how to juggle multiple companies

Summary

people ask me how I run multiple companies at once. my honest answer is: most people shouldn’t. the math of focus is brutal and one company gets your best attention. but if you are going to do it, here is the actual playbook.

1. quarterly planning, real planning. a written growth plan per company, owner-assigned per line item, reviewed every week. without this you are just reacting all day across multiple buildings.

2. a team that can run without you. capable hires. equity partners where it makes sense. people who care like owners because they kind of are. without this you are the bottleneck times N.

3. lead, don’t peer. educate your team, reward results, hold the line on standards. people will rise to what you hold them to.

4. don’t be CEO of more than one. own multiple, run one. the others get an operator who is better at that company than you are. if you can’t hire that, you can’t run multiple.

the test is simple: if one company falls behind every time you focus on another, you don’t have multiple companies, you have one company and some hobbies. try harder.

Transcript

introduction to the challenges of managing multiple companies

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey.

So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. How can you juggle multiple companies at once and still do well? And is it even possible? Is it even worth it? That’s what I’m going to be talking about today. This is the Better Human Business Podcast.

I’m Jerred Moon. And if you could do me a favor, if you’re following me on Instagram, go ahead and take a screenshot of this podcast or any podcast, any podcast episode from the Better Human Business Podcast, any episode you may like, your favorite, perhaps. Share it on Instagram as a story, tag me in it so I can repost the story.

insights into the necessity of having fewer, more focused companies

And after I repost it, I will shoot you a message and say, hey, where can I send the Try Harder sticker? I want to send you a couple stickers. Shoot me your address and we will get it out to you. Now let’s talk about juggling multiple companies. And should you do it? Now this isn’t a problem for a lot of people.

It just happens. I happen to run multiple companies. Depending on how you look at it, I have three legit companies making a decent amount of revenue with teams that take my time and attention. And people ask me sometimes, how do you juggle multiple companies? How do you do that? Because if you’re an entrepreneur and you have one company, you can realize, wow, this is a lot.

How can I juggle multiple things? And you might be thinking, I’m just going to talk about hiring people, but that’s not actually what I’m going to talk about. That’s a big part of it, but that’s not the only thing I’m going to be talking about. So here is how I juggle multiple companies. First, I don’t juggle multiple companies well, and I don’t think it’s worth it for most people.

the importance of effective quarterly planning in business management

To be honest, I’m trying to get down to fewer companies because I said three that are like legit with bigger teams and taking time and attention, but I probably have five or six if you counted everything that I was doing that’s still, ah, this takes some time and attention. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.

What does matter is too many things. If it splits your attention too many different ways, something’s going to suffer and it’s like when you’re going from side hustle to full time, if you’ve experienced that, like the full time never really worked or took off until you were able to give the time and attention necessary to going full time.

And it’s no different with juggling multiple companies. When you have multiple different companies, you’re sacrificing something. If you are like the CEO, you’re the person in the seat for every single one of these. It’s not a good idea. And so I don’t think that it’s a good idea for most people. And I’m not just saying that I, I honestly am trying to pare down, get things more focused.

the critical role of a competent team and leadership in growing multiple companies

And that’s honestly what I’ve been doing over the last two years is focusing more on one company as opposed to splitting my time and attention because we only have so much time and attention in a day. And when you only give a fragmented amount of time and attention, your growth and business happens to be fragmented.

So just know that I don’t recommend it for most people. Especially if you don’t have a business that’s just crushing it yet. So that aside, caveat aside, here’s how I actually do it. And the answer is a good plan. So I’ve talked a lot about quarterly planning, not that many episodes ago, I talked about how to plan an effective quarter, episode 92, if you want to go check that out.

And I talked about that planning process and what I do to plan an effective quarter. So what I do, because I do have, will end up with this fragmented brain and trying to juggle multiple team members and, and doing all these things. What I have to do is sit down at the beginning of a quarter and either by myself or with a team and create an amazing plan.

final thoughts on the complexities and requirements of being a ceo of multiple businesses

And my brain will be wiped by the end of this day. Like it could take two hours, it could take eight hours. And what I’ll do is I’ll just make what I think is the best possible growth plan for the quarter. And then from there, I’ll start assigning who’s doing it and when does it need to get done? Because I obviously can’t be responsible for an awesome quarterly plan across all the companies and doing every single task.

