Megan Hyatt Miller:
Unless you’re very explicit with your staff, they will default to asking for your approval for all kinds of stuff, and you won’t actually end up empowering the people that work for you to make decisions.

Michael Hyatt:
Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael Hyatt:
And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. If you’re a business owner, we’ve got good news for you, because we’re going to be talking about the five mistakes that every business owner makes.

Michael Hyatt:
Now, this comes out of our coaching practice where we coach entrepreneurs and executives, and we’ve found these business owners who frequently make these mistakes, but the good news is you can overcome every one of them.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. I think we all want to know how to avoid mistakes. Mistakes are painful and costly and, gosh, if you know what to look out for, it’s kind of half the battle.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, here’s the thing, I don’t think you can actually avoid mistakes. But the great thing about coaching is that you don’t have to make the common mistakes. You can invent new and exciting ways to make mistakes.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
That’s true. Well, there’s also a continuum of mistakes that you can make. Some are slightly more positive, and some are just plain stupid. And if you can avoid the really stupid ones or the ones where you’re just going to slap your head at some point, then I think that’s a win. So this will be fun to talk about.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, these are pretty significant mistakes that people make, but they’re often done with a lack of self-awareness. People don’t know they’re making a mistake until it’s too late.

Michael Hyatt:
So let’s get into it. We’ve got five of them. The first one is this, filling the day with low-leverage work.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So when I think about low-leverage work, here are a couple of things that come to mind. Answering my own email, especially when the email responses are repetitive. Most of us get a lot of the same kinds of requests that come into our email inbox. Somebody wants to have lunch with us, they want to introduce us to somebody, they want our endorsement on something, I don’t know. I mean, there’s a handful of those things, and if we’re answering those originally ourselves, not using templates, not using our assistant to do that, that can suck up a ton of hours, depending on what kind of role you have. If you have a very externally facing role, which if you’re a business owner or CEO you most certainly do, that can suck up a ton of time. So I think that’s a really obvious one.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
You know one that I think is really insidious that pops up a lot is answering urgent, and I’m using air quotes, you guys can’t see my hands, urgent phone calls from your staff. So, basically, this is like an impromptu meeting that’s not on your calendar, and if you look backwards on your calendar and you were to log every time you had a 15-, 20-, 30-minute phone call with somebody, this could be hours of your week that, right about the time you were going to sit down and you were going to write that thing that you needed to write, or you were going to develop this or approve this thing that you knew was one of your Big 3, somebody shoots in to your day with a phone call or a text: “Hey, do you have five minutes?” And five minutes becomes 30 minutes. And all of a sudden, that one block you had to get your most important work of the day done is shot, and the rest of your day is in meetings. I see that happen all the time.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Doing your own expense reports. I mean, really when we talk about this with our clients, we’re looking at all the things that you might delegate to an executive assistant as the first line of defense that stuff that we would consider most of us as business owners or executives as the drudgery. I’m not really that good at it and, gosh, I hate it. So that’s what we’re thinking about. Another one that comes to mind, we could probably do this for like 30 minutes because we’re going to have all these ideas now, but another one that comes to mind is making decisions that somebody else can make. I mean, this is the one that I probably fall into the most that I have to watch out for, and if you have a strong personality and you have strong opinions about what you want and what you don’t want, unless you’re very explicit with your staff, they will default to asking for your approval for all kinds of stuff and you won’t actually end up empowering the people that work for you to make decisions.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So, for example, somebody will ask you, “What kind of coffee do you want?” At the kitchen and at your office, or where you want to order lunch from, or if they can spend $500 or if they can switch to another vendor because one time you had an opinion about who you use for XYZ service. And you can end up in the middle of almost every decision in your company, and it will drive you crazy. It will drive the people who work for you crazy, and it will slow you down like none other, and this is the definition of low-leverage work.

