Ok, the bottom line is if you want to pass an activity or role on to someone else in your business and do not want it to keep on bouncing back to you – it has to be written down in a format that provides all the key data for this transition to the new person doing it.
One way to look at the dependency of your business on you is by this physical analogy. A key aspect of dependency is the type, number, and level of incoming communications which come to you and are related to the business, and then the corresponding outgoing communications that you create.
So imagine you are standing in the middle of a playing field, this field represents your business. Around your waist, you have a thick belt, military-like, with lots of clips attached to it – around the entire belt. Attached to each of these clips is a rope with a clip on the end. These ropes represent communications to you and demands on you from your business. If your business has a high dependency on you there are ropes around the entire perimeter of the belt, clipped in and being pulled when something is needed. You can literally see how you will be “pulled all over the place”. This is actually what it feels like.
What then do you do? Well after you’ve written down the activity, explain it in detail, how it’s done, why it’s done in a document. Then you can easily pass this clip onto someone else’s belt with this document attached. They then know exactly what to do when their clip is pulled. If it comes back to you, make your document clearer and more detailed until that communication line is completely off your belt and is never pulled again.
Most business owners hate this as its upfront work which they don’t want to do because “it’s faster if I just do it myself” but that is the very fire we are trying to stamp out.