You hired good people. You still check their work at 11pm. You rewrite the proposal they sent, you jump into the sales call to help, and the deal ends up on your desk again.

It feels like quality control. But every decision now waits in line for you, and as long as it does, you stay the only closer and your team never learns to lead the conversation without you.

I talked this through with Wendy Weiss on Salesology® - Conversations with Sales Leaders (September 2024). Listen to the full conversation: 104: Simon Severino, Get A Life

Wendy asked the question so many owners wrestle with

"How do you keep yourself from micromanaging?"

I gave her my secret. "Get a life."

🐬 I love mountain biking. When the sun is out, I want to run. I have three kids and a wife I want to take to dinner. As much as I love working (and yes, micromanaging), I love my life even more. If I want to be out on the trail, I have to trust that the person running marketing runs it.

That's the whole trick: "Find something that's even more fun for you than work." Then letting go isn't a discipline problem anymore. It's the price of the afternoon you actually want.

Mistakes don't kill the company. Hovering does.

Is your team always perfect? Of course not. Neither am I. Everybody makes mistakes.

Here's what I told Wendy: "Will it be fine on Monday? It will still be fine on Monday." We've made mistakes every single week for 22 years, and we've outlasted competitor after competitor. Because we stayed in the game and kept improving.

🐯 A team that's allowed a couple of mistakes a week learns. A team that waits for your red pen stops thinking.

Give away the three heads, in this order

At the start you wear every hat. I simplify a business into three jobs: marketing, sales and delivery (we call it operations). Plus your leadership head on top.

You stop being "an employee for everything" by handing those jobs away one by one, the whole bucket, to one owner each. "Usually you go first operations, then marketing, then sales."

Sales goes last. And it's exactly the one that keeps you trapped as the only closer if you never hand it over.

Once a bucket has an owner, it's theirs. My head of marketing, Michelle, has a budget and hires her own people. I don't mess with that. She asks when she needs help. She runs her part, and I get to do the job only the CEO can do: grow the whole thing.

You can't hand over what's only in your head

Telling someone to watch and copy you is not a handover. A written process is.

Spend one week each: how do we do marketing, how do we do sales, how do we deliver for a client in week zero, week one, week two, week three. Talk it through, someone writes it down. After three weeks you have a minimum set of processes, and now a freelancer or a new hire can learn it with you this month and run it alone next month.

Wendy said it from the sales side: very few companies have a prospecting process written down that a new hire can plug into. They hope someone is a "born salesperson." Then it turns out they're not.

For sales, the process is the order of the conversation. At Strategy Sprints we use the 8 Steps of the Repeatable Sale: the buyer names the frustration, why it matters, and what doing nothing costs, before anyone talks price. On paper, that order lets your rep stay in control of the call without you sitting in.

Keep the process alive with one hour a month

"What if the process changes?" Wendy asked. Oh, they change all the time. Usually within a year they break, because you've grown into more volume and more complexity.

So we have a process for changing the process. Once a month, one hour, three questions:

• Which parts can we make simpler for our clients?
• Which parts can we make simpler for ourselves?
• What can we eliminate?

Every process has one owner, and that owner writes "updated at" with a current date. No owner, no update. The process goes stale, and the old way creeps back in through you.

Know when you can afford to let go

Every evening, when I shut the laptop, I answer two questions about the day I just had. Which of these tasks will I delegate tomorrow? And if I lived more freely and more intentionally, what would I do tomorrow?

Write "bookkeeping" once and nothing happens. Write it two evenings in a row and you feel it in your body. Now you start asking friends and coaches who could take it. Delegation is a practice, not a one-time move.

Then chew on one more question before you hand it off: can I create three times more value in that hour?

Say a bookkeeper costs 30 bucks an hour. If you can turn that hour into 90 bucks (a sales call, a video that brings in a client), you're ready to hand it over. If not yet, keep it for now and keep asking.

🌴 Bookkeeping was the very first thing I ever handed off. It didn't happen in two days. It happened because I decided to, and then the option showed up.

Start this week

1. Pick the thing that's more fun than work. Put it in the calendar first, so you have a reason to let go.
2. Name the next bucket. Operations, marketing or sales: which one gets an owner next?
3. One week, one process. Talk through how you sell, step by step, and have someone write it down.
4. Book the monthly hour. Simpler for clients, simpler for us, what to cut.

Only room for one this week? Make it number 3. Written down, your sales process stops living in your head and starts running without you.

Picture a Monday where your rep runs the call, the buyer says yes, and you hear about it at dinner, after the ride. That's Sprintlife: control of the sales conversation, and the time freedom it buys you.

Listen to the full conversation with Wendy Weiss: 104: Simon Severino, Get A Life

You don't have to build this alone. Grab the free tools and join the founders working on the same thing in the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