Michael Hyatt:
Most people I talk to have got way more to do than they’ve got time to do it, and unfortunately our social reward system validates and rewards these people. So that when we say we’re too busy, that’s a way to brag and we get a lot of accolades for it, but it’s not that helpful. And I think it comes down to, and this is the fix, prioritizing your work. Not all tasks are created equal. Some are just busy work. Some have nothing to do with what you’re out to accomplish, particularly with your goals for this quarter or the outcomes you want to see this week. They’re just a place, and I’m only saying this because I’ve done it to myself, it’s a place you hide where you go to being busy and you’re procrastinating that big, important thing that really would move the needle to do the things that you’re more familiar you’re with and that suck up all your time.

Michael Hyatt:
So this is where, I think, the fix really has to do with our concept of the Daily Big 3. So this is built into the Full Focus Planner. It’s one of the first things that we teach our clients to do, our business coaching clients, so that they can get out of that sense of overwhelm and defeat and break the cycle and finally come up with a do list they can actually achieve. But what makes that work? I mean, because a lot of people, Megan, you’ve had this experience too where you tell people about the Big 3 and they roll their eyes like “What? I got 15 things or 20 things to do today.” So, in your experience, what does it take to whittle that down to the Big 3?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, I think it goes back even further upstream, and this is something that we work with our clients to hone, is really getting clarity on where you do make your greatest contribution. Because part of what happens is that, in any business, there are fires that come up. Sometimes you can feel like a firefighter. You got problems that crop up or great opportunities that come your way, whatever, and you just sort of get into a reactive mode, and whatever is screaming the loudest gets your attention, especially if you don’t have clarity about where you make your greatest contribution, also the work that’s the most satisfying for you. And so we don’t have time to get into now, but we have a concept that we teach called the Freedom Compass that really helps people dial in what’s in what you call their Desire Zone, the place where their greatest passion and their greatest proficiency meet one another.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And what we want is to be moving towards spending the majority of our time in that place, and that is by definition high-leverage work. If you don’t feel like you have proficiency and you don’t have passion for something, that is by definition low-leverage work. So this is like the stuff that you really should give to somebody else who’s more skilled, but you don’t and you have no passion for it and it’s draining. I think of that example you used to talk about in the early days of our business where you would mess around with coding for our website and you actually did enjoy that, so maybe that has the passion part, but maybe the proficiency not so much. That would be what we would call our distraction zone. But to that idea of hiding out, this is where you really can hide out and avoid the things that you need to be doing. And this is where you tell yourself, “Well, I got to catch up on Slack. I’ve got to review that proposal that somebody sent me.” When what you actually need to do is develop a communication plan for something or ideate about some new product, which is really hard work. And so it’s just easier to do that busy work than do the thing you need to do.

Michael Hyatt:
Yeah. The fix is really about prioritization and the realization that not every task is created equal. Some are more important, some tasks drive your business forward, some don’t. Some are basically treading water. So what this entails is that every morning, or sometimes the evening before, people do it different ways, is you identify what are the three things that if I only got these three things done, I would consider tomorrow or consider today a win? And then everything else is bonus. It doesn’t mean you can’t have other things or that you can’t pursue other tasks, but it just means that you’re changing the definition of the win. And the win is not getting the entire task list done, it’s just getting the three most important things done, but you got to identify those to begin with.

