Designed for absence

If you’re an entrepreneur and you can’t leave your business, even over the holidays, you have built a prison. If it relies on you being there, it’s a prison, and you need to get out. You need to build an engine, so you can idle, you can cruise control, you can have options.

What a dispensable CEO is

Let me tell you what it’s not. It’s not a CEO who leads in a way where everything relies on them. Somebody so involved in the business that if they were out of it, it wouldn’t survive. That is making yourself indispensable, and it’s actually leading really selfishly. If something happened to you, every family that depends on this business would be impacted, because the business might fail without you.

Becoming a dispensable CEO doesn’t mean that no one needs you. It means you’re leading from a place of stewardship, not just scale. You design for absence. You don’t make it all about you.

If it relies on you being there, it’s a prison, and you need to get out.

Move in opposite directions

Most people build a business where the growth of the business and their involvement move in perfect symmetry. The business grows, and they’re more involved. Then they’re chained to it.

The growth of the business and its dependency on you should move in opposite directions. As the business grows, you should be less involved, not more. If your business is new, or stuck, or dying, you’re going to be more involved, and that’s fine. But the direction matters.

Five things I do

1. Dream in decades, but plan in months. There’s no reason to make a three-, five- or ten-year plan. Think about what the world will look like, then plan for the next twelve months.
2. Create a company dashboard that shows your performance. You have to be able to see exactly how you’re doing at any point, in an instant.
3. Build a decision system that isn’t dependent on you. Your team has to be able to make decisions without you that are aligned and moving the company toward its goals.
4. Remove yourself from one meeting, or one recurring meeting, at a time. They’ve got to figure it out, and the only way they’re going to figure it out is if you’re not there.
5. Understand the language of business: cash flow and financials. Then you don’t have to be there all the time. You get your reports, and you know exactly how healthy the company is.

Document it, automate it, then test it

Document all your processes. Anything anybody does gets written down. Automate as much as you can: client experience, administrative work, the things that don’t require the human touch.

Then test it. Get out of the business for a day. Then two. Then a week, a month, three months. Eventually you create true options. If you want to sell the business, you can. If you want to stay in it, you can. You can hand it to a family member, go on vacation, start another business, or go hiking in the woods.

Where Unbreakable OS fits

I built Unbreakable OS to solve this for myself. It’s the dashboard and the decision system in one place. Your Big Three set the direction. People pitch their ideas, the AI gatekeeper filters out the bad ones, and the leader of each area decides in one monthly meeting. Owners post weekly updates, so you can see what’s on course and what’s deviating without babysitting anybody. At the end of the month, everything is executed or failed, and the numbers tell you how the company is really doing.

Build the engine, and your company can run without you. You will be designed for absence.

Adam WeisnerFounder of Unbreakable OS and an active CEO who runs real companies on it.