Here is a question:  How many consecutive weeks can you be away from your business and come back without any worries or negative impacts on the employees, customers, and the company?

If you answered less than eight weeks, you are likely not in a position to exit your business without selling.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons you cannot leave your business for an extended period.

As the owner, do you get involved in the following:

Sales: Quoting, estimating, price and delivery for some or all of your leads

Operations: Making and creating deliverables for your customers, more natural to do than teach 

Finance: Making collection calls, sending out invoices, making journal entries, and payroll

Supply Chain: Negotiating prices, issuing PO’s, expediting orders

HR: Interviewing all hires, firing, training, recruiting, and performance evaluations

IT: Being the help desk, server administrator, phone system person, computer/printer fixer

If you are spending the majority of your time doing, how do you expect ever to be able to be gone for any period of time?  You have a job, not ownership of your company.

How do you solve this?

When I talk to business owners facing this situation, I ask them if they have good people, the answer is always yes.  The follow up is do you trust them, again the answer is still yes.  So, if you have good people and trust them, why are you doing all the work? 

Are you ready to make significant changes to your business, to allow you to be an absentee owner?

Are you ready to empower your team, set expectations, hold them accountable, and not worry about HOW they got it done?

Are you ready to let go and have the time you want to spend with your spouse, children, or grandchildren?

If you can answer yes, be ready for some hard work, and understand there is not an easy button.

The secret is you need to separate in your mind owning a business and running a business.  You have many decades of habits that got you here.  The good news is habits are learned.  As you learn new habits old ones get replaced.  As you replace them, your employees will begin to understand your goals, get excited about the opportunity, and in many cases surprise you with their capabilities.

How do you do this?

One: Formalize your role as the owner or owners.  Define your expectations for the business.

Here are some things you as an owner must be clear on:

• Have a succession plan for you and key employees
• Communicate your one, three, and five-year vision
• Define All equity owner’s decision-making authority
• Develop leadership team performance metrics
• Establish quarterly performance meetings with your leadership team

Two: Formalize your leadership team.  You have stated you have good people you trust.  It is time to set clear expectations for them.  Provide them with the responsibility and AUTHORITY to run their departments.  Having an all-employee meeting where you, as the owner, transfer the responsibility and authority for all to hear could be very beneficial.

• Ensure they know what success looks like by the numbers
• Set clear results-based goals for the team
• Become their coach and mentor not the “BOSS” allowing them to lead
• Create a "Dashboard" and regular updates to allow for precise, quick communication to you and the organization

Three: This is likely going to be the hardest part.  You need to begin to step away.  Take your sales leader to your key customers and work to start to transfer the relationship.  Let employees, customers, and suppliers know who they should be working with.  It will be very tempting to say, "I'll just take care of this," the result will likely be confusion and anger with the team. 

• Lead and motivate your team to success (Vince Lombardi)
• Know there will be mistakes, arguments, tension, and maybe some departures
• Key is keeping good attitudes-yours included
• Your primary goal is to transfer your decades of knowledge to the team
• GET COMFORTABLE WITH THE TEAM DELIVERING RESULTS DIFFERENTLY

This is extremely simplified.  What I would like you to take away from this is there is a way to exit your business without selling it.  You need to make this a decision and dedicate time and energy to set your business up to function without you.  You cannot take this lightly, and it will not happen overnight.

There is a small population of owners that can make this type of transition.  Let’s have a 20-30-minute conversation to find out if you are part of that population.