The A La Carte

There’s a lot of business advice about making yourself replaceable.

Build the systems. Delegate. Automate. Get yourself out of the day-to-day.

And yes, I need to do more of that.

But I don’t think my goal is to make myself unnecessary.

I want to become necessary for the right things.

I don’t need to personally be the one completing every administrative task. In fact, one of the things I want for the next version of my business is to have someone who can handle more of that day-to-day work.

Not because that work isn’t important.

Quite the opposite.

It’s important enough that it shouldn’t come to a screeching halt because I’m unavailable.

I want to build the processes, documentation and support that allow someone else to confidently handle the repeatable pieces while I stay involved where my experience is actually most useful.

I want to be able to look at the bigger picture.

Why isn’t this working?

Where are we losing time?

Why does this process require six steps when it should require three?

What are we doing over and over again that could be automated?

Who should actually own this?

And when something inevitably goes sideways, how do we fix it?

I don’t want my value to be:

Ande does everything.

I want it to be:

Ande can figure this out.

And maybe that’s the biggest shift happening in my business right now.

For a long time, growth meant adding another client, another project or another thing I knew how to do.

Now I think growth might mean learning what I don’t have to do myself.

I would love to have someone handling the day-to-day administrative work while I work on the higher-level problems that six years of doing this have taught me how to solve.

And yes, selfishly, I’d also like to take a vacation.

Not a working vacation where my laptop comes along and gets a better view than usual.

An actual vacation.

Maybe I check in once a day to make sure nobody has set anything on fire. I’m still me, after all.

But the work gets done. Clients are taken care of. The systems work. And I don’t come home to a heaping pile of disaster.

Six years ago, building this business required me to ask:

What needs to be done?

I think building the next version requires me to ask:

What actually needs to be done by me?

Because “whatever you need” got me here.

Now it’s time to build what gets me where I’m going next.