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Most entrepreneurs think the next level of growth requires another hire. But what if the real problem isn’t your team size? In this episode, Sharran explains how entrepreneurs can create more leverage without immediately hiring more people.
He challenges the common belief that growth requires adding more team members and reveals why hiring too soon can often create more complexity when the business owner’s knowledge is still trapped in their head.
Sharran introduces his three-step framework for creating reusable work, which will allow businesses to operate without relying on the founder for every decision.
If you want more freedom, stronger teams, and a business that can run without you being the bottleneck, this episode provides a practical roadmap.
“The real leverage is when your work becomes reusable.”
– Sharran Srivatsaa
Timestamps:
01:42 – Why hiring more people isn’t always the answer to creating leverage
02:59 – What true leverage means: Making your work reusable
05:24 – The three-step framework for creating reusable work
05:39 – Step 1: Build your playbook and remove knowledge from your head
11:18 – Step 2: Write the win before the week begins
15:03 – Step 3: Show the gold standard and define what good looks like
18:22 – Recap: How to get leverage without hiring more
Resources:
– The Next Billion by Sharran Srivatsaa
– Board Member: ARC Multifamily Real Estate Investing
– Board Member: The Real Brokerage
Connect with Sharran:
– X
– YouTube
– Threads
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, this is Sharran Srivatsaa. Welcome back to The Business School podcast. And in this episode, I’m going to show you how to get massive leverage. You don’t have to take a course, read a book, uh, or go put, like, massive effort into something else. I’m gonna show you a simple three-step formula on how you can get the most nuanced things out of your head without a lot of effort, and get your team to work for you, get AI to work for you.
[00:00:20] And just by listening to this three-step process, you will easily be able to run more things on autopilot without you being involved. Therefore, you can be happier, your team can work without you, and you can stop being the bottleneck in your business, and you can make way more money and have more time.
[00:00:34] I’m gonna break it all down step by step and show you how to get more leverage without hiring a new person, starting right now.
[00:00:47] One thing is for certain: just because it’s tried and true doesn’t mean it’s working right now. So the big question is this, where can you learn what is working right now? The strategies, the tactics, the psychology, and the exact how-to. How to grow your business. How to blow up your personal brand and supercharge your personal growth.
[00:01:09] That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Sharran Srivatsaa, and welcome to Business School.
[00:01:27] So the topic for today is leverage. Now, what is leverage? I think every business owner wants more of leverage, more output, uh, they want more freedom, they want more stuff getting done without every small thing coming back to you or to me. And when… I think when people think about leverage, they think, normally, they think more about hiring.
[00:01:46] They think that, “Hey, I need another assistant,” or, “I need another salesperson,” or, “I need another ops person,” or, “I need someone to take this something off my plate,” right? And I think sometimes yes. I think sometimes yes, that’s true. But a lot of times, I’m going to wager that a new hire or getting someone new in your business actually is, just shows you the real problem that you have.
[00:02:06] Because let me, let me present that to you. If everything is still in your head, which is normal for a lot of high achievers like you, the new person becomes one more person who needs you to give them stuff, right? They need, I don’t know, they need your notes, they need your judgment, they need the workflow that you have, they need the edits that you’re gonna make, they need your taste because only you can design it that way.
[00:02:29] They need it. They, they need your idea of what good looks like because you have to define what good looks like because you do what good looks like. So I’ve been thinking, so the better question to ask is How do you get more leverage before you hire somebody? Or, how do you make the business easier to run, maybe with the team that you already have?
[00:02:50] Because picture this idea. How do you turn your brain into a playbook, right? So that’s kinda like the big idea for today. So let’s first define leverage. What is leverage? Leverage means getting more output from the same effort, or that’s probably a decent definition. So m- meaning you do the work once, and then the work, that work keeps doing the work again after you.
[00:03:12] Like, that’s cool, right? So, like, for example, if you explain a task to your assistant one time, that means you’re getting help from somebody else. But if you turn that same task into some kinda SOP that your assistant can use every week, now that’s leverage because you don’t have to do that again. If you, um, write an awesome client email one time, that is work that you did.
[00:03:31] Yay, good job, right? But if you turn that, I don’t know, email into a skill on Claude that your team can use over and over again, now that is leverage because you created an asset. If you handle a client call well, you’re awesome. You got the charisma. That’s the skill. Well done. But if you record that call and you use it to train the next, I don’t know, three people, then that is leverage, which is super cool.
