Two things I refuse to do in any of my businesses

Hey, Ben here!

Something I’ve learned from building a portfolio of eight businesses that most people figure out too late:

What you choose not to do is just as important as what you choose to do.

There are a few specific categories of work I’ve deliberately removed myself from across all of my businesses, because doing them would make me the bottleneck in every single one.

Let’s get into them. 👇

Garrett bought a $1.7M accounting firm and is now making $264K/year in profit.

He went from not knowing how to evaluate deals to confidently closing on a million-dollar business.

👉 Want to learn how to read financials and evaluate deals like a pro? Book a call with our team here.

I don’t take customer calls

The customers in my businesses don’t know my name.

As far as they’re concerned, the general manager runs the operation…

Because the general manager does run the operation.

The moment customers can reach the owner directly, every complaint, every question, and every issue starts routing to you.

This boundary has to be established from day one.

If customers get used to calling you directly during the transition period, breaking that habit later is genuinely difficult.

The cleaner approach is to never establish it in the first place.

I (largely) don’t handle employee issues

When someone calls out sick, when a performance problem needs to be addressed, when a scheduling conflict comes up, that goes to the GM.

I may be looped in on significant personnel decisions depending on the business, but the day-to-day management of people isn’t mine to carry.

A business where the owner is handling shift coverage and performance coaching can’t scale, and more importantly, it can’t run without you.

(Inside Acquisition Ace, members learn how to structure deals from the start so this separation is built in. To see how our community could help you land your first acquisition deal, book a call with our team here.)

Why these decisions matter so much

Customer calls and employee issues are two of the highest-volume, most time-consuming categories of work in any service business.

They’re also two of the easiest to delegate if you set up the right structure going in.

The goal here is to make sure the right people are handling the right things, so that when something truly requires owner-level judgment, you have the capacity to actually think clearly about it.

Next week, I’ll get into a few other things I refuse to do, and why removing yourself from them is so important.

If you’d like to speed up your learning curve and acquire your first business, the Acquisition Ace community can help.

👉 Book a call with my team here to see if it’s right for you.