Episode #17 - Your Role in Your Business

Hello and welcome to the Sequoia Project podcast. Episode 17. Today we're going to break down a little bit the responsibility of a business owner — like what their responsibility is to themselves and what it is to the business.

Dale: Something that I'm very, I get very heated about this — I'm getting what I'm very, I get very heated about this. People who are, who have small businesses, even who have run them for a while — something that I heard a lot was, you know, I just don't want to do that. You know, I understand what the task is. I just don't want to do it. I don't feel like doing it. That was the actual word. I don't feel like doing it.

Coby: I thought there was this image that I had to be very professional. And that was the way that I had to sell all this sort of stuff. It was only up until recently where I'm like, well, I don't actually want to do that. And I want to be me. There was a point — I think it was back when I was still at the gym. Our very first intensive. I'm like, I don't want to do these calls. Like I can't do these calls. The anxiety that I feel behind these calls and everything were just overwhelming. I wanted to cry at any point when I had to do these. The fear of judgement was just so massive. But I think just once I started, like I pushed myself into it to a point where I was so uncomfortable that I wouldn't give myself time to think about how uncomfortable I was with it.

Dale: There is the business, and then there is the operator. And they both have their own set of life support systems. What the life support system for the operator is will not be the same for the business. But the business cannot actively do the things it needs to do without the operator. Every business needs customers. You cannot have a business without customers. So the lifeblood of the business is customers. But if you said to the business, go and get customers, it can't do that. The operator has to supply that to the business. It's almost like having a baby. Now that I think about it, it's almost like having a child. It does everything that the operator does. But without the parent, it can't do it by itself. It needs to get to a term. It needs to get to an age of which it goes, yeah, cool. I understand now. And then it can do that itself. That being employees, that being systems, that being processes.

Dale: Under me, we have my general manager. Underneath them we have teams managers and underneath them we have the actual teams itself. A lot of those people take responsibility off me and over the years have taken responsibility off me. But if we have a change in staff, if someone gets injured, someone gets — if the prices of supply go up, those things all still have to be dealt with by someone. And I'm the only person that can make those decisions. So yes, it's much more passive than it used to be, but it's never completely passive because you have to be preparing for the eventualities that might happen to protect how passive the thing is.