The billion-dollar question: "What if you had to franchise?"

Hey - it’s Tom.

Welcome to this week’s Freedom Friday edition of Ctrl+Shift, where we unpack one core psychological challenge of leadership, and leave you with a single (sometimes challenging) question to ponder.

Est. time to read: 5 minutes.

As a founder, you are the expert. But your expertise is often trapped in your head, making you the primary engine and the primary bottleneck. This edition explores a powerful thought experiment that forces you to extract that knowledge and turn it into a valuable, scalable asset.

A note from Tom: For two years, I had a brilliant Account Manager - actually she was my only Account Manager. She resigned with two weeks notice to go travelling. I panicked. She was the face of the business for all our clients, and I had “stepped back” and hadn’t spoken to any client in months. I spent two weeks desperately trying to download her knowledge. It was a painful lesson about where critical information and process should sit.

That painful experience is why I now obsess over the central idea of Michael Gerber's classic book, The E-Myth Revisited: The Franchise Prototype.

The goal is to build your business with such robust systems that it could be handed over to a new owner and run successfully by people with no prior experience with your company. McDonald's can be run by teenagers not because they are culinary geniuses, but because the system is the star. Ray Kroc's genius wasn't in the hamburger; it was in the foolproof, repeatable process for making it.

Adopting this mindset forces a profound shift. You stop seeing documentation and process-building as a chore that takes you away from "real work." You start to understand that documenting the system is the real work of a founder. You are no longer just delivering a service; you are manufacturing the machine that delivers the service.

For you to ponder:

If you had to leave for a six-month sabbatical starting tomorrow, what is the one chapter in your company's "Operations Manual" you would have to write this weekend to prevent the business from collapsing in your absence?

Want to read more? This edition was inspired by learnings and insights from The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber.

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That’s it for this edition, see you next Tactical Tuesday!

Cheers,

Tom

PS If you got value from this edition, feel free to Buy Me a Coffee!