The 90-Day Test

Hello everyone and welcome back to this month's edition of Building Value. Let me ask you a question. What would happen if you stepped away from your business for 90 days? Now for you business owners, I can just feel your heart rate increasing at the thought of stepping away for that long. I can also hear all the excuses and the pop-ups already. Clients wouldn't know who to call. Employees wouldn't know what to do. Important decisions would just pile up and difficult problems would go unsolved.

If that's your reaction, then this is your call to action. Because a 90-day test has a way of revealing something many owners don't think about often enough. How dependent the business is on you.

Now to be fair, most successful businesses are dependent on their owners in the early years. That's often how they get built. The owner is the salesperson, the relationship manager, the decision-maker, the problem-solver, and so on. But over time something interesting happens. The exact thing that helped them build the business at the outset can become the exact thing limiting its value. That drive and the desire and the ability to be involved in every decision, that strength early on, eventually is no longer viewed as a strength. Eventually, it's just viewed as risk. Key person risk, as it's known, to be specific.

Think about it from a potential buyer's perspective. And for those of you who say you'll never sell, think about it from a potential client's perspective. If you're unable to step away because you think everything would break, how could you ever expect a potential buyer to step in or a potential client to join you if there's no plan without you?

Now most owners wear their indispensability like a badge of honor, and I get it. As a business owner and a father, I feel like owning a business is about as close to fatherhood as you can get. How you protect it, the emotional ups and downs, its ability to consume your thoughts from the moment that you wake up until the moment that you go to sleep. But that's why the 90-day test is so important. Not because anyone is suggesting that you disappear for 3 months, but because it's important to prepare for the day where you might.

So, where do you start? We start by creating redundancy. Who can make decisions without you? Who owns key relationships? Who can solve problems when you're unavailable? Said more simply, outline how things get done and then test it. Take a long weekend. Don't answer every call and email. Don't jump into every issue. See what happens. Pay attention to where things break. Those breakdowns are valuable clues. Fix them. Create a little more redundancy and then run the test again. Maybe it's a week next time and then 2 weeks and then longer. Who knows? Maybe even 90 days.

Over time, you'll expose the bottlenecks, the constraints, and the dependencies that are keeping the business tied to you. And by doing it in these bite-size chunks, you'll be able to address them in a manageable way without putting the company or the day-to-day flow at risk. And to be clear, the goal isn't to create a business that doesn't need leadership. The goal is to create a business with defined systems in place that allow it to function without a reliance on any one person. That's what allows you to create a company that can perform consistently, serve clients and customers well, and continue to grow even when you're not in the room.

Thanks for joining me, everyone. Until next month, keep building value.