In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley explains why he’s intentionally working less in his ecommerce business and aims to “fire himself” within 18 months. Rather than stepping away, Josh is building a self-sustaining business by implementing five key strategies: delegating decisions to capable team members, developing leadership through extreme ownership principles, investing in his leaders’ personal and professional growth, implementing scorecards focused on leading KPIs, and documenting his decision-making processes to eventually create an AI system that replicates his judgment, freeing him to focus on higher-level opportunities.

Bullet Points:

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction: Working Less to Grow More
Josh Hadley explains his goal to “fire himself” from his business within 18 months by building systems and empowering his team.

00:01:50 Strategy 1: Do Less, Delegate More
Focus on delegating tasks and decision-making authority to capable team members, even if you can do the work yourself.

00:04:11 Strategy 2: Develop Leadership and Decision-Making
Teach your team principles like extreme ownership and allow them to make mistakes, which is a crucial part of learning.

00:07:42 Strategy 3: Invest Heavily in Your Leaders
Invest in your leaders’ growth through masterminds and coaching, which boosts their skills and acts as a powerful retention strategy.

00:10:22 Strategy 4: Implement Scorecards and Leading Indicators
Focus on leading indicators (KPIs) for each team member to proactively measure progress and ensure clarity on roles and responsibilities.

00:14:11 Strategy 5: Document Your Judgment
Record your decision-making processes using tools like Loom to extract your judgment and create systems others can follow, ultimately cloning yourself.

Links and Mentions:

Books
“Extreme Ownership”: “00:04:38”

Tools for Documentation
“Loom“: “00:14:37”

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  I’m going to share with you why I’m working less in my business today than I was last year and the year before that. And why? Ultimately, I’m trying to fire myself from the business in the next 18 months. Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own ecommerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. My name is Josh Hadley. First and foremost, I’m a man of faith. I’m a husband to a beautiful wife and a father of four children. I’ve been selling in the e-commerce space for over a decade now, doing over $20 million in annual revenue and selling multi-millionaire on Amazon, TikTok, shop and Shopify. And last but not least, I’m the host of the number one business strategy podcast in the E-com space, and that is E-com breakthrough.

Josh Hadley 00:00:54  Today, I want to dive into why I’m working less in the business today than I was a year ago, and why I’m ultimately trying to fire myself from the business 18 months from now, and the specific action items that I’m taking inside of the business, to be able to get to a point where I’m able to fire myself as the CEO of the brand. Now, you may be listening to that and thinking like, why in the world are you trying to, like, fire yourself? Like, are you no longer interested in this business? I’ve never been more bullish in optimistic about my brand than ever before, to be honest with you, I’m more excited about what the future looks like for the business than I have ever been in the past, and that’s the and the reason why I am more excited about the future of the business is because of the focus that I have had to replace myself in the business and focus on putting smarter people around me inside the business than just myself. So I want to share with you five different things I am focused on inside of my business.

Josh Hadley 00:01:50  To ultimately fire myself and work less and less inside of the business within the next 18 months. So let’s start with number one. I am doing less work, even though I am more than capable of doing the work inside of the business. Let’s take this for an example. Can I go make a decision about how much inventory we need to purchase for the next, you know, back to school season or for the next, you know, holiday Q4 season? I most certainly can. I could certainly make that call. I’ve got a decade of experience selling. I know my brand. I know the peaks and valleys, and I know the mistakes that I’ve made in the past. However, what I am adamantly focused on, and especially if there’s something simple that I could do in the business, like, let’s take this as a really good use case on Amazon. You have like there’s the forms that you have to register for it to be like, hey, this is a woman owned business or a minority owned business, or to register for trademarks and things like that.

Josh Hadley 00:02:45  Typically you would say, hey, the CEO should be responsible for that. That’s confidential information. But for me, can I easily go do that? Yes, I can, but the way I approach it is, I say, number one, the people at Nike, like most certainly there’s not one guy that is going around to me like, oh, sorry, this is too confidential. I have to do this myself and hording all of that information. So how does it work with the largest corporations? Number one, they’re delegating authority to others. And so my biggest thing that I have been focused on is asking myself the question before I do any task inside of the business, whether it’s inventory, planning decisions or it’s as simple as like a trademark related decision, I am going to ask myself and say, can somebody else make this call? And if so, I’m going to let them make the call, and then I’m going to coach them afterwards. And ultimately, I want to ensure that this person has at least been familiar enough with the process.

Josh Hadley 00:03:41  Like they’re not brand new. They didn’t just start yesterday and they’re walking into it blind. What I’m referring to is, you know, the supply chain team members that that have been here in the business for the past 3 or 4 years, instead of continuing down this path of like, needing my approval or my final blessing. I’m pushing more onto them to say, no, you can go do this. You can go make this call. You can go get this data piece. I want you to be the final owner of that. So that’s number one. Ask yourself the question before you ever fire off that next email or go solve the next problem in your business. Could that be better done by somebody else? Number two, the second way that I’m trying to fire myself from the business and prepare for that ultimate exit is by focusing on the leadership and the decision making process within my team. At the end of the day, I am all about trying to extract the judgment that I have in my brain to say, this is this is how I make the difficult calls when we need to hire somebody.

