All highly successful practice owners have built a team around themselves. The fact is you can’t do it alone. If you rely only on your own sweat and hard work you will quickly reach the limit of what you can physically can get done. Working smarter and being personally highly organised helps but it will only get you so far. You still have a limited personal capacity.

Take the working ‘on’ versus ‘in’ your business. Everybody understands the concept but to make the principle work you need to build a highly skilled team around you. One of the ways I get to spend so much time away from the practice and working ‘on’ the business is by eliminating as many distractions and interruptions as possible. I protect the time I have allocated so that I can focus without distraction.

As an example, I only take pre-arranged, scheduled phone calls. Otherwise, my phone is off, in another room, or I just ignore it. I haven’t personally answered the phone at Jones And Co. in years. However, I didn’t just decide one day to start ignoring the phone to save time. The secret is I put a system in place and trained my team how to handle each scenario so that  I could ignore the phone.

The components are 1. I built a team, 2. They are following a system, 3. They are highly trained and continuously trained.

The most important and profitable use of my time today is the time I spend communicating with and training my team.

My job is to set very high standards and help everyone believe they can achieve them. My team know I care about the little details, but that it is their job to attend to them. In team meetings I use the Royal ‘We’ all the time. ‘We’ need to do this. ‘We’ need to do that. Quickly followed with “by ‘we’ I mean ‘you’”, Gareth, or Kathryn, or Jess, or Carina, or Rory.