An A-Player is not scalable. Hiring one – or, even worse, multiple – is going to cause you to be chained by the golden handcuffs and lose Friday nights as you micromanage communications or sales.

For example:

If you assign a project task to an A-Player, they can make it happen without any problems, great. Sure, you lose half of your profit margins, but the work is done… right? 😐

Where this breaks down is when you start scaling with more projects than a single A-Player can handle.

So now you hire a second team member. This time someone a bit more “affordable” as your margins are starting to dry up due to the amazing wizard-like A-Player you’ve hired. You ask them to complete the same task but for a different client.

Can you expect the same exact output? Maybe – but then again, probably not.

Unless you have got quality control triggers, delivery processes, and fail-safe protocols to check the fulfillment. If you do NOT have those systems built (or if you don’t know what they are), all you have is blind reliance and chance, and this is not a great foundation for business owners wanting to scale and remove themselves from the day-to-day operations.

Therefore, A-Players are not the secret to scaling – SYSTEMS and PROCESSES are.

A-Players cannot be cloned. However, people’s actions, thought processes, and how they arrived at a certain decision can be cloned via SYSTEMS and PROCESSES.

You need to create a system that can be duplicated, a system that can turn any team member (or even MULTIPLE team members) into people who operate like “A-Players” and can produce the perfect outcome every single time.

Impossible? We have helped over 450 companies who beg to differ.

For example, don’t just say, “Create a new ad campaign” or “follow up with this lead” or “edit this graphic” or “finish writing this content.” Do not bulk the task into one oversimplified SOP – this is how you fail as a founder.

Your job as the founder should be to clear the path for the team. Make their lives easier so, in turn, they can make yours simple.

Instead, create a series of actionable tasks with visuals showing what to do, text explaining what to click on, videos that show how to combine the two with comparisons that, when implemented in sequential order, will result in the correct output every time.

Break the system down into singular processes that make up the entire engine.

I’d rather see 27 easy-to-understand, actionable items that my grandma could complete rather than a chaotic, underslept business owner who keeps digging their future grave by quickly assigning broad tasks that are easy to MISINTERPRET.

And then wonder why they “can’t find any good team members,” why “good workers are hard to find.” 🙄

Good LEADERS are hard to find.

The systems tell people what to do. The systems are the multiplier. Poor systems with good people = poor results. Great systems with average people = great results.

Here is a thought exercise. When you are building your next process or looping protocol or completing an onboarding procedure – pretend that you are going to be assigning it to 10 different team members.

Will each team member come back with the EXACT same finished result? If not, then your process has room for assumption, misinterpretation, or random creativity.

Don’t make assumptions about what people know or the preference for decisions they’ll make.

If it is not said in a process, it won’t be actioned on.

We’re not doing this because our team is “stupid”; we do this to make our team’s life easier and, in turn, our life simpler.

The role of the CEO should be to clear the path for his or her team.

People want to do good work. Most of the time, they are just not being shown how to execute it. Or they are forced to take a guess and pray it’s correct. Build systems so that ANYONE can create results at an A-Player Level.

❌Don’t rely on individual talent; rely on your systems.

❌Don’t scale your business on people; scale it on systems you own.

Systems are predictable; people are not. You want your business systems to do the thinking and the problem solving for your team – to the point where you can hire anyone, even Grandma, to copy the same keystrokes and click on the same buttons to generate predictable results for your clients.

And when you have systems like these built, you can use that free time to spend with family and friends, with work that’s done right the first time around, and with clients singing praises for your agency and referring everybody in their network to you.

(Plus, you will feel confident taking on all those referrals because you know your team can handle it.)

If all this sounds interesting to you, I’ve got a movie for you. You can download it here at https://app.jamiestenhouse.com/hypersystemisemovie