to still control the shift. And that's another little bit of FOMO in there as well for you. Create dependency in your team because you're just waiting for them to come back all the time if you get this wrong, the team is still going to be there pulling back. And as I mentioned, that emotional trust is also another thing that, you know, when you're trying to work out, you know, do you trust them using the system? Do you trust them with the clients? And it can be, you know, a hard shift as well to move from doer into leader. So what can we do about this? What do we need to do to help ourselves, you know? Move up to ONN move up and move out of being involved in you know, in, into, in the day to day.

IAN: First thing I want you to do is to define your thousand pound an hour tasks. So we've talked about 10. Low level task. You need to delegate a hundred pound an hour skillset task. They're the ones for your leadership team. We've got a thousand pound hour task. We actually just did a session on what does a 10,000 pound and a hundred thousand pound task look like with our clients. I'll leave that one for another day, but define your thousand pound an hour role, strategy, leadership, you know the direction, the working on the business, what does that look like? And that will help you to get the focus so that you'll start to realise that I need to get out of the weeds, I need to get out of the technical side of things.

Second thing, I want you to start building Leaders and not helpers. Great book. I've recently just finished a guy called Dan Martell called Buy Back Your Time and the essence of the book is around making sure that you buy back, you buy people who help you get your time back rather than people to help you run the business. Slightly different analogy. Great book. Go listen to it. Bloody brilliant. So build leaders and not helpers, because if you haven't got that clear ownership across the business, the roles responsibilities had a client in the boardroom the other day and he said, oh my God, I'm so frustrated. I bought this MD in and now this isn't working and that isn't working, and yada, yada, yada. And I said, great. Where's your cascade? We call it the scale operating system, but where's your cascade from your KPIs, through to departmental plans, through to individual plans, through to one-to-ones and all of this kind of great stuff. And if you don't build that ownership in, then everyone's just going to kind of make up their own little job descriptions and do what they want anyway. And because you're probably a bit scared of having a difficult conversation, you're not going to address it as well. So we need to build the leaders, not the helpers, get the ownership across the business and get people starting to flick it around so that they're reporting to you on what's going on, rather than you just walking in the office and going, Hey how's everything going? Yeah, all right. And then that's good. Oh, that's brilliant. No, it's not. You need to get into the details on that.

Dedicate the decisions, not just the tasks. So talking to your help desk, you know, what do you think we need to do to help, you know, our customers or our systems work better or whatever it might be. What would you do if it was your business? Ask them that question. If it was your money, what would you do? How would you approach this? You know, start to get people innovating and growing. We had this conversation with someone the other day about marketing teams. I was talking about the team, we got the Growth Hub. Some of the members in the team have been with us for, you know, eight years through various different businesses. But every single year they grow, they develop, they innovate, and now, they're not only grow, develop, and innovate, they're now challenging. So they're getting on the phone going, Ian, you've got the wrong color shirt on, Ian, you need to be doing this, Stuart. You need to get closer to the microphone, or this or that, or whatever it might be. So we've now got people who are making decisions, you know, and offering decisions and, you know, suggestions into the, how the business operates. That's true engagement and that's true alignment with what you need to do. So make sure that you delegate those decisions, you know, properly. Let's get some numbers in, right? You know, I was talking to a guy this week who just come off one of the master classes we did. He says, oh, what? I said, what was the takeaway from the session? He said, it was just, I've got to get my head around my numbers. I need to know my numbers and not just your bank balance and share those numbers with his team. He says, I don't know if I'm making money or not. And I think there's quite a few MSPs out there who don't know whether they're making money. And I also think there's quite a few MSPs out there who aren't making any money. And you just kind of like hope that if I just put a bit more cost in or bring in a few more people, that's going to help the boat go faster. But it's kind of not a business problem as such of as capacity. It's a structural problem in the fact that, you know, unless you've got a structure and you know, a methodology underneath the business, you know, your own operating system to operate the business, not technically, but from a business point of view, you are going to get yourself, you know, you kind going to stay where you are really. So it is about doing things differently. So replace the visibility with the net metrics and get your numbers all sorted out.

And stay strategically involved. As I mentioned, you know, we, we use the scale operating system, but weekly cadence, you know, not daily firefighting, just, you know, getting in and having a whinge and PMO and what's going on and what's happening with this, but get structural, get deliberate, you know, we've done many podcasts around the future of the shadow of the leader and how you show up. And now it's time for you to, yeah come on, let's put your big girl and boy pants on. And let's step up as some leaders. So get this right. You're going to get some clear head space to lead, plan, think strategically and lift yourself up out of the day to day and into that owner not needed and smash that bowl. Smash that bottle that, you know, you've got that bottleneck in.

You'll be a more capable leadership team making day-to-day decisions around a structured plan that you've got that you know that is going to get you from where you are today to where you want to be. You know, you're going to have a consistent delivery flow without owner firefighting all the time, where you are not just getting involved in the firefighting and all of that kind of stuff. And you're also going to get more time back. So you spend more time with the family or with your friends and give that flexibility.

Owner not needed is not just about leaving the MSP and just about, you know, selling your MSP. It's about giving you flexibility, choice and control on where you want to spend your time and your money. Because the MSP model is an incredible model. It's an incredibly profitable model, and getting it right can give you so much freedom on what you want to do, and build a business that works for you, you know, rather than you for it, as we always say.

But finally, you know, you are going to build more value into the business, you're going to build more structure. It's not going to be dependent on you. And just by doing the things in this podcast, let's just put the cherry on the cake, if you are a million pound MSP and you've got half decent EBITDA, say you've got 250 grand EBITDA. Just by doing what you've done on this podcast and lifting yourself up could easily give you one more multiplier on your valuation. In terms, this podcast could have just delivered you a quarter of a million pound in cash in your pocket to go and spend in your retirement or whatever you want to do when you finish working in your MSP. I don't think there's anything more to say.

Hope you enjoyed the show. Have a great day. Look forward to connecting with you soon. If there's anything we can help you with here at The MSP Growth Hub, you know where to find us. See you later. Look after yourself.

NEXT EP TEASER:   And if you want to know what it's like behind the door and under the hood of The MSP Growth Hub, then you don't want to miss next week's episode. Stuart and I interview all the coaches from The MSP Growth Hub as we share the insights and actions and revelations that took place our two-day client event in January. You don't want to miss that one. We'll see you next week.

OUTRO: Hang on a minute. 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 are 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 degrees scan of your business where you can identify the one or two tactics that can help you find more time engage in, align 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 or iTunes, or 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 day.