So who’s doing what and by when and making sure that they understand their responsibility and when. But the most important thing to highlight here is the actual plan itself, because if I was just running around scattered, oh, maybe we should do this here or maybe we should do that there, my brain would fall apart.

Like it would unravel because I can’t keep that much in my brain. But what I can do is dedicate a full day to focused, hey, this is the, this is what I think is my best guess, our best guess at how to grow over this next quarter. It’s a really good plan. Now I can remove my brain and I don’t have to think about it all the time.

And to be honest, it’s not running in my subconscious mind as much because I know that I have a good plan and then I can put things on my calendar that I need to do from that plan. Team members can put things that they need to do on their calendar from the plan. And then I just know we’re working the plan.

And once I know everyone’s working the plan, I don’t have to worry about it as much. And this is the big, big part of how I juggle multiple companies is I make sure that there’s a really good plan in place. I know what tasks need to get done. They get scheduled out. Either who’s doing it could be me for some of them could be someone else.

And when does it need to get done by? Make sure it’s on the calendar. If I need to set aside a certain amount of time each week to work on this thing, but I plan all this stuff in ahead of time. So the answer is really effective planning. But what that allows me to do is do a lot of different things because I know that let’s say in three different companies, we have these really robust quarterly plans.

I may only be responsible for three or four of the overall activities, right? And say there’s 30 things roughly that need to get done and I’m responsible for three or four of them, maybe one in each company, something like that, however it works. I just know everybody’s doing what they need to do or tracking KPIs, like we’re doing all this stuff.

So when we get to the end of the quarter, the quarterly plan should be completed or near completed and we can assess whether or not it went well or did not go well. And then I just know, Hey, I’m working on my part. It moves you out of this guessing game and constantly like throwing crap out a wall and seeing what sticks.

It makes you more organized and moves you in the right direction. So that’s the biggest part of how I’m even able to do it mentally. My preference by far is just to focus on one thing and nothing else. But this is how I do it while focusing on multiple things. It’s just, Hey, what do I need to do to grow, to move these companies forward?

Now the second thing is going to be people. And I think everyone knew that was coming. You hear me talking about assigning things to team members, all of those kinds of things like yes, you have to have a good team. You have to hire people out. In some cases that could mean becoming actual business partners with somebody.

I have obviously I’ve done that in other companies, right? Like having really good business partners because no one is going to care about your business as much as you do. Now if you have a business partner who has some sort of equity, they will start to care about it as much as you do. But an employee will typically never care about your business as much as you do.

Now you do get lucky. I would say I have one to two employees like that who care about the business almost as much as I do. And it’s awesome when you find people like that, you’ve got to take care of them and just try and keep them around for as long as possible. But ultimately you do need to hire really good people and make sure that they’re doing their jobs well.

Your job becomes leading them. That’s the biggest part of it, right? You have to lead these people, make sure that they’re educated, they know what they’re doing, they’re feeling rewarded for their work, all the things that you have to do in leadership. You have to really take care of your people and find people.

And then you also have to get rid of people who aren’t up to the standard, which is the hardest part of all of this. So people, that’s a massive part of the equation. But I think everyone knows that if you want to run multiple companies, it’s a really bad idea to have, to say that you’re the CEO of multiple companies is silly.

And honestly, if you tell me you’re the CEO of four companies, I’m like, well, okay, like that doesn’t sound serious. Like I think Elon Musk may have been CEO of two companies at once, it happened to be like some of the largest companies in the world, but he may be the only dude who’s like actually pulled it off.

Like CEOs should have one focus. So if you’re the CEO of a company, you should only be the CEO of one company. I’m the only, I’m only the CEO of one company. I have different roles in all these other companies, not the CEO. Other people are the CEO in the other companies. And that’s okay. I’m okay with that.

I don’t have the ego where I need to be the leader. So giving up that equity in some cases, now I’m not telling you just, Oh, throw equity at somebody. And then all your problems go away. That can cause much bigger problems if you don’t have a legit, awesome business partner. And then also you don’t always have to do that.

you can just compensate people really well and fairly, and that’s all you need as well. So that is how I juggle multiple companies. Maybe you took something away for just how to juggle one company. Well, ultimately you need a really good plan and you need to stick to that plan and you need to try harder.