Jordan asks: “I’ve built a small investment team, but everything still runs through me. Pricing, customer service, weekly emails—they all find their way back to me. I thought hiring would give me leverage, but instead it feels like I just created more people waiting on my decision. I don’t want to lose control, but I also don’t want to be the reason the company stalls. How do you design a business where people can act confidently without asking permission?”
In this episode, Scott calls Jordan out on the real problem (“I don’t want to lose control”—your team feels that mindset), reveals the three-part delegation framework (train what winning looks like, teach how to think, empower to act), and shares his own refund policy story about letting go of control. You’ll learn the one question that reveals bottlenecks (“What’s preventing you from doing this without me?”) and understand why the business only grows to the leader’s capacity—meaning if you’re the bottleneck, that’s your ceiling.
The bottom line: Train outcomes, not steps. Teach thinking, not tasks. Empower action, not permission-seeking. Then get out of the way and watch what happens.
Got a business question? Ask Scott here: https://scotttodd.net/ask
Full Transcript
Scott Todd (00:00)
Welcome to Fix My Business, the show that helps you get unstuck, remove those roadblocks that stand in your way so that you can continue to grow your business and build the life that you want. I’m your host Scott Todd and today’s question comes from Jordan and Jordan writes, I’ve built a small investment team, but everything still runs through me. Pricing, customer service, weekly emails, they all find their way back to me. I thought hiring would give me leverage.
but instead it feels like I just created more people waiting on my decision. I don’t want to lose control. Come on, Jordan. I shouldn’t. Okay, I’m going to keep reading the question, but I also don’t want to be the reason the company stalls. How do you design a business where people can act confidently without asking permission every five minutes? Jordan, right there when I called you out.
What you said is, don’t want to lose control. And that is the mindset that you have going into this and your people feel it. They really do. What’s happening here, Jordan, is that you are the hub. You are the constraint of the business. You’re the thing holding this business back. I always say that the business is only going to grow to the capacity of the leader. That’s it. It’s not going to grow any further than that. If you have control issues, that is the limit of the business growth.
Okay, now your employees are also going to know that. You also said that you were concerned or you thought that hiring would give you leverage. Well, it does give you leverage. Hiring does give you leverage when you empower people to act. If you’re not empowering people to act and you’re still trying to hold on to decisions, well, then you’re going to have this exact situation. And then you’re going to look at the payroll every time you pay it. And you’re going to wonder, what am I getting for my money?
eventually, at least, I mean, that’s what people tell me. I’ve had that too, where I look at somebody, I’m like, what am I getting here? What do they do? But if this is across the board, that’s really the problem that’s driving that. Jordan, think about any big business. I mean, I’m not going to get into individual businesses and calling them out, but I know that you can look at any business. You can just flip open any newspaper article and look at a big business and you’ll see where.
a frontline employee somewhere messed up with something. You can look at any customer that’s ranting about something on any social media channel, and it’s probably because a frontline employee did not make the right decision. Now, as a C-suite executive in a big company, you cannot sit there and worry about every single decision that a frontline employee is going to make. It’s just not possible for you to do your job and worry about that stuff.
That also means that sometimes the leaders have to clean up some messes. That’s the way that it is. People don’t always make the right decision. But that’s the thing. They are making decisions. Every day people are making decisions and you have to give people in your business the ability to make a decision. And the way that I handle this is I want you to really think about three elements here. The first thing that I want you to do is I want you to think about, look, the only way I’m going to get leverage is if I train them.
Train them not how to do the job. That is part of it, but really what you’re training them on is not the actual steps. A lot of people think that that’s the way that it is. What you want to train them on is what winning looks like, what the finished product looks like. Hey, you know you’re done and you know you’ve done a good job when this happens.
my team, create these questions for me and they know that they’re winning. I don’t care how they get on this piece of paper, but they know that they’re winning when they can hand me a piece of paper with the question that I can read on it. Okay. So we have to train what winning looks like, not the micro steps to get there. The next thing that we have to do is we have to train them on how to think because just because I tell them I want it like this, what happens if the happy path isn’t followed?
What happens if there’s something that’s weird that pops up? What happens if the toner goes out? Whatever it is, right? Like how do you think about these problems now? So you’re not just training them to do, training them also to think and to think the way that you want them to think. And again, that goes back to what we just talked about, what winning looks like. This is what winning looks like. Does this piece of paper have to be typewritten or would Scott be happy with a handwritten note?
be happy with a handwritten note. I just need something that I can share with you. See, that’s what winning looks like. So think about that. And the last part that I think a lot of people miss when they’re building teams is empowerment. They don’t empower their people. They think that they do, but they don’t. They don’t. go, yeah, yeah, just go do this and then come back to me and we’ll double check it. That’s not empowerment. Empowerment says, I just need this done.
I need it done. And when you do that, you will find that the employees will take it because they now know what winning looks like. They now know how you want them to think about situations and novelties. And then they’re empowered to fix whatever comes up. So in my organization for a long time, I was afraid to give people the power to give refunds. Finally one day I’m like, I’m tired of doing this here. Under these circumstances, give a refund.
And under these circumstances, don’t give a refund and use this language. This is what I would do. And now just go give the refunds. And now guess what? Sometimes I wonder if we’re giving too much refunds, but they’re following my rules, right? That’s the way that it is. All right. So you have to think about the way that you’re working with people and trying to build out the training program. And then I think that what you really have to do too is you need to sit down with your people.
When they’re in front of you, as you’re saying, they’re waiting on you to make a decision, I think that you have to sit down with them and say, hey, look, let me ask you a question. What’s preventing you from just doing this without me? What is it? And they will tell you, well, I could do this, but I need you for X, Y, and Z. Cool. Now you know what’s preventing them. That’s the obstacle in the way because you asked, or if you see the obstacle,
Now your job is to remove that obstacle, right? Like that’s what you need to do is you need to remove that obstacle. And when you do that, you will find that your people stop coming to you for every single question. You’ll see that you’re giving up control because you’re giving them empowerment. That also means that you’re no longer the hub, the spoke, the thing that’s holding everything together because that’s not what you want to be. Your time constraints will go away. Your business will grow like
wildfire. It really will. When you get out of the way, you’ll be amazed what it can do. And that’s how you solve the problem. That’s it. All right. If you have a question, head over to scottodd.net forward slash ask, drop your question there. We’ll get it onto this show. I look forward to seeing you in our next episode.