Last year I hired a full-time manager.
Nine months later, she quit. Burnout, frustration, feeling micromanaged. When I asked for honest feedback, she showed up with a full sheet of notes. It was hard to hear, but she wasn’t wrong.
The main issue was simple.
I never really let her manage.
Any time something felt urgent or imperfect, I stepped in. Client issues, decisions, or problems, I handled them myself. I even rewrote her emails to make them sound more like me.
I thought I was helping. I was actually undermining her.
I hired a new manager last month, and this time I am trying to do things differently.
Every day I get a report from our overseas team outlining wins, problems, and fires. It is incredibly hard not to jump in. I can see the solution immediately. I know I could fix it quickly.
But if I step in, the team stops looking to her for direction and starts looking to me. Her authority erodes, and slowly everything routes back to the owner again.
Businesses cannot grow like that.
Early on, you have no choice but to solve everything yourself. That is how you learn the business. But eventually your job has to shift from doing the work to building the system that does the work.
Not in the Same Day Turn Insiders group yet? Join today and see a full breakdown of how much we’re charging hosts (and paying cleaners) across the board with our Airbnb cleaning business. Thursday’s email is only going to Same Day Turn Insiders (join here).
Sometimes you have to let small fires burn so your team can learn how to put them out.
Not catastrophic ones, but the everyday issues that build experience and confidence. If you take over every time something gets messy, your team never develops that muscle.
And if everything still requires your involvement, you don’t have leverage, you have a bottleneck.
If you hired someone to do a job, let them do it.
Stay informed. Coach when needed and set clear expectations. But resist the urge to take the problem back every time something feels uncomfortable.
It won’t be perfect but it’s the only way to get bigger.
P.S. - want to see how much profit we are making on each job (even Airbnbs)? In Thursday’s newsletter, I’ll be sending out an email to only subscribed Same Day Turn Insiders with exact breakdowns on how much we’re charging each Airbnb host and how much we’re paying to cleaners. Join Same Day Turn Insiders here
Until next time!
Logan
