Does it feel like most of your days as a small business owner are spent unclogging toilets, resolving conflicts between employees, or touching every aspect of customer orders just to keep things moving? You've fallen into the "firefighter" trap, constantly putting out small fires in your business instead of focusing on your highest profit-driving activities.

To escape this cycle, you need to instill clear processes, accountability measures with your team, and empower them to resolve the vast majority of those daily firefights on their own. Start by documenting all core processes to create consistency. Establish KPIs or scorecards to evaluate performance. Implement tools like online knowledge bases and documented procedures so your team can self-serve resolutions first.

Most importantly, set the expectation that you'll no longer be looped into every minor escalation. Block off dedicated hours on your calendar for strategic planning, marketing, networking with prospects, optimizing profitability drivers - anything that grows your business rather than running operations. When fires do spark, address them in this proactively blocked strategic time only if they're truly embers engulfing the whole forest.