[00:03:54] So the easier way to d- kinda do is invert this, like what is not leverage? And what is not leverage? When you put more hours in, is that not leverage? I think more hours is just more hours, right? Doing the same task faster is just doing it faster. Doing more hours is just doing more hours. Hiring someone who still needs you e- for every step of the way just creates another inbox for you to manage, another inbox for them to manage, and them, for them to not feel fulfilled that you’re actually, like, s- not letting them do their best work.
[00:04:24] It’s like buying a tool or a piece of software without teaching it your way of doing something. Like, if you took AI out of the box and you didn’t train it, then it would– now it creates more work for everybody. And I think the real leverage is when your work becomes reusable, when your bur- work becomes re-useful in a lot of ways.
[00:04:41] And now, you– that may be a checklist, which is boring. That may be an SOP, which is boring. That may be a script which you think is boring. That may be a prompt, you’re like, “Ugh, can’t believe th-” That may be like a template or a, I don’t know, a s- a sample call or a training video or a, I don’t know, a checklist or a rule book or some kinda decision guide or heuristic.
[00:04:57] And the big question I wanna ask you is: how do you turn the work that you already do into something that a business can use again? How do you turn the thing that you do every single day into something that you, or someone else, can reuse? How do you make it reusable? And I think this is how you get leverage before you have to forcefully hire somebody.
[00:05:17] And if you think about it, I like to internally call, uh, name things for myself, so I call this the reusable work. How do you create reusable work? And there’s three parts to it, and I’m gonna give you the parts so that you can just organize it in your brain. Part number one is you build your playbook.
[00:05:31] Part number two is you write the win. And part number three is to show the gold standard. All right? Now, you don’t have to remember any of this. I’m gonna walk you through it right now. So let’s get to the first one, which is build your playbook. Uh, the idea is pretty simple. Your weekly work is just raw material if you think about it that way.
[00:05:46] Meaning anything that you do, I don’t know, once, twice, or three times, becomes a part of this play-playbook. Now think about your week. The way you get ready for a sales call, the way you prepare for the next week, the way you send a weekly update, the way you look at a deal, the way you write a proposal, the way you bring on a new client, the way you handle a complaint, the way you, uh, respond to an email when somebody gets mad, the way you follow up when someone goes dark or, or, or, or someone needs a nudge.
[00:06:08] All of that you think is random work because you do it naturally, but that is how your business runs. Your business runs on an operating system, which is you. And for most business owners, it’s all stuck in their heads. So what happens when the whole playbook of your business is stuck in your head? You become the playbook.
[00:06:23] You are the playbook. You are the thing. And you don’t want to be the thing, because if you are the thing, then you can’t grow the business. You can’t find peace. You can’t get time, and you’ll work until you die. And this sounds fine until you want someone to help, and then you get frustrated when you hire someone to help because they still need your brain because you are the playbook.
[00:06:40] You can grow, but n- now what? Now you have to teach more people, and you’re like, “Man, I would just rather do this myself.” You can take a day off, but, uh, someone still talks, texts you, Slacks you, emails you. I’ll tell you something crazy. I had this happen with a memo I was writing for my team. So like every week, I was writing the same thing over and over again.
[00:06:56] And I would go into AI, I would explain the same thing over and over again. I would say, “Hey, here’s the memo that I want. Here’s the tone I want you to use it. Here’s the format from last week. Here are the rules. Don’t use like, you know, em dashes and a bunch of these other things. Uh, you know, here are the mistakes you need to avoid.”
[00:07:11] And I did that over and over again. I’m like, “This is dumb.” Like, this is dumb. I kept asking the same things over and over again because it was just easy for me to hit the Whisper Flow button and just talk to it. But then I was like, all right, I am looking at this recipe from my memory every time to make, I don’t know, banana pudding, and even though I could have just written this whole recipe card one time and fed it into AI.
[00:07:33] So I, I literally stopped. I was so frustrated, I stopped. I spent 10 minutes, and I used… And I was like, what if I had to create this reusable version, where if I could not do this thing again? So I tried to build a prompt. I figured out the rules. I wrote the format. I did a few samples, and then I just told AI, I went to the last chat, and I’m like, “Hey, I gave you everything, right?
[00:07:51] I don’t want to do this again, and I want you to give me this entire package that you– that I can just give you one time the next time I’m working on it so that I don’t have to re-input all of this.” And it, it was there. I didn’t have to do any of the extra work. I just went back to the same chat, and I said, “I just don’t wanna do all of this again.