Michael Hyatt:
Now, my rule on identifying the Big 3 is that they have to be important. So if you take the Eisenhower Matrix, which has two axes and creates four quadrants, there are those things which are urgent and important and those things which are non-urgent and important, and either one of those is fine. If it’s important, whether it’s urgent or not, that deserves to be on your daily big three. What you don’t want is things that are not important. That’s quadrants three and four. So there are some things that are urgent and they’re not important, and there are some things that are either urgent nor important. And those two things you need to be getting off your to-do list altogether. Maybe they’re important to somebody else, but they shouldn’t be important to you, and by putting them on your list gives them an importance that they don’t deserve.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so that’s the first mistake, and it’s filling the day with low-leverage work. And our remedy for that is to come up with your Daily Big 3. And if you’ve never done this, try it for a week. Try it for seven days, and see what a difference it makes. Our clients report to us that it’s the single biggest help they’ve gotten. In other words, it moves them forward, because if you’re doing three things a day that are important and you do that five days a week and you do that 250 days a year, that’s 750 important things you accomplish every year. And if you do that and you stay focused, you can really move the needle on your business.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, what’s the second mistake?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
The second mistake is working without a vision, and, gosh, if there is one thing we hear from new clients more than any other, besides the fact that they’re working too many hours and they’re putting out fires all the time, it’s that they don’t have a written vision. They kind of have an idea, it’s sort of up in their head somewhere about where they want to go in the future. But how far out in the future that vision is, what it actually entails, it’s just not explicit. It’s kind of just implicitly rolling around in their head, and what that means is, and we talk about this with the Full Focus System, you’ve got to have vision before you can align your team, before you can execute in a high performance way that generates extraordinary results, especially if you’re going to do that without compromising your most important values, which is something that we’re really committed to at Full Focus.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
So if you feel like you’re struggling with either execution or alignment, getting everybody on the same page and rowing in the same direction, oftentimes it’s because you’re working without a vision. This is one of the most common mistakes that we see, and, gosh, you can just end up wasting a lot of resources and just working harder than you need to because you don’t have clarity about where you’re trying to go.

Michael Hyatt:
I think this is one of the most underappreciated aspects of having a vision, is that it operates as a filter. Without a vision, you don’t really know what’s important. Without a vision, you can’t differentiate between a distraction and an opportunity. But once you have a written vision, all that comes into focus. You realize a lot of the activities that you were involved in just aren’t important, because they don’t contribute to the vision. They’re not driving toward that envisioned future. Once you get that clarified and identified, it simplifies your life, and it really does become that filter for everything else. And companies that don’t have a vision end up with a lot of clutter, a lot of complexity, too much work that everybody’s doing. Everybody’s feeling overwhelmed, because there’s not that vision that sorts out what needs to be done from that stuff which doesn’t need to be done. And everybody’s going to be busy. Everybody’s going to be working hard, but unless it’s driving toward the vision, it doesn’t really have value.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, because of the importance of this, we actually have our clients in our coaching program go through this process, figure out their vision, figure what their mission is, figure out what their values are. Because if you have these components, it’s really the foundation that you want to build your business on, and too many people get focused way out in the execution phase. What can we do to improve our productivity? What can we do to tweak our financial results? And they never go far enough upstream to address the thing that ultimately driving poor alignment and poor execution, which is a lack of vision. And that doesn’t always mean just the long-term vision for your company. It can just mean an articulated vision for anything that you’re working on. Usually that is in play in some kind of execution failure, because you don’t have the alignment you need, but certainly every business needs a vision for the future, for where they’re going to be in three years, and that’s what we teach and that’s been hugely beneficial for our clients.

Michael Hyatt:
I like what you said, that it’s not always that big vision, though. As important as that is and as much as we believe in it, there also needs to be a vision that’s articulated for various projects. We have a tool for this called the Vision Caster, which is more near-term and more focused on specific projects, but the thing I like about that is that it gets out of your head onto paper what it is you want to accomplish, and it gives you a mechanism for transferring or communicating that vision to other people. And again, people can guess. It could be trial and error, but the problem with that is it consumes a lot of resources and a lot of unnecessary time. And when you’re clear as the supervisor with what it is you’re trying to create with a given project, it makes it so much easier for everybody else. So starting with the vision is probably one of the most efficient, effective things that you can do in your organization.

