"What if I miss something? What if someone makes a mistake?"

I'm often asked these questions when trying to get business owners to empower their employees to be more autonomous, so the owner can focus on the bigger picture.

It's not necessarily because someone is a control freak either. It's because the stakes are so high. As an owner, they're "my stakes," and we rarely have a safety net.

Here's how we break through. Even if you could pay attention to every detail (which you can't), even if you could weigh in on every task (ditto), you would end up devoting 99.9% of your energy to the details, ensuring that the business never grows. For a solo-preneur who just wants to make or do the thing they make or do, that's fine. But if you want to grow, you have be able to let go.

Let's skip 'how to set yourself up so you can effectively let go' for a minute (that's an entirely different post. Or a book. Books, actually).

Let's just focus on the fear of mistakes. It's easy to interpret that word as "mi-stakes." "My-stakes." But that's wrong. They are "Mis-takes." "Mis ... takes."

How many "takes" do you get in a day? If your business were a film set, there would be, what? 200 takes? 500 takes? 1,000 takes? Each day? If you miss a take, what do you do? You just do it again, and you move on.

We business owners make mistakes all the time. Sometimes pretty big ones! Our employees will rarely have the gumption to make the kind of mistakes we as owners make. So yes, they will make some mistakes. They will miss some important details. And it will be just fine.

The fear of making mis-takes is mis-guided. Instead, be afraid ... be very afraid ... of getting mired in the details. Because the ultimate risk isn't that someone makes a mistake — it's that you stay stuck making every single decision.