[00:08:07] Package this all up for me.” And what did it do? That’s– I think that’s true leverage. It made something reusable, and that was making your playbook. All right. So if I would call you out on something, I would ask one big question, which is it’s really hard for you to do. What did you do this week that you also did last week?
[00:08:24] Think about that. What did you do this week that you also did last week? And if you just start there, that is one tiny workflow. You don’t need to try to write a whole, I don’t know, company manual and put it on, uh, a website and create a, you know, I don’t know, a learning system. You don’t have to do any of that.
[00:08:39] What is one thing that you did this week that you also did last week? It’s probably just one task or one workflow, one thing that you keep doing every single week. Can you just turn that into a playbook? That way, someone can read and be like, “Ah, I know exactly what Sharran did. I can run this overall.” Now, you may say, “Well, Sharran, how do I do that?
[00:08:54] You know, it’s all in my head.” Now, I’ll give you a couple ideas. One, you can record your screen while you’re doing it, and just ask AI to turn it into steps. Number two, you can have your assistant sit with you if you’re there. If your assistant’s remote, just get her, him, or her remote, share your screen, and do the whole thing.
[00:09:08] By the way, I’ve done this before. I literally said to my as- assistant, “Hey, I’m going to share my screen with you. I don’t want you to say anything. You can record my computer, and if at any time I am doing something that you don’t understand why I’m doing it, you can say, ‘Hey, Sharran,’ and ask. But otherwise, I just want you to see exactly how I’m doing the thing.”
[00:09:22] And I just had her watch me do the thing. You may think that’s crazy, but they can watch and learn. And they just– she just watched me do the whole thing. She had it recorded, and then she was able to do exactly what I did, which was crazy. And I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t even have to record a video. I didn’t even talk.
[00:09:36] I just did the thing, and then she interrupted me a couple times and asked me a question, but she just watched me do the whole thing. And the crazy part here was I just moved her camera outside, so I didn’t even see her there. I just kept working, and she saw me do the whole thing. I also think you can just ask someone on your team to write what they think the steps are, and then you look at their draft, and you just fix the draft.
[00:09:55] That way, you don’t have to do any work. I do this often, by the way. This is the other way. I just go for a walk. I open my voice recorder on my phone, and I just literally describe what I’m doing out loud. And then when I come back, I just take the transcript of that, and I just have AI make it into steps.
[00:10:08] But whenever I go for a walk, somehow I can think about it a lot more clearly, and I can just talk it out loud completely. And those are the ways that I, I think about just taking the idea out of my head and actually making it a playbook of sorts, because how else are you gonna do it otherwise, right? And so you may say, “Well, all right, Sharran, I, I’m willing to go for a walk.
[00:10:24] I’m willing to, like, do the thing, but it’s really weird for me when I have to, like, explain the thing. How do I… You know, is there a playbook for that?” So no, I’m gonna give you a playbook of a playbook, like really meta concept here, right? So the thing that I think about is I just follow it sequentially.
[00:10:38] So, here’s a couple of questions that you can use. Uh, by the way, the transcript of this video is gonna be in my show notes. But I first think, I’m like, “What do I do first? What do I look for? What do I avoid? What makes this good? What makes this bad?” Right? I-I’m just thinking about that. Hey, like, what do I do first?
[00:10:52] What do I do second? Cool. What’s not good? What’s good? What makes this bad? And I just ask those questions, and that makes it a lot easier because that’s the raw material, right? So that way, someone knows exactly what makes it good, what makes it bad, how to start something, and that’s really good. Because if it stays in your head, there’s nothing to hand off, and there’s only…
[00:11:09] Like, what do you hand off? You hand it to yourself, doing it again next week, and that’s just terrible, and you shouldn’t do that. So let’s not do that, right? Cool. So you got the first one, which is, like, build a playbook. Second one. This is called Write the Win. And now, what do I mean by Write the Win? This is one of my favorite ways to actually make, uh, uh, something powerful come to life, so, so let me walk you through it.
[00:11:28] I don’t know if you do this, but we do something called an end-of-week report. So I have all the executives that, you know, kind of report into me turn in an end of week report, and that is just, there’s a couple of questions that they answer so I know what they did by the end of the week. And my– So normally what people do is they look back on their week, and they break down what they did that week.