Michael Hyatt:
The third mistake is failing to lead their team well. So the truth is your business is never stronger than your team is. Your team is essential to your success. But here’s where we go back to mistake number two. Without a vision, the team perishes, but there’s more, including not supporting healthy team culture and poor hiring and retention. And these are mistakes that a lot of organizational leaders make, and it really leads to their downfall, because then they spend so much time trying to repair or trying to remediate a lack of experience or a lack of skill or a lack of training or whatever, and hiring well solves a lot of that.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Well, and if you care about your operating results, you need to care about your culture. And this is one of those things that not a lot of people teach this. If you went to business school, I don’t know how much you would have learned about culture. I think that it’s in that soft-skill category, and you always say, Dad, that culture is the unseen force that drives operating results. And I think that’s really true. It’s very difficult to produce extraordinary results if you have a toxic culture, and if you’re not thinking about your culture, then almost by default, you’re going to have toxicity or at least something that’s less than high performance. That’s why we put so much emphasis on not only who we hire, but how we manage the team and how we lead the team once they’re in the door, because culture’s everything.

Michael Hyatt:
It is, and it’s easy to get wrong. And the problem is, it’s very easy to miss, because when you’re embedded in a culture, when you’re immersed in a culture, it becomes invisible and you’re just not aware of it. It can be totally toxic, but people have a way of adapting. They have a way of figuring it out. But it doesn’t serve them, and if you’re trying to create organizational change, the better your culture is, the faster you can do it. When you don’t have a good culture, when you have a toxic culture, it’s like trying to go on a run in a swimming pool. You’re meeting with this resistance that, at every step along the way, you have a hard time getting any momentum. And that’s what a lot of organizations face, because the culture is pushing back against their efforts.

Michael Hyatt:
And so the cure to this really, as leaders, is, first of all, start out with a clear picture. Again, it goes back to vision, but a clear picture of the kind of culture you’re trying to build. And that starts with your Vision Script, which we already talked about, your mission statement, and your core values. Those are the foundation out of which you can create a culture. And then I think it’s not something that just happens. You have to teach and train on this. You have to make people aware of the culture. You have to point out what you like about it, what you don’t like about it, what you’re willing to tolerate, what you’re not willing to tolerate, what you’re going to reward, what you’re going to punish. All that creates culture. And, as leaders, we’ve got to be self-aware, and then we’ve got to be consistently driving toward a better culture.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, so mistake number four is using people to do what systems should do. And, gosh, we have totally been guilty of this, and it is one of the easiest mistakes to make. We see this happen when people are lacking any employees at all or they’re just starting to hire, and of course it can happen much further down the road. But basically, when we are using individual people to do things over and over and over again instead of fixing something once and forgetting it with a system, not that you’re really going to forget it, but you’re basically creating some kind of an automation around a process or a system, it’s just so much work. And there’s certain things that people are so good at, where there’s really complex decision making or creativity that’s involved, ideation, people are great at that. But where you’re doing especially repetitive work or where it’s very precise work, that’s where systems and processes are critical to producing excellence, especially at scale. And so this is a big mistake, and can cause you to really not use your resources effectively and get yourself in trouble here.

Michael Hyatt:
Well, here’s a good example. Let’s say that you want to have a leadership team meeting once a month, and so you say to your assistant, “Hey, I’d love to have a meeting this month before the month gets away from us. So could you set up something?” So they start checking people’s calendars, and, of course, that’s a nightmare because three-fifths of them can meet on this Tuesday but the other two can’t and so you have to try to figure that out. Instead of saying, and this would be a way to automate it, say, “We’re going to do executive team meetings the second Tuesday of every month, rain or shine. Whoever’s in town and can make it comes. Try to make it a high priority, but the meeting’s going to go on regardless,” and you never think about it again.

