Owning business operations, or operating as a business owner?
I know, I know… I said every Sunday. It’s late. I’m sorry. But, it’s here.
Why is it late though, you ask? Let me explain, welcome to the topic of my third blog post.
Being a business operator, and not a business owner.
Now I did not exactly coin that statement myself. Whilst the above wording is mine, it’s derived from the research of my most admired mentor (we’ve never met, but we will), the man who will “not be your guru”, but your personal coach in all things relevant to life — love and relationships, personal growth and happiness, business and finance, you name it. If you haven’t yet, then by way of my noble and profound introduction, meet (can I say that?) Tony Robbins. He’s a leading authority in pretty much anything, and with such impactful insights and teaching techniques, he’s honestly touched the lives of millions of people globally -myself included. I could tell you more, but this is not a sponsored post and I think I have given credit to his idea, so let’s move on.
So essentially without getting into too much detail, Tony portrays being a business operator as a bad thing based on the idea that by being an operator you are stuck into your daily business operations, not giving you time to focus on just high-level stuff, and significantly, enjoy the fact that you actually OWN a business!
Do I agree? Well, I didn’t at first, but now I do.
When starting a business, especially in the super early stages, you do everything yourself. You don’t/won’t/can’t employ (interestingly, an equally balanced combination of those three factors I find), and all the heavy lifting falls onto you. I can’t speak for everyone, so I don’t want to generalise, but at least this is what it was like for me. I did/do absolutely everything from product management, product testing and reviews, UI/UX design, marketing, conceptualising of sales and marketing strategies, sales meetings, customer support on all our channels, account management for our clients, job management and customer to user management, etc etc etc. As Tony would say, “Buddy, you are a fucking business operator”. Every aspect of ops is on me. Every user and customer touch point, on me.
What does that mean? Without help, it means you can’t really turn off, or take a break from operating the business to dedicate time doing deep-work and thinking about growing the business and innovating. Yes, these things happened organically as you operate, but I truly believe not nearly to the extent if that was your priority, in other words — owning the business.
“But Jaryd, you said you didn’t agree with Tony, probably the most educated and respected man on the subject?”. I did say that, here’s why.
I believe being an operator is one of the most important aspects of being a founder and active CEO. Without it, what “operation” is there to own at the end? By being an operator, you have your finger on every pulse, nothing misses your eye, and you truly get to understand the business you are supposed to be building and the problem you will be solving. I say this because, at least from my experience (yes, just 1 venture so far, but my gut tells me that by and large, it’s true), that what you start out doing is likely going to look very different to what you end up owning at the end of the day (if we escape Death Valley, were sadly 95% of startups die with no headstones, and disappear into the abyss of the consumer’s mind). “Jees, that’s dark Jaryd”. That’s because by doing it all yourself, observing and iterating through your continues feedback loops — you learn what assumptions of yours are true, which ones are garbage and that the market dismissed, and what tweaks to make to change your business. You can only get that from being an operator.
“But Jaryd, you just said being an operator is the most important aspect of running a company, but you also apparently now agree with Tony, what is it?” Please, just let me finish, it will all make sense in the end (I hope).
Being an operator is a key to success. Being THE operator is a guaranteed way to fail (I realised this very recently). Funny how a bit of grammar changes something completely. You need to be, and should want to be, involved in the various ops with the relevant people you have delegated to be responsible. Right now I’m personally in slow transition from doing all the ops myself, to learning how to actually let go and share responsibility (I’m finding it bloody hard, and its going to take lots of practice for me to get comfortable letting go of important dimensions I was once fully in control of, to trusting someone else and up-skilling them to take over). But, I can already see the benefits personally (I can now take a personal day to spend 5 hours at SARS and 3 hours at the Traffic department getting my 3 month expired license renewed, love it) as well as on the business.
Where I see this practically going for the foreseeable future, knowing myself, is still overseeing and being active in all the operations, but with the ability to walk away from something if needs be and knowing reliable and trustworthy people and systems/protocols are in place. That, at least to me, is the difference between being an operator, and being the operator. I want this to be the case. I want to always be right in there, but I also know I want the ability to leave it alone, and focus on the ownership part. I mean what’s the point of owning a company, if at the end of the day you are just multi-faceted, super responsible and unpaid employee?
And that’s the hiccup I have with Tony’s owner over operator idea — he believes you need to transition from operating to owning. I think you need to absorb ownership into operating.
I wish I could tell you how, but I’m still figuring it out. What I can say though, is you need to do it. It was killing me personally, I was doing shallow-work that needed to be done, taking up hours of time that could have been allocated to deeper-work and objectives more aligned to my attributes and skill set. Stuff like strategising how to enter our next market, successfully (and controversially) position ourself against our competitors, and writing my next blog post — stuff that I know needs to be done, but just haven’t been able to get to as I’ve had to keep the blood of operations pumping.
If you’ve adapted from being the sole operator, to something similar to what I’ve portrayed above, I’d love to hear your story and process (teach me please). If you haven’t got there yet, a clap or two below will suffice.
