It's just faster if I do it myself. How many times have you said that this week? You hand a task to an employee and they fumble. They ask a question, you think it's obvious, and you feel that physical twitch in your chest. The impatience, the frustration, so you take it back. You swoop in and you fix it in five minutes. You save the day and you feel good and it feels useful. But I need to tell you the truth about that moment. You didn't just save the day, you just sabotage your business. You're addicted to the being the hero. And in business, a hero is just a nice word for a bottleneck. Welcome to phase two of the trust engine. We are entering the war of the how. And the first battle isn't against your team, it is against your ego. I'm Johnny Terror. Let's get to work. If you are a service entrepreneur trapped by the hustle, you have been sold a lie. The hustle promised freedom but delivers a prison. I know because I built a successful CPA firm working 16-hour days out of a pantry. I learned the hard way that grit gets you started, but systems will get you free. I'm Johnny Terror and this is the Trust Engine Podcast. We're here to build a service business that scales like a machine and sells like a person. Let's get to work. Most of you know my story from phase one. You know about the pantry office, you know about the 16-hour days, but we haven't talked much about what happened after I escaped the pantry. On October 18th of 2021, I walked into a new reality. I didn't just hire a virtual assistant, I merged my firm. Overnight I went from a solo operator working next to a box of sears to a partner in a firm with 20 employees. I walk into a real office. I had a team, I had bookkeepers, it's admin staff, junior accountants, and I was terrified. I remember sitting at my new desk looking at the stack of tax returns prepared by a junior staff member, and I felt this cold knot in my stomach. What if they missed something? What if the client calls me angry? What if they don't care as much as I do? Man, my brain started screaming, check everything. Redo it. It's your name on the door. So I did what any good hustler does. I became the super employee. I was redoing the work of people. I was paying to do the work. I was the bottleneck. I thought I was ensuring quality, but really? I was just soothing my own anxiety. I needed to prove that I was still the best accountant in the room. I was protecting my ego, not my business. And that is the ego trap. We tell ourselves that we don't delegate because good help is hard to find. We say our standards are just too high. But that's a lie. We don't delegate because we are addicted to the dopamine hit of being the firefighter. When you solve a problem, you feel valuable. When you answer the client's emergency text at 9 p.m., you feel important. You are the savior. But here's the hard truth I have to learn. If you are the savior, your team are the victims. If you swim in every time there is a problem, you teach your team that they are incompetent. You train them to be helpless, and you train them to bring every fire to you because they know you love being in the firefire. You're not building a team, you're building a cult of dependency. And the cost? Man, the cost is that you can become the lid of your own growth. You are the limit. Your business can only grow as fast as you can work, and eventually you will break. So how do we break that addiction? How do we stop being the hero and start being the architect? When I was in the new office, struggling to let go, I realized I was doing the boomerang delegation. I will throw a task out, hey, prepare this return, and it will come right back to me with a mistake. And I will catch it and I say, see, nobody can do it. The tax accountants, the junior accountants, the tax seniors, they will help me prepare the return. But in our firm, I still review my client's return before it goes out the door. So I sat there thinking, nobody can do this like I can. Not faster, not cleaner, and not accurately. I have five years of history with that client in my head. I knew the backstory, I knew the nuances, and I had been preparing and reviewing the same return for half a decade before delegating to a staff and a manager. But I wasn't giving them the systems or the history. I was just dumping the labor. I hadn't given them the standards, I hadn't given them the why. This is where everything changed for me. I picked up a book that you've probably heard of, but maybe you haven't actually applied it to your business. And it's called Extreme Ownership by Joko and Leaf Baby. You know, Joko is a Navy SEAL. I'm a CPA. Our worlds could not be more different. But the principle he teaches is that the only thing that saved me from drowning in that office. The core principle is simple, but it's a brutal part and an attack to your ego. Leaders must take ownership of everything in their world with no one else to blame. I read that and I look at the bad tax return on my desk. Man, my instinct was to blame that junior accountant. You know, they're not smart enough, they're not trying hard enough, they don't care. But that extreme ownership book forced me to look in the mirror. And Joko has the principle. