You’ve trained your team. They handle the routine work just fine. But the second something weird happens—a bill with a missing address, a confusing email, a non-standard request—it lands right back on your desk.
In this episode, Scott answers a question from Kevin, a business owner stuck in the “two-minute fire drill” cycle. Scott explains why this isn’t a competency problem; it’s a visibility problem. The solution isn’t to train harder; it’s to stop teaching tasks and start teaching judgment. Learn how to build a “Decision Tree” for the 10% of tasks that break the rules, so your team can solve problems without you.
Key Takeaways:
- The “Happy Path” Trap: Most training only covers the 90% of scenarios where things go right. You need a specific plan for the “Edge Cases.”
- Competency vs. Visibility: If your team performs well most of the time, they aren’t incompetent—they are afraid. They lack the visibility into how you think.
- The 4-Step Decision Tree: Scott breaks down a simple framework to handle confusing bills or data:
- Hunt for Clues: Scan for partial data (addresses, codes) to match against internal records.
- Push Back: If the data is missing, email the vendor immediately asking for specifics (X, Y, Z).
- The 48-Hour Rule: Wait. If no response, bump the request.
- The Rejection: If the vendor fails to reply, reject the bill.
- The Psychology of Delegation: Your fear of fixing mistakes forever fuels their fear of making them. The only way out is a documented escape plan.
Memorable Quote:
“We can’t teach people how to do things that aren’t in the happy path. We have to teach them how we think.”
Resources Mentioned:
- Submit Your Question: Stuck in the messy middle? Get your question answered on the show at scotttodd.net/ask
Full Transcript
Scott Todd (00:00)
Welcome to Fix My Business. This show is dedicated to helping you get unstuck in your business so you can keep growing. We answer your questions on this show and today’s question comes from Kevin. And Kevin says, Kevin’s in real estate investing by the way. Kevin says, I’ve trained my team, like actually train them. They do fine most of the time, but the second something isn’t obvious, they dump it back on me.
We get a bill, it’s missing a property name or address, and suddenly it’s my problem. Sometimes I literally just read the bill closer or send an email to the bill sender. If I can figure it out in two minutes, why can’t they? Why does everything hard end up back on my desk? Kevin, here’s the situation. At first glance, you might think that it’s a competency issue.
and it’s not a competency issue. Your team is performing. You even said it. You said, hey, look, they do fine most of the time. This is a visibility issue. And what I mean by that is that you have trained them how to do tasks, and they’re doing that. The bill comes in, they’re processing it for the majority of the cases. But when it’s hard, that’s an edge case. And those edge cases have not been trained properly. You see, we can’t teach people
how to do things that aren’t in the happy path. We have to teach them how we think. And there’s a difference there. So we can show them step by step how to do something. We gotta go to another level and teach them how we think about things. You see, what’s happening here is that when it comes to these edge cases, we have multiple fears. Your employees have fears and you have fears. Here they are. Your employees,
Man, they are afraid of making a mistake. They really are. They don’t want to make a mistake. don’t, they, they’re, they’re concerned. They don’t know how to think about this. So what they do is they dump it back onto you. Now you’re, you have a fear too. And your fear is that you’re going to end up doing these, these stinking two minute fire drills for the rest of your life. And you don’t see any end in sight. And whenever we have fears within an organization, those fears keep us.
in a trap. And the only way out of that is to build an escape plan. That’s the only way we’re going to change the trajectory here is by doing something different. And in this case, the escape plan that we’re going to build is we’re going to build a decision tree for the edge cases. Now you’ve already said it. You’ve trained them. Cool. Now we’re going to build a document that will help them think through these edge cases. And that’s the unique thing about
these situations is that it’s not black and white. If it was, it would be in the happy path. Here we need them to think. And so what we’re going to tell them is we’re going to build this tree and we’re going to say, step one, examine this bill for obvious clues. Is there something that we can pull out of it that would tie it back into our ⁓ property management database or our database or whatever system you’re using?
Is there something that we can gleam from this to know what to do next? I had this situation. I had a very similar situation to this. What happened was we received a bill from a property owners association and it basically had a bunch of numbers up there. didn’t tie to any record at all. But I did notice that there was a partial address. It was the beginning of the house number and it was the beginning of a street. It was cut off, but it was just enough.
So what I told the team, as I said, hey, go back to the county records and see if we can figure out what property this is. We need the property number. We need something. can we get just off of this bill? Can we get something to work on? And if you can, now you’re off to the races. So that’s step one. The step one of this decision tree is, well, look for the obvious clues. Step two is if there are no obvious clues or you can’t figure it out, email or call
the people who sent you the bill, like email them. And when you email them, I want you to say, hey, we’ve received this bill. It does not have enough information for us to process it. Please provide us with X, Y, and Z. That’s it. When I get bills in my company that do not meet our ability to pay like the required information, we don’t pay it. We send it back. We reject it. Okay. Now I want to tell them step three is to wait 48 hours.
Don’t worry about it for 48 hours. Step four is to follow up on it again. So after 48 hours, if you haven’t received a response to them, you can follow up, follow up with them. After that 48 hour period, send them an update, a bump that says, hey, still needing this. Another 48 hours pass, we’re going to take that bill, we’re going to mail it back to them, and we’re going to say, I’m sorry, this bill is declined because we do not have the information that we need in order to process it through our system.
Please provide X, Y, and Z. Notice what happens when we do that. When we do this, our team doesn’t come to us anymore because we’ve given them the decision tree on how to think about these edge situations and they don’t bother us anymore. So now the thing that you’re writing about, we can make it go away by telling them this is not
This is not a Scott problem. This is not my problem. And it’s not your problem after the 96 hours or whatever it is that we’re waiting. It’s the people who sent us the bills problem. You see, your team isn’t struggling with execution. They really aren’t. What they’re struggling with is the judgment on the very unique situations. And as a business owner, we have to now think about that.
that problem. Like that’s the next level of scalability or getting us to the point where we can scale. Think about this one for a second. If you’re dealing with this problem, that means that you’ve already overcome the difficult part, which is getting them to do the other 90, I don’t know, 90%. Now, you got to cover the basis for the 10%. This is the easier stuff, believe it not, when you have a system to build the decision trees or the documentation.
Visibility, documentation, that’s the way out of this whole thing. Kevin, you’re doing a great job. You got to just wrap this part up and get done, get rid of this 10 % and get it off your plate. And then you’re done with it forever. Let them handle it. Listen, if you have a business challenge of your own and you’re stuck on something, I’ll tell you what you do. You head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. You can ask your question there. We will put it on the air and help you get unstuck. I will see you in the next episode.
In the meantime, keep moving your feet.