How to pretend to scale your business

A little background for our lesson today. The majority of web hosting companies don’t directly own the facilities where they run their servers. Sure, the big guys like Google and Amazon build out massive datacenter facilities and fill them up with servers.

But most medium sized companies don’t want to get involved in managing backup generators, security people, and all the other stuff that comes along with a datacenter. So just like companies rent office space instead of having their own company headquarters, these hosting companies rent datacenter space in someone else’s building.

Unlike rented office space, hosting companies don’t generally have any offices there for people – it’s JUST rows and rows and rows of computers. Which means most hosting companies don’t have any staff on site, or sometimes even in the same city.

That leads to the question… what happens if there’s a problem with a server? Let’s say your hosting company is based in New York, and your server in Los Angeles has a hard drive fail. Do you put someone on a plane and fly them to the west coast?

Of course not. The companies that run the datacenter buildings, the landlords as it were, offer a service called “remote hands“. It’s exactly what it sounds like: an onsite employee from the landlord will be YOUR hands, remotely. You tell them exactly what to do, what to type, what to pull out or plug in, and they do it.

It’s a great solution. BUT, there’s a gotcha.

It’s not remote “employee.” It’s remote “hands.” That means the job of that remote person isn’t to figure out an issue or solve a problem. It is to complete exact steps that you give them. You might ask them to walk over and see what color light is flashing. Then based on that, you’d tell them to try unplugging cable A. Try unplugging B. Etc.

That’s how many entrepreneurs treat their employees when they start trying to scale. They hire someone and give them very specific instructions on what to do, but hold onto all the decisions. The thinking.

That’s supposed to be the idea, right? Delegate so you can focus on other things?

What happens though, with remote hands, is that every little detail comes back to you. Any question, any roadblock, any issue – YOU have to think about it. Deal with it. Work around it.

Remote hands isn’t an efficient way to get things done, it’s just a good way to get remote things done. It doesn’t help you accomplish more in less time. In fact, it’s often the opposite. By the time you write up what you want, go back and forth, evaluate responses, rewrite directions – it would have been much faster if you could have just done it yourself.

That isn’t scaling. It feels like it should be scaling because you have other people working for you, doing things so you don’t have to. But it’s not. Real scaling is accomplished by delegating responsibility. By having people that you can trust to tackle a higher level task on their own. Who can think through tasks, solve problems, and get things done without your input.

And… you have to actually let go of a task once you delegate it. If you give someone a task, and they’re capable of handling the task, but you constantly micro-manage it… well, you’ve just turned them into remote hands. And then you’re not scaling, you’re just faking it.

If you want to scale your business for real, you need work completely moved off your plate. Fire and forget. You need people that will take ownership of their work, and you need to trust them enough to let them do it.

To Your Success!