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders. If the team fails, the leader must look inwards first. If the tax return is wrong, it's not because the junior account is stupid. It's because I failed. Maybe I didn't clarify the mission. Maybe I didn't explain the client's backstory. Maybe I didn't provide the training. Maybe I hired the wrong person and put them in the road they're not ready for. Whatever the reason, that failure is mine. And that shift hurts, man, it stings. But it also is incredibly liberating. Because if the failure is mine, then the solution is also mine. I can fix my training, I can fix my communication, and I can fix my system. If I blame them, I'm the victim. If I blame me, I'm in control. So how do we apply this? How do we use the SEALs tactics in the service business? We use a principle we call decentralized command. In the SEALs world, the commander cannot make every decision for every soldier on the battlefield. It's chaos, right? It's too fast. And if they wait for orders, they will die. So the commander gives them the commander's intent. He tells them the why and the end state. We need to secure this building to stop the enemy from flanking us. He doesn't tell them which window to climb through. He trusts them to figure that out because they understand the goal. In my firm, I was trying to control every keystroke. I was micromanaging the how instead of clarifying the why. I had to stop giving orders and start giving intent. Instead of saying, prepare this tax return to the best of your abilities, I had to start saying this client is terrified of an audit because they had a bad experience five years ago. Our mission on this return is to make sure every single deduction is bulletproof so they can sleep at night. And that is the commander's intent, gentlemen. So when they know the intent, they can make the decisions. My staff could think like owners. This leads us to the next principle, clarity. You know, Joko says in the book, it's not what you preach, it's what you tolerate. If I accept a messy return and fix it myself, I just set the new standards. I have told the team it's okay to be messy because Johnny will clean it up. Real ownership means having this resilience to send it back, not out of anger, but out of accountability. I had to learn to say, hey, this isn't up to our standards. And here's why. Here's the commander's intent you missed. Now let's go fix it. That is accountability. And finally, we have to talk about cover and move. In the SEALs team, this means you support your teammates so they can accomplish the mission. In a business, this destroyed the silo mentality. If I'm the only one reviewing returns, I am the bottleneck. I am the only one to cover. I had to build a system where the team could cover for each other. Peer reviews, senior check-ins on juniors, manager check-in on seniors. We had to build a culture where teamwork wasn't just a poster on the wall, it was a tactical necessity. We had to realize that if one of us fails, the mission fails. And that's the shift, guys. You move from I am the only one who can do this to I am responsible for building a team that can do this better than me. But here's the catch. When you start doing this, when you start practicing this decentralized command, things will get messy at first. You're going to have to accept a temporary dip in quality for a permanent increase in freedom. Let me say that again. You are going to have to accept a temporary dip in quality for a permanent increase in freedom. The first time they do it without your help, they will do it 70% as well as you. And that will hurt your ego and you want to soup in and you want to grab the hose. Don't. Coach them to the 80%, then build a system to get them to 90%. If you fix it for them, they stay at 70% forever. If you coach them through it using that extreme ownership, you build a leader. Now, look, I'm the trust engine guy and I value radical transparency, so I'm not gonna sit here and pretend I'm cured. Just last week I caught myself doing the same thing. I was sick, I was out of the office with a cold, my hat was pounding, and it was foggy and a client emergency popped up. Logic says, call the team, use the centralized command, trust the system. My ego said, only you can fix this. So instead of relying on my team to do it, I opened my laptop and I did it myself. Why? So I can feel useful. So I can feel like the savior, even while I was shivering under a blanket. So yes, I still struggle with this topic a lot, but I make improvements every day. I catch myself and I ask, am I being the leader or am I being the bottleneck? I force myself to close the laptop and I'm not perfect at it. Becoming this intentional operator isn't not a destination. It is a daily war against your own desires to go back to the quote unquote safe work. Okay? Look, I can give you the frameworks, I can give you the why, but I know exactly what happens when you turn off this podcast. You are going to get an email, a client is going to be disappointed, and a staff member is going to miss a deadline. And that hero complex is going to flare up. You're going to want to swoop in and grab the hose. Isolation is the ego's best friend. When you're alone in the office, and it's easy to convince yourself that you're the only one that you can save the day. And that is why I created the Intention Operator Mastermind. We don't just talk about tax returns or services. We meet weekly to go to war on the things that actually stop your growth. Leadership, communication skills, and high-level sales. But more importantly, we dig deep into the dirt. The mindset and the mental blockers there are keeping you from the freedom you were promised when you started this thing. If you're ready to stop being the hero and start being the architect of a machine that works without you, I mean you reach out to me directly. Text me at eight zero six three theme zero one four one. Eight zero six three three seven zero one four one. Just text me, operator, tell me where you're stuck, and we will see if you're fit for the group. I'm Johnny Terra and remember, action over theory. Let's get to work. Wow, we cover a lot today, guys. But remember, action over theory. Don't just listen, execute. Go build the machine so you don't have to be the machine. If you found value, the best way to support the Trust Engine Podcast is to leave a rating and review on your platform. And if you know of another entrepreneur trapped in the hustle, share this episode with them. You can find the show notes and the systems we discussed here at TrustEngine Podcast.com.