EP289 You Get Paid For What | Ken Courtright’s Today’s Growth | Growing Business Today

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You Get Paid For What

This is a part of some reflection of, “Am I adding value?” What can I do to get people to do a true legitimate paradigm shift in thinking? I want you to write down what five things do you do on a weekly or monthly or daily basis that you think causes the result of 80% of your income. The typical responses when we do this in a group setting are, “I train people, I evaluate spreadsheets, I drive a truck, I influence a Board of Directors.” Typically, four out of the five things people do, they can comfortably say, “If I physically do this task, it ends up in a direct result of cashflow,” and that’s why they do it. They do it for a couple of different reasons, one of which is they think it would take too much time to train somebody else to do it, so they might as well keep doing it. Another one is the fear factor of being judged if they hand it off to somebody and it fails.

What I’m mostly covering is for entrepreneurs, business owners and founders. It’s not necessarily for employees. If you think you’re an employee and you’re eventually going to own a business, I would certainly save this podcast. What if I told you that as a business owner, 80% of revenue can be attributed to items or things that were at one point done by the founder or divisional leader or thought producer that was doing them for a long period of time, but they found a way to set them in motion and walk away from the task?

Let’s take a look at the five things you do and ask yourself, “How can I stop doing these and set them in motion so other people do them?” Let’s presuppose you’re not buying into or understanding what I’m saying. I’m going to say this from a completely different angle. I want you to picture an organizational chart, founder of a company, CEO at the top, a nine-year-old company and 100 employees. There are four divisions. There’s marketing, sales, production, they build some widget or tool or service and accounting. You’ve got to market, sell and produce something, and then you’ve got to account for the revenue.

I want you to picture this pyramid shape, founders at the top, hundreds of bodies separated equally across the chart. There’s a left quadrant, left pyramidic thing, central left thing, central right thing, and then far right thing. The founder is no question at the top of this org chart, but I want you to mentally picture a little stick figure of the founder at the top. Then about halfway down, I want you to picture right down near the middle, near sales, another stick figure. Then at the very bottom, I want you to picture underneath the word “sales” another stick figure.

Imagine that nine years ago, this company was one person. It was a guy who may be found or invented or borrowed a product and he started selling as a salesperson. He was a one-man shop. He started selling this item and it started to sell. It got to the point where he was like, “I don’t want to work for this other company as a broker, as a commission only rep. I’m going to start my own company.” He leaves and he starts his own company, Joe Blow Inc. A couple of years go by, he looks around and he’s like, “I’ve got three sales reps. I’ve got somebody producing this product. I’ve got somebody doing some sprinkle marketing and SEO work internally. I’ve got a virtual CFO. I’ve got five employees.”

He looks back and he realizes, “I handed off selling in Wisconsin to this other guy. I started in Indiana, I handed it off to another guy. I still got Illinois. I’ve never handed off the marketing, I did hire someone and I showed him what I was doing. I was never good at building the product, so I found a guy with a good resume. I did hand off building the product so I no longer have to build it and package it. I was never good at accounting, but I did muscle through it and I found someone to do the accounting.”

The bottom line is all four of these other people were being done by the original founder at one point, albeit not well, but they were done producing 80% of the revenue and then they were eventually handed off. That’s a couple of years in. Let’s go three more years in, four years ago, so we’re five years into this nine-year company. There are now 30 people working for this guy. He’s still the founder and he sees himself at the top. Every move along the way of the growth of this company, the founder was doing a task. He thought it was important and critical at the time. It could easily relate to it touching 80% of revenue, but then he outgrew the position. He either matured through it or got frustrated, but he handed it off. He put something in motion that is now done by someone else.

Nine years later, he’s at the top of this pyramid-looking chart. Is he at the top? No. One by one, he handed off jobs to other people who worked for him and report to him, which show up underneath him on an org chart. He didn’t build a pyramid and he’s at the top of the king of the hill. He built something foundationally below him that supports him and he gets paid. He always has and always will get paid by doing something, to the point where he knows it enough to set it in motion so that others can do it full time and better than him.

What five weekly, monthly things do you do that result in 80% of your income, that if you look at it differently, knowing that with the knowledge, it’s eventually going to get handed off? What can you hand off quicker since you’re going to hand it off anyway? You might want to set a New Year’s resolution to stop doing and start setting things in motion. The title of this podcast is You Get Paid for What? You don’t get paid for doing, you get paid for setting things in motion. I hope this helps. Take care.