If you want your company to grow, sometimes you need to get out of the way
Glued to his BlackBerry while supposedly "on vacation" with family in Hawaii five years ago, entrepreneur Charles Chang suddenly got frustrated with his unrelenting workload. Looking for a solution, he walked into a bookshop and bought Michael Gerber's book The E-Myth Revisited, which he proceeded to bulldoze through in a couple of days.
"The big message of E-Myth is that you need to be able to duplicate yourself, so that you're not the one doing everything and so that you have a structure so you can work on your business and not in it," he said.
Rejuvenated by that piece of business advice, Chang came home to test it out – by hiring and getting serious about delegating.
Chang said within five years he has changed his one-man-band ways, created a new tier of management with five vice-presidents and increased his company's staff by about 100 people. He's also gone from working 80-hour weeks to 50-hour weeks and has 14 weeks of vacation booked this year.
Chang credits his new business approach for sanity gains and rapid company growth.
"One person with many assistants never goes anywhere," he said. "There becomes a point where you're the bottleneck."
Chang added that while most entrepreneurs pay lip service to the idea of delegating responsibilities, few truly do it.
"It's discipline and it's a leap of faith," he said. "You've got to be able to allow people to make mistakes and be OK with some small screw-ups – hopefully not too big – and not beat them up for it."
