How to Create a Business That Can Work Without You | Learn from Wharton Business School Graduate and Founder of Lessdoing.Com

Audio Transcription

Are you feeling overwhelmed and finding yourself being without the free time needed to enjoy your financial freedom? Clay Clark is interviewing Ari Meisel about the system he created that help business owners to create a scalable business.

Ari Meisel is a graduate from the prestigious Wharton School of Business and is a self-described  “Overwhelm-ologist” who helps entrepreneurs who have opportunity in excess of what their infrastructure can handle, to optimize, automate, and outsource everything in their business, so they can make themselves replaceable and scale their business.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “I believe great people to be those who know how they got where they are, and what they need to do to get where they’re going. Great people have a vision of their lives that they practice emulating each and every day. They go to work on their lives, not just in their lives. Their lives are spent living out the vision they have of their future, in the present. They compare what they’ve done with what they intended to do. And where there’s a disparity between the two, they don’t wait very long to make up the difference.” – Michael Gerber (The E-Myth Revisited)

1. Who can benefit from your Doing Less System?
2. Ari, you often write about making yourself “replaceable,” but for those out there who are not familiar with the concept of “making yourself replaceable”, what do you mean by this?
3. What is your advice to a founder that is fully immersed and overwhelmed with their business on where to start when beginning to become replaceable?
   1. A lot of founders wear all the hats. We have to look at where we are spending our time. It is not unusual to find someone that is spending a ton of time doing things that are not their highest and best use.
   2. You have to pull the ego out of it. You have to recognize the “we” are not the company. You have to have a since of non-attachment to the business.
4. Ari, Michael Gerber the best-selling author of The E-Myth book series once wrote, “I believe the difference between great people and everyone else is that great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes them next.” I would love to have you explain how the guiding principles required for Optimized Operators seeking to make themselves replaceable, can people design a life and lifestyle that they love?

Set Time

Block Most People

1. Ari, I would love to hear you are about your thoughts on communication, Communication — Organizing Ideas, Asynchronous Communication, and Inbox Zero.
2. Ari, Arianna Huffington the founder of the Huffington Post once wrote, “The way it works is simple: While you’re away on vacation, people who email you get a message, letting them know when you’ll be back. And then — the most important part — the tool deletes the email. If the email is important, the sender can always send it again. If it’s not, then it’s not waiting for you when you get back, or, even worse, tempting you to read it while you’re away. So the key is not just that the tool is creating a wall between you and your email; it’s that it frees you from the mounting anxiety of having a mounting pile of emails waiting for you on your return — the stress of which mitigates the benefits of disconnecting in the first place.” Do you agree with philosophy and why or why not?
3. How to Get 10 Hours of Time Freedom
   1. Get off of Facebook
   2. Get off of LinkedIn
   3. Get off of Twitter
   4. Stop reading all of the mailers at your house
   5. Stop responding to every email that gets sent to you from people that are not paying you, or you are paying them
   6. Don’t watch TV ever
      1. http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watches-5-hours-tv-day-article-1.1711954
   7. Let people who don’t share values with you, let them know that you will never speak to them again.
4. The legendary management expert, Peter Drucker once said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all,” I would love to get your thoughts on how effective processes can eliminate wasting both resources and time?
5. Hiring and onboarding are so critical for business owners who are looking to make themselves replaceable, can you share with me how you can make a company’s hiring and onboarding process more systematic?
   1. The 2 things i tend to look for when hiring people:
      1. People that have attention to detail
      2. People who are proactive
   2. The 2 things during the interview process that we did differently were:
      1. People had to submit a video of themselves on youtube.
         1. We noticed that people who submitted a video that was between 1-3 minutes it was usually a good fit.
      2. Then we gave the people a one time solution based question and based on their response we could have some very informative looks into the way the candidates operate.
6. Ari, Ben Horowitz the legendary Silicon Investor and the man who built Opsware before selling it to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion once said, “The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed.” Can you share why it’s so hard for many business owners to manage people?
   1. We should not be managing, we should be leading.
7. You mentioned learning and the growth mindset earlier. What does the The importance of ongoing learning mean to you?
   1. It’s part of how I live and breath. If you are going to replace yourself you will have to replace yourself with something. I follow about 30 podcasts.

WINS OF THE WEEK

Complete Carpet has beat almost all of their records from 2017

1. 1. 2017 (January – December)
      1. Referrals – 43
      2. Leads from Google – 331
   2. 2018 (January – July)
      1. Referrals – 106
      2. Leads from Google – 378

Here are the things you need to do to systemize your business:

1. Create a Sales Call Script
2. Install Call Recording Software
3. Create an Operations Checklist for Fulfilling your Product or Service
4. Schedule One Recurring Meeting Per Week Where You Assign and Follow-up on Action Items for What Needs to Be Done
5. Schedule a Group Interview for Hiring Quality Talent
6. Agree on File Naming & Organization System on Dropbox

Learn more about Ari at the following website:

1. https://lessdoing.com/
2. https://pages.convertkit.com/5c6e61b321/3bbb1ba081
3. BOOK – “The Art Of Less Doing: One Entrepreneur’s Formula for a Beautiful Life”
   1. https://www.amazon.com/Art-Less-Doing-Entrepreneurs-Beautiful/dp/1619614421