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Hi, I'm Joel Miller and this is the Business Accelerator Podcast. Our show to help busy but growth minded small business owners just like you scale yourself and your business so you can win at work and succeed at life.

It's what we call the double win and this week I want to focus on a misconception that sometimes prevents business owners from experiencing it for themselves.

And that is the belief that the only way to make it happen for themselves for their teams is to have a big team.

In this episode our founder and chairman Michael Hyatt and our CEO Megan Hyatt Miller are going to talk about how to make the most of a small team. Let's jump in.

You know one of the questions that we hear from our clients all the time is how can I grow my business without growing my team.

You know in many cases their customer base is growing but they often feel hesitant to take on the expense of extra team members particularly in the current economic climate where there's a possibility maybe even a probability of a recession in the near future.

And so I think this is a tricky balance that business owners have to manage on the one hand we want to resource our team to take advantage of opportunities.

On the other hand we want to manage risk and we don't want to get ahead of ourselves we don't want to have our overhead be based on speculative revenue that we hope to generate but we haven't yet proven that we can do.

Obviously that can get you in all kinds of trouble so I think this is a tension that most business owners face.

We're probably always if we're doing it well hiring a little slower than our needs but I think for any of us whether you have no people on your team right now a handful of people or still a relatively small team.

You probably have fewer people on your team than maybe you would like in an ideal state if you could afford everybody you want so the question is how do we make the most of a small team whatever that means to you.

Yeah and I agree with that and I think that the temptation as a business owner or as a business leader is to throw people at the problem.

But the truth is those people come in and they quickly start you know filling up their calendar and their task list with all the things you've hired them to do but then they see other things.

So you know before very long they too are overwhelmed and the problem is if you're hiring really good people they're going to work to the edges of their capacity and usually a little bit beyond their capacity.

And I can remember a business partner I had years ago who said to me and he meant it as a compliment he said you're the kind of person.

But if you were bagging groceries at the local grocery store you would figure out how to make that you know a 60 hour week and it's true.

You know good people are going to create work for themselves because they're going to see things that need addressed but not everything needs to be addressed with the human resource.

You know automation is an option we're going to talk about some of these as we go forward having a very clear system for accomplishing that thing that may involve automation or just templating it so we don't have to recreate the wheel every time.

Another option for us is that you know we just decide we're going to leave that work undone that you know it definitely is something we could address but maybe we just don't need to do it.

Or maybe it's not that important to our customers or our clients I literally just had that experience this week where there was something that we were doing for our clients that was consuming an enormous amount of staff time.

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