Michael Hyatt:
And I had this problem in another organization where I worked. It’s in a non-profit, and we kept having this problem with the executive committee. And so every month we try to schedule. It was a whole bunch of back and forth until we decided, “No, this is going to be the third Tuesday evening of every month.” And we just set it, and we forgot it. Never thought about it again. It just shows up on the calendar. That’s the rubric that we follow. If somebody’s out of town, somebody’s on vacation, even if I’m out of town, we just appoint somebody else to lead it, even though I normally lead it and we carry on. Or again with appointments, using a tool like Calendly, which enables you to send your availability to other people and let them pick their time, so it reduces the human factor, which is great.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Yeah. It’s kind of like “save the whales”; it’s like save the humans. We want to save the humans for the most important, highest-leverage work possible. And sometimes it just feels easier to use people for everything, because we don’t want to take the time to think through the system and then the process that supports that system or the automations that support that system. But this is the definition of high-leverage work, because it’s something that you make an investment in at the beginning and then you get the return on that investment over and over and over, every time you need to run that process or system and the people are freed up to do other higher-leverage work. So this is really a good investment of your time and resources.

Michael Hyatt:
I know we use this example a lot, but I think it really illustrates the point, and that is managing your email. So that’s one of those things that you can spend a lot of time coming up with an original response to every single request, but if you think about it very long and you suddenly realize, “I get a finite number of requests, and there’s a lot of them that are very similar. And if I could just create a template, I can still personalize it. But not only would that enable me if I’m processing it for myself to do it faster, because I just use the appropriate template, personalize it on the front end and the back end and get it done in literally one tenth of the time, or I could pass it off to somebody,” like your executive assistant who can then use those templates as the foundation for responding on your behalf.

Michael Hyatt:
This just happened to me before lunch today, and we’re recording this after lunch. Somebody had asked me a series of three questions in response to a podcast episode that we did a few months ago, and I was kind of procrastinating responding to it because, for whatever reason, I thought I had to be original. Next thing I know, Jim, my executive assistant had already responded. He had responded as me better than I would’ve responded. And I said to him, I literally wrote back to him and I said to him, I said, “Hey, when I die, just keep doing what you’re doing. Nobody will know for like a year.”

Megan Hyatt Miller:
It’s like, “You do me better than I do me.”

Michael Hyatt:
I know, crazy.

Megan Hyatt Miller:
I think what’s so great about that is the person on the other end of that email was really better served by the system and the process that you had in place around automating your email responses through Jim and these templates than they would be… I think we tell ourselves this story that original is always better than templated, and that is so not true. In fact, one of the biggest reasons to develop systems and processes, automations, all that kind of stuff is to ensure quality. That person got a faster response with a better answer because of what you had put in place, and I think that’s true for all kinds of stuff.

Michael Hyatt:
Think about lawyers. They are very efficient, because they use templates. When you ask them to write that business contract, this is not the first transaction like this that they’ve seen. They got some boilerplate text. They’re pulling it out and they’re billing you a gob of money for it, but it’s a template and you don’t know the difference and you don’t care because it solves your problem.

Michael Hyatt:
The fifth mistake is chasing low-return opportunities. Now, I think this is a little bit of a muscle memory problem for entrepreneurs, because there is a point in your career where you really cherish good ideas and you really feel like, “Oh my gosh, if I had that idea, I need to monetize it. I need to get it into production. I need to create a service before somebody else does.” And what you don’t realize is that as you mature, then this sheer plethora of ideas become a distraction. And a lot of them are low leverage. Kind of like the work that we can do, low-leverage work, there are low leverage opportunities. Yes, they might add some incremental revenue, but what we often do is overestimate the revenue opportunity and underestimate the cost obligation. And this is where we have to be sober-minded, and especially, I think, do a financial model of the opportunity to make sure that it’s not just full of grandiose adjectives about what an amazing, unbelievable, big opportunity this is going to be. Well, how big? How amazing? How much money are we really talking about, and will there be anything left after we associate the cost with it?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Okay, so this reminds me of that great line, which I think is attributed to Faulkner, that says, “In writing, you have to be willing to kill your darlings.” And the idea there is that you have to be willing to prune out, this is in a writing context, you have to edit out things that don’t serve the story. And the same thing is true in our business. What we don’t want is just a junk drawer of opportunities. We’ve got to go through and sort out the things that are no longer serving us, and over time, as you just said, Dad, we’ve got to get better at recognizing what is truly an opportunity, counting the cost, going through a systematic process of analysis to really determine not just what is the potential, but what is the cost? And what is the cost in the context of what else we have going on right now relative to other things that we’re working on, so we can really decide if it’s worth pursuing?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
And of all the things we’ve talked about today, this is probably the one that we’ve gotten wrong most often. We are entrepreneurs at heart, and I think we have gotten better at this. And I think that we have gotten better, because we’ve made painful mistakes in the past and had to do some pruning as a result and realize, if that product was great, that served a purpose at its time but it’s not part of our future. And therefore, in order to dedicate more energy and focus, just like you would if you were pruning a plant, we have to prune that thing out so that we can devote more time, energy and resources to the things that are really core to our business and say no to the distractions. And this is tough. This is a discipline thing.