[00:11:47] That makes sense. It’s an end-of-week report. My challenge for you would be to write your end-of-week report before the week starts. For example, on Sunday or Friday for the next week, you’re like, “Hey, these are the things I’m gonna accomplish next week.” So if you write your end-of-week report like you’ve already completed it, then something magical happens because you’ve already said that you’ve done the thing, so you will prioritize doing the thing.
[00:12:10] So before, uh, y-you’re just gonna al-already look like what you’re gonna deliver on Friday. And most people will get to Friday and say, “Ah, what happened this week?” I want you to get to Friday with like, “Hey, I already did the thing.” And so what you prioritize in the week is you’re like, “Man, I already wrote this in my report.”
[00:12:25] By the way, I’ll tell you where I learned this. When I was, um, when I first got diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, my doctor told me something. He said, “Hey, Sharran, instead of trying to figure out what you’re gonna eat and in the moment or look at the menu, et cetera,” he’s like, “On the next day in your app,” like I was using, uh, MyFitnessPal or something, I can’t remember.
[00:12:43] He said, “Just r- log your food for tomorrow today.” And I was like, “What do you mean? I’ve not eaten it.” He’s like, “That’s right. Just you know what you’re gonna eat. Make a commitment for what you’re gonna eat and already log it in your app. And if you already logged tomorrow’s food today, then you’ve already accepted that you’re gonna eat that same thing tomorrow, so you won’t deviate from what you’re gonna do.”
[00:13:03] And it was important for me because I had to manage my glucose, ’cause I was just diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes, and I had to like manage it with insulin, et cetera, so I didn’t want to like veer away from it. So that one thing, just writing, already writing it into the app, inputting into the app what I’m going to do tomorrow, made it amazing because I was like, “Wow, I, I’m not gonna go back and change it.”
[00:13:21] So I’d already committed to doing this thing. And so if you– Like, I would say on my end of week report, “Hey, I followed up with this prospect, I handled this pricing, and I got a yes or no,” and I would just write it in the report. That way I know that’s what I’m gonna do that week. And it’s really good because it makes you already pre-commit to the thing that you’re, you’re going to do.
[00:13:42] And so, like, when you start on Monday, you know exactly what you’re gonna do. On Tuesday, if someone is trying to, like, veer you away from your goal, you’re not gonna do it because you already know what you’re gonna do that week. So before the week starts to, I don’t know, make your week go crazy, if you have pre-decided what you’re gonna deliver that week, you have no choice but to deliver on what you already said that you were going to do.
[00:14:03] So you pre-write your end-of-week report for yourself, which is insane, right? So you may say like, “Sharran, how do you actually do this?” I would not overthink this one. What’d you get done? That’s it. Just ask the question, “What’d you get done?” And now you pre-write what you’re gonna get done because then you will reprioritize your week to actually do that thing, which is insanely powerful.
[00:14:24] Now, you may say, “Well, Sharran, I’m a solo operator. I’m a founder. Like, I don’t, you know, I don’t have anybody to do this.” This is how I would do it. Open a new chat in AI and say, “Hey, you’re my end-of-week report partner. I’m gonna give you my…” And just tell them exact- tell the chat exactly what you’re doing.
[00:14:38] Give that person the end-of-the-week report that you’re gonna do, and then just check in every day. And then go back to the end of the week and say, “Yes, I did it. I didn’t do it.” So at least you have a way to stay accountable because the best part is it acts as a forcing function for your prior- for prioritization during the week.
[00:14:53] Otherwise, your week will drift, and you will just write your end-of-week report on what you did as opposed to writing your end-of-week report on what you should have done. The easiest hack will crush for you overall. All right. Last but not least, part three is to show the gold standard. And here’s the big idea.
[00:15:06] People cannot copy or make it reusable what they have never seen. So you have to define what good looks like, meaning your team is not gonna be able to match up your energy or the, or I don’t know, the thing that you want in your head if you never show them what it looks like in your head. And I think this is a m- really terrible thing for business owners because they get mad when someone on the team doesn’t get it right.
[00:15:29] The, the, if the report is wrong or the email is, is doesn’t feel right or the client call feels messy or the follow-up is too slow or, like, the, the, the proposal is not, like, formatted cleanly. And then the boss thinks that, “Hey, why didn’t they get it?” But the real question, if you think about it, is, did you show them what good looks like?
