Clockwork, Revised and Expanded: Design Your Business to Run Itself

by Mike Michalowicz

No one starts a business with the goal of being trapped by it. Your business should be as you always intended, a platform for your freedom.

Business owners suffer from an “I must do the work myself” problem. We do the work ourselves to save money. We do the work ourselves because we think no one can do it as well as we do. We do the work ourselves because it’s “just easier” than handing it off to someone we think is too green, too inexperienced, or too incapable of acting like an owner. We do the work, which makes us the only ones capable of doing the work. So we get trapped in an infinite loop and can’t see our way out. We start to lose things—precious memories we can’t get back, a good night’s sleep (or any sleep, for that matter), our interests, time off, and for some of us, even the people we love.

Most entrepreneurs I know do everything. Even when we bring on help, we spend just as much time, if not more, telling the team how to do all the things that we are supposed to no longer worry about. We put out fires. We stay up late. We put out more fires. We work weekends and holidays, flake on commitments to family, and bail on nights out with friends. We put out even more fires. We push on, we push harder. We compromise our health in the name of building a healthy business. But we’re not. Here’s the irony: even when things are going well with our business, we are still exhausted.

“Work harder” is the mantra of both the growing and the collapsing business.

Your business needs a vacation from you so it doesn’t depend on you.

impact, not hours.

It’s time to be an entrepreneur the way it was always intended—to be the architect of your business, not the contractor.

organizational efficiency. Productivity gets you in the ballpark. Organizational efficiency gets you hitting home runs. Organizational efficiency is when all the gears of your business mesh together in harmony. It is the ultimate in leverage because you design your company’s resources to work in concert, maximizing their output. Organizational efficiency is when you access the best talents of your team (even a team of one) to do the most important work. It is about managing resources so that the important work gets done instead of always rushing to do what’s most urgent. And it’s about removing yourself from the day-to-day grind so you can make all that happen.

“Who will do this?” (Instead of “How will I do this?”) “Let’s do fewer things, better.” (Instead of “Let’s do more things, faster.”) “How do we halve our efforts to double the output?” (Instead of “How do we double our efforts so we can double the output?”) “Master yourself.” (Instead of “Push harder.”) “Work smarter.” (Instead of “Work even harder.”) “Design.” (Not “Hustle.”) “Scale.” (And surely not “Grind.”)

The Survival Trap is what I call that never-ending cycle of reacting to whatever comes up in your business—be it a problem or an opportunity—in order to move on. It’s a trap because as we respond to what is urgent rather than what is important, we get the satisfaction of fixing a problem. The adrenaline rush of saving something—the account, the order, the pitch, the entire damn day—makes us feel as though we are making progress in our business, but really, we are stuck in a reactive cycle.

You can’t grow your business out of lucky moments. You need planned execution, the creation and enforcement of systems.

Time and sanity are not the only costs of staying stuck in the Survival Trap. You’ll also stunt your company’s growth and keep less of the money you earn.

I have seen many businesses pivot into something that the owner loathes. They keep shifting their offering to match what the customer wants until the customer starts buying. But in the process, they neglect to consider what they, the owners themselves, want. They ignore what their hearts call out to do. And while the business may win customers, it loses the heart of the owner and the soul of the business. The business experiences death by a thousand cuts. Sure, an offering may make money, but at what cost?

You want them happy and they need you happy. Don’t pivot. Align.

The Big BANG = The driving purpose for what you do. The Big Promise = The number-one thing that your customers value you for.

When you ask your customer, “What are we doing right?” they won’t tell you what you are doing right. They will tell you how they are measuring your performance. And since that is how they are observing you, the thing you are doing right is actually the thing that you need to do better—if it aligns with how you want to serve your customers.

Ask all your Top Clients what you do right and their answers will tell you the one thing that determines your reputation above all else.

You know the saying “Don’t busy the quarterback with passing out the Gatorade?” This is because the QBR is so important. The quarterback has a job to do. He has got to move that ball down the field, not dole out drinks to rehydrate his teammates. Similarly, Bettina shouldn’t be bothered with tasks that interfere with serving the QBR. It’s so obvious that it is hiding in plain sight. Bettina needs to save lives first, last, and all the time in between, yet she is often stuck passing out Gatorade.