Josh Hadley 00:04:38  And I’ve got two really good candidates, or I’ve got two really bad candidates, but we need to have somebody in here tomorrow. Like, I am trying to distill all of those different judgment calls and give them to other people. So the most important framework that I’m going to give you here is that with all of my leaders, I’m trying to teach them the leadership principle of extreme ownership, which is a fantastic book. By the way, if you have not read that book, I would highly recommend reading that book by Jocko. But ultimately it’s I want them to operate under this extreme ownership mindset, and they need to be comfortable making mistakes. And I, as the leader, have to be comfortable knowing that they will make mistakes. One of the biggest things that I get asked all the time is, Josh, should I really hire somebody for this role because nobody does it quite as well as I can? And to be honest with you, I’ve hired other people in the past to go try and do that, but they ultimately just end up making a bunch of mistakes.

Josh Hadley 00:05:32  And then it costs me money. And I say, yeah, that is true. They are costing you money. And you know, they’re not they’re not perfect right out of the gate. And then I ask them this question, so were you perfect out of the gate? Did you ever make any mistakes managing your own PPC campaigns? Inevitably they come back and they say, well, of course I made mistakes and I still make them today. And I say, pause that, that therein is your answer. You, as the leader, need to be willing to allow those team members to make mistakes, to own a decision, and then to also be responsible for the outcomes of those decisions. That’s the most important. Like teacher for them, I can shout and document the SOP in 100 different process and steps for them, but until they actually see them make a call based on this certain decision or this data that they thought they saw or they thought they needed, and then it goes south. Well, they’ve learned their lesson.

Josh Hadley 00:06:29  And the most important thing is that when somebody makes a mistake in the business, I support them. And I say, good. I’ve made a number of mistakes growing this business, and none of them have been too catastrophic for the business. Now, I also want to like caution that by saying most of the time, and I would say 90% of the decisions that you’re making inside of the business today, their revolving door decisions. Which means if you make the wrong call here, it’s not catastrophic to your business. There’s very limited number of decisions that you make that if like this is a one way door, you go through this door, there ain’t no returning, there is no coming back from oops, oh, sorry. That was a that was a little boo boo. That was a mistake. Like there’s very few of those. Those are decisions like you, you would need to own as the owner of the business and as the CEO. But I’m talking about the day to day decisions that like, hey, optimizing this PPC campaign would would somebody do something differently than I would? Yeah, but I’m going to let them learn their lesson and maybe it’s more positive, but I won’t know until somebody tests and fails.

Josh Hadley 00:07:28  And then my job as a leader is to support them when they fail to say, great, what was the lesson learned? And how do we how do we correct the process to ensure that we don’t repeat the same mistake over again? I’m not disappointed with somebody that makes a mistake unless they’re repeating the same mistake over again. Let’s talk about the next principal and the next action that I’m taking in the business to basically free myself and work less and less inside the business. Number three, I am investing heavily into my leaders. So what does that look like? Well, my favorite kind of like investment advice when you’re first starting off as a business owner is whenever you get excess capital, don’t just go blow it on, you know, a fancy new car don’t go, you know, investing it into a new second home or something like that. Instead, your best investment is the S&P. Me all right so S&P me is invest in yourself your skills and your talents. So I basically flipped that script on its head and said, hey, once upon a time it was investing in myself to say I should go join this mastermind group.

Josh Hadley 00:08:32  I need to be part of, you know, this paid coaching program. While that is still true and I am still part of like coaching programs or mastermind groups. Guess who else is part of those masterminds and coaching groups? And they’re different ones. They’re not even the same ones I’m in. Okay. My director of operations is part of the CEO Alliance. That is for people like the second in command. Like he’s going and traveling to conferences, and I’m paying for his airfare. I am paying for the hotel. I am paying for him to be part of this mastermind group and take business. Time to jump on calls and to learn a thing or two. And the whole goal is, if I can get my Director of Operations to level up his game, that will have a greater ROI and impact in the business than like taking that money and going and saying, hey, we can go on a nice vacation as as a family or something like that. The most important thing is like, if I want to allow myself to be able to exit the business in the org chart, then I need to have very, very capable leaders.

Josh Hadley 00:09:31  I know that I have only become better and better as a leader when I’ve surrounded myself by other highly talented and exceptional leaders that get me to expand my mindset and my leadership and ability to lead teams, that’s where I’m investing. My time and money is heavily into those leaders and their own personal growth and development. And guess what? They love it as well. And you want to talk about the number one retention strategy in a business. It’s not the money. Right people? Yes. You need to have a livable wage. And yes, you can have some upside for them. But more often than not, people want to feel like they’re challenged and that they are learning and growing. Personally, most people leave businesses when they feel like it’s not doing anything for them. They’re not learning or growing personally. They’re not challenged professionally. They’re going to leave your business. So the best thing to do is to personally challenge them and give them that ability to go learn from some of the brightest and best in your own industry.

