INTRODUCTION

NO MORE 16-HOUR DAYS

When Tessie was a young girl, her godfather, a diabetic, underwent a series of amputations. With the help of home health-care professionals, he learned to walk again. Witnessing this process, Tessie was in awe, and it inspired her to want a career in home health care. After working for a home health-care company to gain knowledge and experience, Tessie felt that she understood the inner workings of the business. She was ready to launch her own company.

She got together one evening with her friend David to talk about it. They’d been thinking about this for a long time. That night they sketched out a “business plan” on the back of a napkin and became business partners. Four months later, they were up and running with 20 employees. Tessie said it felt easy in the beginning. “We worked hard contributing everything we had, and the business grew as if by its own momentum. In those years, I don’t think we knew enough to understand we were actually running a business. We just went at it knowing we both had enough to contribute. Then it hit us like a ton of bricks.”

The turning point for Tessie came with the frightening realization that her business wouldn’t continue to grow unless she and David did something differently. What that something was, she had no idea.

We were successful based on our growth, but we weren’t managing it properly. We were not running our business; the business was running us. We needed to change, but we didn’t know what needed to be changed or even how to figure out what it was that needed changing. We felt all along that the two of us could make it happen and that we didn’t need any help to get through it. But we were feeling exhausted. We were starting to have uncomfortable conversations. We were asking ourselves: “What are we going to do? How are we going to get through the next day and keep up the pace we set for ourselves?” We had just been going on, day after day after day, never taking a look at where we were going. Finally, we hit a wall.

Freedom—Lost and Found

Like many, maybe even most, business owners, Tessie and David were driven to own their business for the freedom it would afford them personally and professionally to be their own boss and to create the kind of quality business they envisioned. Their success in the early stage of building their business didn’t prepare them for the struggle to keep up with the pace of growth. Hard work is something you expect, but reaching a point where it feels like you may be jeopardizing what you’ve built can be scary. Like Tessie and David and many other business owners who have arrived at a similar place 5, 10, or 15 years down the road, perhaps you are thinking, “I don’t know how I can keep this up. This is not what I signed up for.” Or maybe you can see the potential of that wall coming, and you want to avoid the crash. What gets us to this point?

Driven by a fierce desire for the freedom that owning your own business promises, you jump in, energetically rolling up your sleeves and giving it your all, confident that your knowledge and hard work are all you need. Your dream begins to take shape. Suddenly you have more business than you can handle, along with all the accompanying responsibilities and problems. You are holding on tightly to the belief that you can do everything yourself, not feeling that you can trust anyone else. There’s too much at risk. Although it is getting harder and harder, you feel that you have to hold everything together, or it might fall apart.

You fear that if you were to bring someone else in to help you, he wouldn’t care as much as you do. Besides, who would that be? How could you find the right person with the right combination of knowledge, experience, and skills, along with genuine caring? He might try to change everything, especially the “secret sauce,” the alchemy of ingredients that has made your enterprise unique in your field. You feel alone, stuck, at a loss for how to do things differently. You can’t see a way out. You feel trapped. The more you try to manage and control everything and everyone, the worse it gets. Yet it’s all you know. You realize that you have to do something differently when something crucial happens, such as one or more of the following events:

You lose a key employee.

You lose an important customer.

Your bank pulls your line of credit or won’t approve a loan you need.

You’re having trouble controlling costs.

You can’t hold people accountable.

You feel the bind you are in; you can’t handle the growth you’ve had, and you need to grow in order to keep going.

You are tired; you realize that your business isn’t good enough to sell, but it isn’t bad enough to close.

The freedom you sought by having your own business is fleeting, and your confidence is going with it. Instead, you feel more caged in and stuck in a frustrating cycle. During the day, you are doing your best to keep up with whatever demands arise, while at night you are losing sleep, fearing failure, worried about letting others down, and knowing that all the hard work and determination that got you to this point will not get you out of it. You keep saying to yourself, “There’s got to be a better way.”

There is a better way. I know it will sound ironic to you now, but that tight-fisted control you’ve been using to run everything, to hold everything together, and to keep it all going one day at a time is limiting your growth potential. It’s putting a cap on that potential and locking it down. Although your solo command-and-control style used to work, maybe even was necessary in the beginning, that same tactic won’t serve you now that you’ve grown your business, and certainly not if you want to expand it or sell. You don’t have to be the one-man band, doing it all yourself. In fact, if you want to grow, you will need to enlist some other musicians.

When I admitted my own fear, and I realized that I owned the business but didn’t know how to run it, my astute wife, Mary, said in her straightforward style, “I guess you’d better learn.” I knew she was right. After much reading and research, I discovered professional management—a way to run a business employing proven fundamentals and disciplines that empower a business to continually reach new levels of growth. I learned that you don’t have to do everything yourself. In fact, if you want your business to grow, you can’t do everything. You need to include other people—talented, skilled people—and you need to involve everyone: engage them at every level, trust them, and give them responsibility and freedom. You need to let go instead of holding on so tightly. This is a big shift—a shift in how you think of your role as the business owner and leader, as well as how you think of the roles of your employees and customers, and of vendors, distributors, and others. More important, it’s a shift in how you behave—in what you get up in the morning and do each day.

Professional management helped me to successfully run Iams and to increase sales from $12.5 million to $1 billion over time. And it is helping thousands of others to regain their freedom, confidence, and control, and to run successful businesses. With knowledge collected from some of the nation’s foremost business strategists and many owners of privately held businesses who have lived and studied professional management, Aileron has developed a unique system that has been designed to guide and empower private businesses—the owner and the entire organization—to live professional management. We say “live” professional management because it is a values-based system that, once embodied, flows into and benefits your whole life, not just your business.

The system is practical and adaptable, not theoretical. Just the opposite. We want it to make sense to you. And because we want you to be able to apply it right away and be successful, we provide a built-in platform of support. You do the work, but we guide you, help you to find the resources, and hold you accountable. We call it Aileron’s Professional Management System, also known as DOC.

We have learned how to distill and teach professional management in digestible pieces. We break it down so that you can learn the fundamentals and implement them in your business. The purpose of the system is to help you get everything going in the same direction and sounding more like a well-orchestrated symphony than a one-man band. This approach helped Tessie and David and thousands of others to discover a better way to run their businesses, and in the following chapters, we hope you will discover it, too.