To realize his vision, Bezos gave up the grunt work and let his team handle the day-to-day operations. Sadly, many business owners never make this vital shift. They may do some big thinking about their business, they may have a big dream for their business, but they don’t get out of the way so it can become reality. They don’t change, and therefore their company doesn’t change. They don’t run the company; they run around inside the company.

Entrepreneurs are natural DIYers.

We aren’t usually that good at most of it (even though we convince ourselves that we are), but we get the stuff done well enough. While it makes sense that we have to take on many different roles when we first get our businesses off the ground, it’s not healthy and it’s not sustainable. Finally, we make that first hire, and even with the added financial pressure,[*] we feel some relief because we couldn’t keep up the insane pace of doing everything.

Designing a business that runs itself is doable. In fact, it is very doable. To pull it off, you have to shift away from Doing and focus more and more of your time on Designing the flow of your business.

our goal is to get you, the business owner, Doing less and Designing more—which

Doing: These are the activities of productivity, the necessary work required to serve clients and maintain operations.

Deciding: This is the process of making choices and assigning tasks to other people.

Most entrepreneurs confuse Deciding with Delegating. If you assign a task to someone else but need to answer questions to get the task done, you are not Delegating—you are Deciding

Your employees do the work, but the business owner’s “job” becomes answering a constant and distracting stream of questions from them. It eventually gets so bad that you may even throw your hands up in frustration and make the decision to “go back to how it was before” in an attempt to return to the “easier times” when you did all the work yourself.

Delegating: In this activity, you assign an outcome to an employee and empower them to make decisions about executing the tasks to make that outcome a reality.

Delegating, you will feel some relief from your workload, but only if you delegate in the right way. Initially, you must reward your employees’ ownership of an outcome—not the efficiency in achieving it—because the goal is to shift the responsibility for decision-making from you to them. If they are punished for poor decisions,[*] or slipups, you will only be training them to come back to you for decisions.

extremely difficult for entrepreneurs because we can do everything perfectly (in our mind) and get frustrated when they don’t (in our mind). You must get past this perfection mindset if you ever want your business to successfully run itself.

Designing: This is the activity where you work on the ever-evolving vision for your company and strategize the flow of the business to support that vision.

Every entrepreneur starts out as a doer because doing things is what we’re good at. The problem arises when you get stuck in that phase, and all the Doing keeps you from your bigger vision of building a business.

The distraction of being the decider made me super inefficient.

you’re going to save your Saturdays and your soul and scale your business, being acutely aware of what phase of the 4Ds you are in is essential. Will you ever stop Doing entirely? Maybe not—but you will do a fraction of the work that you do now, and you will transition to doing only the work you love.

It’s important to remember that Doing, Deciding, and even Delegating maintain your business. Designing elevates your business.

They no longer asked, “How do I get the plumbing work done?” Instead, they asked, “Who will get the plumbing work done?” That simple change of question started to bring the answers that made them business designers.

Whatever work you do, it can be broken down into steps and delegated to someone else.

Planned breaks from work are proven to be more efficient than time wasted on unplanned distractions.

The articles about industry trends that you’ve been meaning to read, the training videos you’ve paid for but haven’t yet watched, the Big Promise you haven’t documented yet (yeah, I see you)—you can use your 1 percent time to finally get around to doing that important stuff.

We don’t want to trade joy for organizational efficiency.

Create systems? I don’t even have time to get the work done, and now I have to create this detailed step-by-step document?

“Have the right people, doing the right things, in the right portions, right.” Here’s how that sentence breaks down:

A good rule of thumb is, if you feel you could use help but need to grind it out longer, take that as a desperate subconscious plea to yourself that you need help now, and should make that hire.

Hiring can’t happen too soon. But it can happen too fast. Those are two different things. If you hire too fast, you are hiring without proper consideration. That is a mistake. But you can’t hire too soon. Meaning, any size business will benefit from the right hire, hired under the right parameters, sooner rather than later.

People can be the grease of the gears, and if you lose good people, no matter how fast your gears are spinning, they will burn up and grind to a halt. Great systems with people who don’t do a great job, or no people at all, fail. Ironically, marginal systems with great people can still squeak by.

when you work less, your brain works more. Differently. Exploring, creating, and designing.