In the past month, I had identical coaching conversations with two business owners in widely diverse industries: one being a tradie and the other an allied health professional.

In both cases, their respective businesses were both trading successfully with lots of opportunities in the pipeline to grow the business.  The constraint around growth was not the demand for their services but the ability to service their customers.

Both agreed they were looking to hire new team members.

However, as the conversation progressed it became clear both business owners were feeling overwhelmed and frustrated.  They felt they were spending too much time working in the business and not enough time working on the business.

Given this, both had a light bulb moment in that they understood that bringing on additional resources to deal with growth would not change their feelings about the business.  The additional resources should be allocated to deal with growing the business, which meant the workload of the business owners would not change.

As a result, both business owners committed to the following actions:

• To not increasing the client base in the business
• To bring on an additional team member
• To reallocate work away from the business owner to the new team member

The key measure of success for bringing on a new team member was that the business owner would be working less in the business. In that way, there would be time available to the business owners to both work on their business and to pursue their passions in life.