Sometimes your biggest strength becomes your undoing.

As the owner, you’re the single biggest critical success factor for your business – no one cares about your business more, knows the processes better, and can do the job as well as you.

You’re also the biggest barrier holding your business back from being the wild success you know it can be… and from giving you the financial and lifestyle rewards you went into business for in the first place.

Too often our business relies on us. There’s only one reason for that: us. We think the business needs us to survive; that things couldn’t possibly run better without us there. It’s this thinking that traps you in the business.

As I’ve outlined in previous posts, I argue that the key to achieving business success is to build a business that’s highly attractive to a buyer. You don’t actually need to sell it; but by building a business that others want to buy, you’ll by default build an awesome business you’ll want to hang onto.

One of the most important attributes for a potential buyer when assessing a business is whether it relies on the owner. A ‘self-sufficient’ business is a lot more attractive – and valuable – to a potential buyer. It means they’re not reliant on the current owner; they can then choose to run it themselves, or employ someone to do it for them.

So how do you create a self-sufficient business that doesn’t rely on you?

Effectively, you need to ‘sack yourself’ – to remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business. By doing so, you’ll create room for team members (or 3rd parties) to step up and handle most of the ‘stuff’ that takes up so much of your time, and that prevents you from working strategically on building a better business.

Jason Cunningham's latest book, Have your cake and sell it too: the 7 key ingredients of business success is available now at jasoncunningham.com.au.