[00:15:45] Because telling someone is, I don’t know, super weak compared to showing someone. So if you tell someone, “Make it more professional,” what does that mean? If you say, “Be warmer with your clients,” what does that mean? If you say, “Send a better recap,” what does that mean? And I think that you, as the owner, have taste, I guess.
[00:16:01] You have judgment. You, you know what good feels like. The team doesn’t know. They don’t know what good feels like. They don’t know what you want. And then everybody gets annoyed. And then the boss, you, think that everybody should have known, and you don’t believe in, like, getting anybody to do anything anymore.
[00:16:13] And so the answer is really simple. Show the gold standard. If you want a memo written a certain way, give them a memo that is already written that way so that they can model to it and just say, “Hey, follow this, follow this as a model.” If you want a client call handled a certain way, record a call where you did it that way and say, “Follow it this way.”
[00:16:28] If you want a proposal to look a certain way, do it one time. Send the best one that you have to them and say, “Follow it this way.” If you wanna, I don’t know, follow up with a certain tone, tell them three, four, five examples of exactly what the words are based on the tone, and they will do it exactly for you.
[00:16:40] Just like you would give AI those recommendations, you need to give your team those exact same recommendations. You have to show them what good looks like. It, it– Think about it this way. It’s like, um, you go to an ice cream store, and you get a sample of the ice cream. Well, the sample teaches the person significantly what to do better than just looking at the ice cream flavor through the glass, right?
[00:17:05] The sample is the big idea. And this is m- super important when someone joins your team for the first time. The best time to show somebody what good looks like is before they build any habits that you have to, what? Fix later. Why would you do that? If time has already passed, I, you know, I get it. If time has already passed and you have not done it, you can still reset the conversation.
[00:17:21] And so the best time to fix something is when they started. The second-best time to fix something is right now. So you just take responsibility. If somebody breaks something, if somebody does something that you don’t like, the easiest way to fix that is for you to take responsibility. Say, “Oh my gosh, Jenny wrote that email, and I didn’t like that.
[00:17:37] It is my fault. I need to show her what good looks like.” And then you say, “Hey, Jenny, you are awesome. You write great emails, but I have not done a good job of showing you exactly how I think, how we can write emails in my voice, to make it easy for the client. Would it be okay if I showed you three examples of how I’d like it done, and maybe you can do that going forward?”
[00:17:56] That’s it, right? That is, you’re defining what good looks like upfront, which is so perfect. That is a gold standard. That’s what you wanna call out. I don’t think I need to talk about this anymore. But the fact is this, it’s super simple. All you have to do is, if someone is not doing something the way you want it, just take responsibility for it.
[00:18:12] That’s it. ‘Cause then you can say, “Hey, I’m gonna take responsibility. I’m gonna show them what– I’m gonna define what good look, look, looks like.” And once they have that, they will do it the same exact way. All right. So if you want more leverage in your business, please, please, please think about this concept of reusable work.
[00:18:26] How can you reuse work that you’ve already done? Because we know what leverage means. What is leverage? Leverage means getting more output from the same effort. So I talked about three things today. Number one, build your playbook, which is to take it out of your head. Number two, write the win first, so write the end-of-the-week report first.
[00:18:41] That way, you can prioritize your week accordingly. And number three, show them the gold standard, meaning define what good looks like. Hey, so, uh, I hope this was helpful to you. Uh, if you have a team member, please send this to them because then they can hold you accountable to getting things out of your head.
[00:18:54] And they’re like, “Yes, finally. Listen to this Sharran guy. He’s weird, but, like, he knows what he’s talking about because he can get you to leverage me more, which is exactly what we want overall.” All right? If you like this, can you do me a favor, please? Can you, one, send it to somebody on your team that can help you?
[00:19:08] But more importantly, can you take a screenshot of this episode and tag me that you like this, and I can make more like this for you. So please take a screenshot of this episode if you liked it and tag me, and I’m, can make more like this for you, especially when you have more time to get more leverage.
[00:19:29] Hey, this is Sharran. I have an awesome free gift for you just for listening to the podcast. As you may know, I’ve got a chance to build two billion-dollar companies the hard way. So if you like this episode, you will love getting the exact playbooks from those wins. It’s on my Substack, called My Next Billion. It has the exact frameworks I wish someone had given me when I was figuring it all out. Now you get the real lessons from the trenches as I go for a three-peat and build the next billion. So everything’s free at mynextbillion.com. Please check it out at mynextbillion.com.