Three Decisions That Fix the Bottleneck — Driven for Success Episode 35

If you’ve been told to delegate more, but you’re sitting there thinking, okay, but what decisions am I actually supposed to keep?

You’re not alone.

Because if you get this wrong, you either stay in the bottleneck or you lose control of your business.

It’s very easy to sit there and go, if I keep everything, I’m stuck in this never-ending vortex of decisions and nothing moves forward. It’s also very easy to say, if I give everything away, things break down so quickly that nothing gets done.

Most owners swing between these two, and neither works.

Welcome to Driven for Success, the podcast where we keep trucking company owners and executives running their business with better processes, less chaos, and lower driver turnover.

I’m your host, Mike Ritzema, founder of Superior Trucking Payroll Service, where our mission is simple: to help trucking families.

This podcast is one of the ways that we fulfill that mission.

And today, we’re answering the natural next question from our last episode: What decisions should you still be making as the owner?

Last time, we talked about you being the bottleneck and how we want to break that. We want to make you not the bottleneck. And now we’re going to define your role going forward.

Most owners hear “you need to delegate,” and you’ve probably read it everywhere, and it’s probably been all over social media and things like that. And they think it means just hand things off.

That’s not how this works, because not all decisions are created equal.

And if you try to delegate everything, you’re going to create a mess.

Like, you don’t want somebody deciding which truck you’re going to buy, right? That’s a million-dollar decision if you’re buying five trucks. Or you may not want somebody pricing lanes without understanding your strategy, without understanding the backhaul.

And when that happens, people get frustrated because delegation without structure creates chaos.

Here’s a simple way to think about it.

There are really three types of decisions in your business.

There’s direction decisions.

These are things like: Where is the business going? What lanes are we focused on? What kind of drivers do we want? When should we grow? When should we not?

These are all high-strategy decisions.

And if you have someone else making these decisions, you don’t have a business. You have a committee.

This is where you as the owner have to step in and make these decisions and provide the vision and direction for the company. That is your job. That is the most important job that you have for the long-term success of your company.

These decisions have implications that will go on for years.

This is also the job where you add the most value. This is where you can be the most important piece of the company.

There’s also system decisions.

These are rules and processes. These are how we handle things.

For example, how does driver pay get handled? When do we pay detention? When do we bill it? How do we handle exceptions to things?

And this is where the “answer, then system rule” lives that we talked about in the last episode.

You’ll make the answer, and then you’ll develop a system right after it so that that answer can repeat itself to people without them having to ask you. And your employees will know exactly what you like to expect, and they’ll know exactly what a successful answer is.

You don’t answer these every time, of course. You just define them once, and then the answer repeats itself.

And then there’s execution decisions.

These are the day-to-day. This is in the middle of the day, applying these rules that we’ve just talked about, handling normal situations, and making decisions inside your guardrails that you have set.

If it follows a rule, it should not come back to you.

And if it does, then we didn’t set it up right. Either the rule is flawed, or there’s no confidence that they should follow the rule. And then that’s a clarity issue, and you’ll need to address it.

So why doesn’t this work in most companies?

Because everything gets blurred together.

Owners end up making execution decisions, re-answering system questions, and not spending any time on direction.

If you’re deciding about an execution decision, say a detention pay issue that should be normal, at 10 o’clock in the morning, it’s hard to go back to thinking about growth plans and long-term strategy at 10:15. Those are completely different types of thinking.

And you can’t just jump from one to the next and go back and forth and back and forth.

You’re going to feel really busy and exhausted at the end of the day, but you won’t have moved any of your decisions forward that you should be doing.

Let’s make this real.

If someone comes to you and asks, “Hey, how do we handle this?”

Instead of answering immediately, ask yourself: Is this a direction decision? Is this a system decision? Or is this an execution decision?

And then, if it’s a direction decision, you decide.

If it’s one of those long-term strategy things, you make that decision. You don’t explain it beyond what you feel like you need to explain to the person so that they understand. But that’s it. It’s your decision.

If it’s a system decision that hasn’t been asked before, then you answer it while defining the rule for them. And we put it down somewhere so that everybody knows the rule.

And if it’s been asked before, you refer them back to the rule.

If it’s execution, they should decide. It shouldn’t even come to you.

And if it’s coming to you, then again, the execution rules are not clear. And you’ll need to clear that up either in the rule itself or in the employee’s expectation of how to apply it.

Most of what hits your desk should never make it past system. It just shouldn’t. It just shouldn’t happen that way.

And unfortunately, sometimes it does, and it requires a little bit of constant vigilance early on to make sure that that doesn’t happen.

Because, again, and I’ve fallen into this trap myself, it’s easy to just give an execution decision because you know it. And it’s faster.

In the moment, it’s faster.

But in the long term, you’re just rewiring your people to come to you with every decision. And that’s no way to run a company.

You’re just kind of spinning plates everywhere, and you can’t do it. There’s a finite amount of that you can do.

And if you spend your day in execution and system decisions, you don’t have time for direction. And then the company just goes where it goes.

And at the end of the day, you’re exhausted because you’ve made all these decisions. And you wonder what everybody else does. And you wonder why the company isn’t moving forward, because it’s not working on its strategy.

And that’s frustrating.

So you have to be vigilant about turning people back on the execution decisions and just saying, “What is our policy?”

And on the system decisions, if it’s already been defined as a rule, you turn them back to that.

And if the system rule needs to be changed, then you change it or define it more clearly. That’s going to happen, especially early on.

But if you’re willing to dig in on this, if you’re willing to decide this is what I want to do, and this is the kind of company I want, this is the roadmap to get there.

And you have to be willing to turn back the execution decisions and the system decisions where you already have defined the rule. Turn those people back right away.

And if it’s a new system decision, then you have to be willing to stop and define the rule. Because it can take three times longer now because you have to answer the question and define the rule, or you can answer the same question ten times a week for the rest of your life.

It’s a no-brainer on the long-term math.

Here’s what I want you to do this week.

For the next few days, every decision that comes to you, just label it.

Is this direction? Is this system? Or is this execution?

That’s all you need to do.

Just realize what you’re doing. Make it simple.

You don’t have to fix everything yet. You just have to start seeing it. You have to start recognizing what kind of questions are coming to you, because awareness is the first step to getting your time back.

Once you know what kind of questions you’re getting, you can figure out what you have to do.

And I think what you’re going to find too is you’re not getting a lot of direction questions, because the employees that are in the day-to-day aren’t worried about that. They rely on you for the direction of the long-term goals anyway.

So you’re not going to get a lot of those.

You’re going to get a lot of system and a whole lot of execution questions.

And I think that you won’t realize it until you start seeing it.

Your goal is not to make every decision.

Your goal is to build a business where the right things happen without you being involved in all of them.

That was the goal you had when you were at five trucks, and now you’re at 45 trucks. But it doesn’t feel like it’s happening that way.

But it can.

If you stay stuck in execution, you’ll always feel busy.

If you move into direction and system, your business can actually grow.

We hope this episode is helpful to you.

Please like it and comment and share it with your other trucking friends. It’s the only way that we can help people like this, is if more people see it.

We’d love your feedback. Just comment wherever you find this podcast and give us a review. We’d love to hear from you.

Until then, we’ll talk next week. Keep on trucking