You're building a prison.

Prison or engine.

Most business owners grow their business and their involvement in perfect symmetry. The business gets bigger, their involvement goes up. Business gets bigger, involvement goes up. You're trapped. That business is now completely reliant on you, and you don't have a choice.

I call the fix asymmetric endurance. The growth of your business and its reliance on you should move in opposite directions. As your business grows, it should rely on you less, not more.

It works in the inverse too. If your business is brand new, stuck or declining, your involvement should go up. Roll your sleeves up, get into the minutiae, find through first principles what's wrong, and build the systems. Those systems are what let your time move the other way once it grows.

Most founders build a box of fireworks, and they're the spark. It might be a cool light show one day. They might also blow their hand off. An engine takes time to build, but you can idle, go on cruise control, or put the pedal to the metal. You just need to fuel it.

Moses tried it first.

In Exodus 18, Moses is sitting to judge the people, and he's overwhelmed. His father-in-law, Jethro, gives him advice.

Then he gives him a framework: look for able men who fear God, are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place them over thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Every great matter comes to Moses. Any small matter they decide themselves. That was clear in Biblical wisdom before any business book or guru book ever came out.

I think this really comes down to trust. Part of the reason I like to be involved in every single decision is that I don't trust it's going to be handled well. Jethro's three criteria answer that. Fear God. Be people of truth. Hate covetousness. If you're running a business that relies on you, you're doing the company a disservice, and you're really building a prison. Building a business that can survive without you is being a good steward.

Document, then automate relentlessly.

Document all of your processes. Write down all of your KPIs and your job descriptions. There are lots of tools that will record your screen and write the SOP for you. It should be really easy at this point.

Then list everything that gets done and assign time to each one. How much time is this thing taking? Once you can see it, automate relentlessly the things that should be automated.

Take yourself out of the decisions.

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.

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.

Create a company dashboard so you can see exactly how you're doing at any moment. And understand the language of business: cash flow and financials. Then you get your financial reports and you know exactly how healthy the company is, without being there all the time.

Then test it.

You think the business can't run without you, but have you tested it? Get out of the business for a day, a week, a month, six months, a year, and see how it operates. Hypothesis, experiment, results, analyze, fix. Then test it again.

Your vacation is the real test. If you're walking around on your phone sending emails and taking calls the whole time, that's not a vacation, and you're not running your business well. Do emergencies come up? Absolutely. That's why they're called emergencies. Don't become legalistic about it either. If only you can make a decision, you're the chief steward, and you deal with it. That's the exception, not the rule.

And time away isn't only about rest. It's about perspective, and perspective is a superpower. The deepest revelations I've had in business have come when I'm away from it.

It's not about working less.

It's about having options. If you want to be more involved, you can. If you want to take a vacation, you can. If you want to hand the business to a family member or sell it, you can, and a business built this way is much more attractive to a buyer.

Making yourself indispensable is actually leading selfishly. If something happened to you today, every family that works in that business would be affected, because it might fail without you. So design for absence. Move from chief executive officer to chief stewardship officer. Then you can go to the soccer games, and you're not a slave to the business.

Make one thing not need you.

• List what only you do.Every task, with the time it takes.
• Document one process a week.Record it, write the steps, give it an owner.
• Leave one recurring meeting.Let the team run it and bring you only the hard calls.
• Read the numbers, not the inbox.One dashboard and your financials, weekly.
• Take one day fully off.No email, no alerts. Write down what broke and fix that next.

Here's where I sell you something.

Asymmetric endurance is one of the seven laws I built Unbreakable OS on, the system I use as a CEO. Your team sets goals, pitches ideas, runs monthly cycles and gives weekly updates, so decisions don't all run through you. It's $195 a month for up to 10 people, with 45 days free. You can also do everything above without it.

Try Unbreakable OS free ↗

If you'd rather work through it with me, I coach a small number of business owners. Work with Adam

More: Your business isn't yours · Christian business coach · Ditch the L10 · The book: Biblical Business