When you decide to start growing your business, it can be difficult to let go of the idea that “you are what you do.” But once you recognize that there is a difference between being a solopreneur and running a company—and why understanding this distinction becomes important as your company grows—the transition from working solo to leading others will become much smoother.

Your business is bigger than you and more powerful, making everything that needs to happen is within the realm of possibility for someone else to do. Yes, as the owner of a business your name will still be attached to it—and rightfully so because you are responsible for what it produces. But the work can be done by someone else and that person may even do it better than you.

Letting go of control, identity, and habits that no longer serve you can be scary. But taking on this new mindset is a crucial shift for your success. You will shift from the position of being solely responsible for everything to supporting your team in their success.

Here are three specific tools you can implement to empower your team & set them up for success:

→ Develop and document Standard Operating Procedures

SOPs are the way you do business—they’re your step-by-step process for accomplishing tasks. They allow you to get your team up to speed on how things should be done, so they can replicate it without being dependent upon you each time a new task comes along

It allows you to feel comfortable knowing that you have communicated expectations clearly, and it gives the person space to do an activity independently. Then when they are done with the task, you can give them coaching or other forms of support if necessary.

When your team members work in a shared SOP, as they become more confident in their roles, they can add more details to their processes as they gain expertise and eliminate redundancies.

→ Create Quality Assurance Procedures

Your team deserves to have their work evaluated with constructive feedback. They deserve the opportunity to grow and learn—and that’s what a quality assurance procedure is all about evaluating people’s work and giving them constructive criticism so they can improve.

This approach creates an environment of continuous improvement for both your team members and business processes. You will identify gaps in your procedures causing repetitive errors, and then fix them. Team members can learn from their mistakes as well as how to avoid them in the future

It is all about up-leveling together. 

Eventually, however, it will be necessary to delegate the work that you have been doing as part of quality assurance (QA) because your role will then become a bottleneck. In this stage of business growth—when you are first starting out—this is an opportunity for team members who “get it” and can do QA to develop and grow their skills on critical systems like yours.

→ Use the see-one, do-one, teach one training procedure.

Start by showing the team members how to do the task correctly. This can be as simple as reviewing screen recording videos & SOPs.

Next, have them try it on their own and correct any mistakes.

Finally, have them teach it to someone else on the team so that they can master it themselves. This is a very effective way to get people up to speed quickly with something new.

As your business grows and expands, you will find some of your team members taking on larger roles within the company. These individuals may take over managerial tasks that free you up to focus more on high-level strategy than day-to-day details.

All of these activities will allow you to be more productive, increase your business’ capacity for taking on additional work (in other words, make more money), and give you the freedom to spend your time as you wish while still earning a profit.

These tools will help you build a strong team that can handle their workload with confidence and produce high-quality results, but also let you step away from the day-to-day so your business can grow.