Josh Hadley 00:10:22  The fourth way I’m beginning to work less and less inside of my business is by implementing scorecards and measuring the leading indicators of the business. Once upon a time, I was adamantly focused on refreshing my seller central dashboard. I was constantly refreshing the Shopify dashboard to say, oh, how many sales did we make today? Hey, do we have enough inventory in here? Do I need to make any decisions over and over and over again? And oftentimes I was just those are more reactionary decisions than they are proactive decisions. And so one of my favorite things that I have done now is on Mondays are my like, my favorite day, because I get a chance to look at the leading indicators of the business. Every single team member on the team has leading indicators. They have certain KPIs, 3 to 5 of them each, that if they focus on those 3 to 5 things, will drive an impact in growth or a downline impact for the benefit of the business. And so what I do is every Monday, I review all of the leading indicators from every single one of the team members to say, hey, it’s not did they just get their job done? I’m less interested to know, hey, how many hours did they work last week? How many hours? Like, were they actually clicking around on their computer? Like, I’m not looking at any of that garbage information I’m looking for.

Josh Hadley 00:11:40  Hey, did you complete your leading indicator? A leading indicator would be something like this. In TikTok shop it’s. Did you reach out to over a thousand creators? Because I know that that is the leading indicator. If I can reach out to over a thousand creators, I know my conversion rate is about 15%. I’m going to be able to get 150 of those new creators that we reached out to to come join our affiliate program. So the leading indicator is, hey, did you do the Thousand Creator outreach? Because if you didn’t fail there, I already know you’re not meeting the KPI or the lagging indicator. The lagging measure is going to be our sales performance on TikTok shop. And so I know that it all starts with how many new creators in my onboarding, how many people did I reach out with? And then ultimately, that will conclude with how well TikTok shop is growing or struggling in and of itself. And so it’s focusing on those leading indicators. It’s focusing on scorecards for every single team member.

Josh Hadley 00:12:36  And the other really most important thing about implementing this is sitting down with every single one of your team members and ensuring that they understand the importance of their KPIs and the leading indicators for their role. The reason why you want that is because you want your team to be extremely clear as to what their roles and responsibilities are. And I see this time and time and time again more often than not. Most entrepreneurs, they’re just hiring somebody and then they’re just like, oh, well, hey, I need your help on supply chain this week. Next week I need your help in ad management. And then the next week I need your help with some Amazon seller support cases or customer service, things like that. And ultimately, what ends up happening is over the course of six months, this team member that’s been bouncing around from this to that is just like, I don’t even know where to spend my time. And what ultimately happens is they start focusing on the wrong things in the business. They start optimizing the things that they enjoy, which maybe it’s supply chain, or maybe it’s the customer service, and they’re going all out for customer service because they just enjoy it.

Josh Hadley 00:13:38  So understanding getting your team member to understand what their true KPIs are and the leading indicators for their role makes all the difference. Because I know that if they understand what their role is and how it impacts revenue and profit in the business, that I no longer have to be responsible for those decisions and those KPIs, because I have a name assigned to those. So if I want to get myself off the org chart, I need to establish who is responsible for the TikTok shop KPI, who is ultimately responsible for generating more revenue in the business, and there needs to be a name associated with each of those. Fifth, and finally, the number one thing that I am doing in the business, whenever I have to do something in the business, if I say, hey, right now, I don’t have somebody that owns this, I have to be the one that that does the actual thing in the business. I’m not just doing it and being like, well, I got it done. I guess we’ll save it for another day and we’ll ultimately try to hire somebody down the road.

Josh Hadley 00:14:37  I am adamant about this. If I have to do something, I’m immediately recording a loom video, and especially if this is a repeating process. Right now, it’s product research and development for myself. If I have to do this on a repeating basis, I am documenting that process every single time by hitting record with a loom video, and then I’m narrating exactly what I’m doing, why I’m making the decisions, how I’m getting access to the data, or what I’m looking at in order to make the final call. Because at the end of the day, what I’m hoping for is I’m going to utilize AI to clone myself and my ability to make judgment calls in the business. That is your number one most powerful skill as a CEO of any business is your ability to make judgment calls. That’s what you’re being paid for, to make the difficult decisions, to make the big shot at the end of the day. So if that’s the case, I’m trying to document all of the, like, little nuances that go on inside of my mind every single time I’m thinking about, hey, well, should I launch this product or is it a better product? This is my money on the line.

Josh Hadley 00:15:40  Here’s the opportunity that I’m seeing. There’s always a lot of nuance, and ultimately, that nuance is what kills most entrepreneurs from actually creating an SOP and ultimately giving this to somebody else. This is why they say nobody can do this as well as I can. The reason why nobody can do it as well as you can is because you have not extracted the judgment calls that you are making inside of your mind. So that is the number one thing that I am actually trying to get out of my brain, into systems, into processes, into AI, ultimately so that I have my own AI brain, that the rest of the team, if they ever want to ping me, we’ll go to the AI Josh and not the human Josh, which will then allow me to go explore new opportunities. I hope you found value in this podcast. If you did, please share this with another operator who needs to hear the same thing. Share it in your mastermind group. Share it with another business owner. And until next time, have a great day!