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If you have mastered the art of attracting high-paying clients, you need to take the next step. That higher step is to have your business make money without you. If it can, you own a business. If it cannot, you own a job.
For enlightenment on this subject, I turned to Chuck Blakeman, founder of the Crankset Group, who built 12 businesses in eight industries on four continents, and now uses his experience to help business founders and leaders create success. I heard Blakeman speak at the Jumpstart 2020 conference for consultants in Mesa, Arizona in January of 2020.
Blakeman debunks the idea that small business has to be a 30-year grind. He believes in three to five years you can create a business that will attract high-paying clients and run itself.
“Your business should produce both time and money, not just money,” Blakeman told the 200 consultants and speakers in the dental industry.
Blakeman has decades of experience advising companies in strategic planning, leadership, management, organizational redesign, teambuilding, decision-making and incentives.
“Organizations are replacing imposed, top-down hierarchy,” Blakeman declares, “with organic, horizontal leadership and a network of teams released to take action.”
According to Blakeman, there is no dip in performance when the emphasis is shifted to horizontal relationships. Instead, there is an immediate, measurable uptick.
Blakeman advocates transforming even small professional and consulting practices into mission-centered organizations.
“Loyalty to departments and bosses creates unhealthy competition and a destructive lack of communication, cooperation and community across functions,” says Blakeman, who dubs the current trend as the participation age. Everyone’s first loyalty is to the mission, the result or outcome the organization intends to deliver to its clients.
“Everyone is a leader,” Blakeman asserted, “with no exceptions. In a mission-centered company, leadership is any act that improves the life, situation or performance of another individual. By that definition everyone can lead. The classic addiction to heroic activists and heroic geniuses is augmented with a leadership focus that shows how everyone, including the guy pushing a broom in the warehouse, can and should lead. Dozens of examples of large companies working this way.”
Instead of traditional management structures, Blakeman advocates what he calls “distributed decision-making, which is the utterly simple, elegant core practice of the ‘participation age’ company. Employees are empowered to make decisions wherever their decisions have to be carried out. This practice, used for decades in some companies, will revolutionize the way decisions are made as companies race to embrace the ‘participation age.’”
“Management must be eliminated, with no exceptions. Managers are good people in a hopelessly broken structure. We must add in new practices and tools that immediately shift everyone’s reliance from the ‘boss’ to their teammates – from a top-down structure to horizontal relationships. A structure built to manage people is central to the dehumanization of work. Companies like Haier, with 75,000 employees and no managers, demonstrate the viability of this structure.”
For those who want to read more, consider the books of Blakeman, Michael Gerber, and Allison Maslan.
