There are many things that business owners must do. Certainly there’s the doing of the thing that the business does and, perhaps more importantly, the selling of the thing the business does.

But, business owners also routinely get bogged down in all the other stuff – creating web pages, collecting and paying bills, writing emails, tweeting, meeting, troubleshooting the network and, my favorite, taking out the trash.

Common sense suggests that in order to survive and grow you must delegate all the other stuff. That is indeed true, until you delegate all that other stuff, you can’t focus on the highest payoff activities.

Here’s the thing though – while getting all that other stuff off your plate might free up your mind, it won’t actually set your business free. It will allow you to expand the capacity of your business to that which you can keep your arms around, but it won’t actually allow you to grow.

In order to truly get free of your business in a way that will allow you to grow you must work to replace yourself in two key jobs – the doing of the actual work that makes money and the selling of the work that makes money.

If you’re a consulting company you must be able to find people who can do the consulting and you must be able to find people who can make it rain new consulting contracts. If  you’re a plumbing company you must be able to find people who can do the plumbing and you must be able to find people who can sell the plumbing.

If the business relies on you to do either of those functions you don’t really have a business, you have a job!