Lessons from the Sports: Why Every Business Needs Coaches and Staff

A hidden superpower is handing off your work to someone else.

Picture this,

You go to an NBA basketball game to watch your favorite team play. You also have courtside tickets, giving you the ultimate view of the arena.

You see the players' towering figures sprint up and down the court. Glancing at the home team's bench, you recognize the team's owner. He is the only nonplayer on the bench and is the one coaching the team. He calls plays and coaches the players. He's also carrying around a camera, shooting game film that he will show his team after the game.

The game continues.

One of the players goes up for a dunk and twists his ankle. The owner rushes to him, treats his ankle, and helps him off the court.

Where are the other coaches?

Shouldn't the head coach be calling the plays? And where is the film crew?

The athletic trainer?

After the game, there is a press conference. "Mr. Owner, where are your coaches"?

He seems extremely tired. Sweat pours out from under his forehead. He says, "I don't have any; I want to save money." and storms out of the room.

This thought experiment sounds outrageous. An owner would never run an NBA team that way.

An NBA team is a business. Not unlike the one you own or work at. How much money could they save that makes it worth not having other personnel besides the owner run the show?

The example above is similar to how we used to run our construction company.

The players played. The owners did everything else—no one in the middle to help handle the load.

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When our company started

My parents were the owners, coaches, and every other staff member. Everyone else was a player.

We are in the real estate business, so they would find the deals, find the money, oversee the project, and exit it. They had a few employees to help facilitate this, but my parents were deeply involved in all of the processes within the operation.

That framework worked for a while. But then we grew. Ten projects rose to 20, then to 50, 100, etc.

The more you grow, the less active you can be. Imagine a single person attempting to remember the critical path for 400 homes. It's like the owner-coach running up and down the court with the camera.

That's what happened to us.

I have learned that in an efficient organization, an owner should be able to leverage his team to carry out the work while they oversee and make decisions. That is what an owner does; they make decisions. We have been unable to make decisions in the past because our attention is on the day-to-day operations.

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Delegation

Last August, one of my main goals was to begin delegating as much as possible to skilled individuals who could manage jobs better than we could.

These managers would lighten our load on noncritical tasks so we can focus on creating systems and making decisions.

We followed this plan and placed managers in the following departments:

- Onsite Operations: They oversee superintendents and contractors doing manual labor onsite. Make sure that the projects are on schedule and budget

-Entitlement and Permitting: They ensure we can get project permits. They coordinate the engineers and architects and work with the cities to get approval to build.

-Quality Control: This manager ensures that all of our systems are running smoothly, particularly the documentation of activities and reporting for all departments.

-Accounting: This manager coordinates the billing and invoicing team to ensure we pay and get paid for our jobs on time.

-Materials: Coordinate material request and delivery. Also essential is the correctness of the orders.

Essentially, the manager's job is to