Michael Hyatt:
It is, and I think this is why it’s essential for organizations to engage in the discipline of pruning periodically, because things that look promising or exciting after you’ve had them in the market for a while, you discover, this is a lot of work for very little return. This is a lot of squeeze and very little juice. And we ourselves, we had a couple things last year that we decided we were just going to sunset, two products that we were going to sunset, which is a euphemism for kill, and we just deleted them from our product offerings. I don’t think we missed a beat, no big deal. I mean, we had some raving fans of those products that loved them, but it just was not profitable and it consumed a lot of organizational resources to produce them.

Michael Hyatt:
And what we often fail to realize is there’s a lost opportunity cost. So all that energy going into service those low-level opportunities, those were resources that we couldn’t apply to some higher potential opportunities. So that lost opportunity cost is something you’ve got to really consider in it. It may be a good idea, but is the best idea? And sometimes the best thing you can do is pass on something and then wait ’til you get something that has even greater potential, and that’s hard. Because we say to ourselves, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, so I think I’ll just take this opportunity.” We do that with clients and customers. “This is not my ideal client or maybe this client is a lot of maintenance, but I’m unwilling to prune them out of my customer portfolio, because at least I’ve got this business and I’m not sure I can go out and find somebody else.” But you’re probably better served to fire that client, fire that customer, and reinvest that energy to go find somebody that better fits the avatar or the profile of your ideal client. Would you agree with that, Megan?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
Absolutely. I think about Steve Jobs and how relentless and ruthless, honestly, he was with pruning Apple’s product offerings and how he said no constantly to things. That was really a point of pride for him and a huge ingredient in the success of Apple over the years. There’s a million things that they could have done and they said no to almost all of them, and I think that is a lesson to all of us because nobody’s confused about what Apple offers. They do everything that they do with an incredible amount of excellence and originality, and that’s because they’ve gone deep in a few places instead of wide and shallow in a million.

Michael Hyatt:
Okay, so today we’ve been talking at about five mistakes that business owners make. Number one, filling the day with low-leverage work. Number two, working without a vision. Mistake number three, failing to lead their teams well. Mistake number four, using people to do what systems should do, and mistake number five, chasing low-return opportunities. We’ve tried to give you good, practical solutions for each of these, but, Megan, do you have any final thoughts?

Megan Hyatt Miller:
One of the best ways that I think you can avoid these mistakes and the plethora of others that are out there is to have a really good diagnostic to understand what mistakes you might already be making that you’re not aware of, because, usually, if we knew we were making mistakes, we wouldn’t be making them. You’re probably smack dab in the middle of some kind of mistake right now that you don’t even see, and so I want to just encourage you to book that call that we talked about earlier, because in that call, we’re going to walk you through that new assessment that we have that is going to help you get really clear on where you’re the most vulnerable in terms of mistakes that you might already be making, but not be aware of. And then, most importantly, what you can do about it. So I just want to encourage you, go ahead and book that call. It’s totally free. I promise it’s going to be a good use of your time, and you can do that businessexcellerator.com/podcast.

Michael Hyatt:
Megan, thanks so much for your thoughts. Thank you everybody for joining us. We’ll see you next week. Until then, Lead to Win.