How great is it when football teaches you life lessons, right there on prime-time TV?
Opening night for the NFL season. The defending champion Seahawks playing the Patriots in a rematch of last year’s Super Bowl.
Then BAM.
Seahawks QB Sam Darnold gets hurt on the fifth play of the game.
Poof. All your grand plans are out the window.
The guy you built your offense around is suddenly unavailable. Whatever game plan you spent months developing has to change immediately.
In business, we have a name for a version of this problem:
Key-man syndrome.
What Happens When Everything Depends on One Person?
Key-man syndrome happens when too much of a business revolves around one person.
And in small businesses, that person is usually the owner.
They know all the important clients.
They know how everything works.
They answer the difficult questions.
They approve the marketing.
They make the sales.
They solve the weird problems nobody else knows how to solve.
As long as that person is around, everything works.
Until they’re not.
I’ve seen this with clients I work with, and I’ve had to fight through it in my own business multiple times over the years.
It’s incredibly easy to create a business that depends on you.
In fact, in the early stages, it’s almost unavoidable. You’re the one with the knowledge, relationships and experience.
The problem comes when the business grows, but the dependency doesn’t change.
Could Your Team Win Without You?
Back to football.
The Seahawks lost their starting quarterback almost immediately.
But they didn’t lose the game.
The rest of the team stepped up in a BIG way and found a way to win.
That’s what great teams do.
And there’s the business lesson.
Could your team do the same thing?
Here’s a question I think every business owner should occasionally ask:
If I disappeared from my business for the next two weeks, what would stop?
Not slow down.
Actually stop.
Which clients wouldn’t get taken care of?
Which decisions wouldn’t get made?
Which sales wouldn’t happen?
Which bills wouldn’t get paid?
Which marketing wouldn’t go out?
Which problems would sit there waiting for you to come back?
Those answers show you where your business is still too dependent on its key man.
And if the answer is “pretty much everything,” you don’t really have a team yet.
You have helpers.
Great Teams Aren’t Built Around One Person
There’s nothing wrong with being incredibly important to your business.
But there’s a big difference between being important and being indispensable.
The goal isn’t to make yourself irrelevant.
It’s to build people, processes and systems that allow the business to continue functioning when you’re not available.
Because eventually something will happen.
Hopefully it’s something good, like taking your family on vacation for two weeks.
But it could also be an illness, emergency, employee departure or something else you never saw coming.
That’s when you find out how good your team really is.
Football gave us a pretty good demonstration of that last night.
How would yours do?
