Personal Responsibility and the Art of Delegation

First of all, you have to realize, every mistake that people make affects their cash flow. This affects the way their business can run. For example, you either four areas we want people to be focused on cash flow.

1.Values which leaves a mission statement, leaves a purpose.

2.Operational relevance which is delegation.

3.Recurring revenue which leads to marketing and sales.

4.Systemization because no business runs well without systems.

The bigger you get, the more important systems are and there’s a real disconnect between business owners and their employees around systems and that many business owners hate systems because they don’t want to do things in a specific order. But their employees love them because it gives them a definition for what excellence is. Your employees want to do a good job; you just need to help them get there. Let’s start off with delegation because I think that’s the biggest roadblock that keeps business owners from growing their business.

I had to develop a system, it was a big learning curve. By the way, that’s true for literally everybody, if you could work in a big company, the biggest complaint people have is my boss is a jerk. The reason the boss is a jerk is because the boss either micro manages or does what I call seagull management which is, they tell you what to do and then they fly back in and crap all over the place or the same thing is true with private business owners and said, delegation is not a natural act because we as human beings are not naturally trusting. We don’t tolerate mistakes very well which are the two pieces that have to happen for you to be a great delegator, if I delegate, I can’t just advocate it. I can’t walk away and then come back three weeks later and blow up because you didn’t do what I wanted you to do. There has to be an inspect function as part of delegating.

We as business owners, if we want to grow our business, have to work through others and you can’t work through others unless you learn the art of delegation. In my opinion, delegation is more an art than it is a skill because people are different. When things don’t go well, do you tell her or do you ask? In other words, what would happen if my very favorite question in the world. When someone says, well I can’t do this and I say, what would happen if you could? It sort of changes the conversation completely and then they often will say to people, I don’t know. Why don’t you pretend you know? When people pretend they know, it’s actually the real answer to the question anyhow. It doesn’t matter whether they tell you or they pretend they’re telling you, it’s still the same answer.

By the way, another thing which might fit is, are you creating a cash flow positive or cash flow flush business? Is making sure that your price what you’re doing effectively. One of the things I think in real estate which I just don’t understand is people buying investment real estate that doesn’t cash flow.

The reason they buy the real estate is, they say that this is what they tell me they say. Well, it’s going to go up in value, it’s going to go up in value enough to overcome the deficit cash flow that you're taking money out of your pocket to do that with. That’s an example of pricing being bad with the investment that you’re making and one of the things that you always need to be doing in fact almost, my work with any business that has less than five employees. I can almost guarantee the pricing model stinks. Unless they fix that pricing model, they are never going to have enough effect as cash in their business to allow them to hire the people to grow.

If I’m investing in real estate and I’m going to buy a 10-unit apartment house and I spend two million dollars on this property, my cash flow doesn’t pay for my cost, they gave me a reasonable return that allows me to actually have a business out of it. My answer for that investment needs to be “no”, because, I’m not really sure whether that property’s going to go up in value or down in value. What I am sure about is I have a bank note to pay every month. I have property taxes to pay every month. I may or may not have utilities to pay and if I can’t pay those things, I have to take money out of my pocket, I’m on the road to bankruptcy, I’m not on the road to financial freedom.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws353-personal-responsibility-and-the-art-of-delegation-with-josh-patrick/