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

by Mike Michalowicz

You must transition from doing the work (or making all the decisions for others doing the work) to true delegation—the assignment of outcomes.

Whatever time you give yourself to work, you will use. Nights, weekends, vacations—if you think you need it, you’ll work right through your time off. This is the root cause of the failure of productivity. The goal of productivity is to get as much done as quickly as possible. The problem is, because you’ve prioritized a seemingly endless amount of time to running your business, you’ll continually find ways to fill up the time. The more productive you are, the more you can take on. The more you take on, the more productive you have to be.

You grow a business by doing more to get more. You scale a business by doing less to get more. They are different orientations. Extremely different.

As you shift to scaling, your refrains will shift, too. “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.”) That last one, “scale,” is the most noble approach of all. If you own a business, your number-one job is to create jobs, not to do them. Scale and your business will grow right.

At the end of eight hours, the first lumberjack was shocked that the second had produced nearly twice as much split wood. The first lumberjack asked, “Did your regular breaks allow you to rest and recover? To produce more, do you need to work less?” The second lumberjack responded, “No. During those breaks I worked the hardest, sharpening my axe.” Scaling a business is not about less work. It is about different work. You must put less effort into those outcomes, but more thought. The hard work is the thinking. This is not a flippant comment. Thinking, as in deep, calculated thoughtfulness, is the hardest work of all. And that is why we avoid it. It is easier to do work than to design outcomes. It is easier to keep chopping with a dull axe than it is to stop and sharpen it. The sense of time and production loss is too much. Yes, a sharp axe will help, but I can’t afford to stop chopping. The logic is obvious—we need a sharp axe. But the emotion of “just keep grinding” is what we need to overcome first.

What happened? Happenstance happened. One day works well and we think we’ve got it. Nope. You can’t grow your business out of lucky moments. You need planned execution, the creation and enforcement of systems. Every day needs to click, not one here and one there.

Perennial success happens when the organization flows forward in the absence of any particular individual, including the boss.

you offer three products to five types of customers who each need their own variation of that product, you are delivering fifteen products. Better said, you are offering fifteen product variations, and for each one to be remarkable, you must get all fifteen right. That is fifteen areas of potential problems. And what if each product variation were made from ten parts? Now we have fifteen products times ten parts. That is 150 potential problems. Doing more things is the best way to grow a company? Don’t get me started.

Your purpose needs to outweigh your effort. That is what keeps you going when you don’t want to carry on.