In my family, no one loves doing the dishes. No one even likes doing the dishes. In fact, I will go so far as to say that my husband and I and my daughter absolutely loathe washing up. When we moved to the country during COVID and we were renovating Sal's Country House Rescue, at one point we literally had no kitchen. But what we did have was a brand new dishwasher. It was literally hooked up all janky-like, with the pipe and the dirty water being

Held together with a plastic bag and a whole bunch of tape. I feel like we could be on an independent review panel for how good dishwashers are. We have tested a lot of them over the years. If we go to an Airbnb, we are literally mentally taking note of how good or bad the dishwasher is. We will sit at the dinner table and talk about whether we like the dishwasher or not. Now, if you want my personal recommendation, in fact, it is our personal recommendation of the best dishwasher, it is going to be the Bosch Series 8.

That thing cleans everything. It's got a bonus cutlery drawer, which means you can fit so much in it. This is the level that my family goes to when it comes to avoiding washing the dishes. Something else you should know about me. I don't believe that anybody in my family can stack the dishwasher correctly. I mean, what is with stacking bowls so that they touch each other and the water can't get through to wash them? Or sticking those little tiny bowls in the bottom drawer and they just fall over. I mean

They're designed to go into the same drawer that the cups go into. That's what all the little prongs are for. But I have to make a choice. Am I prepared to deal with dishes that don't always get cleaned? Or a dishwasher that is only 70% full because it has not been stacked correctly, but I didn't need to stack it in the first place? Or is my way the only way? And therefore I'm the only person who can do it? What does my super precise arrangement of a dishwasher have anything to do with you and your business? Well

Here's what I've actually found. The better you are at running your business, your way, the harder it is for you to see that your way is literally a prison cell that you have built for yourself. I recently had a conversation with an e-commerce store owner who was feeling stuck and didn't know how to grow the business to the next level. Let's call her Colleen. Now I asked Colleen to walk me through where her time was going each week. It's one of the easiest places I can start to see, okay.

Salena Knight (02:25.236)
Where are we focusing our time? Because where focus goes, the money flows. She started with a very nervous laugh and she said, I should have seven more employees. Now here's the thing. I know Colleen's business. I know what her turnover is. I know how many orders she's getting each week. And she does not need seven more employees. I mean, seven full-time employees is generally you're going to have to be at mid-seven figures to hit that number. And so I brushed that nervous laugh away and I said to her, give it to me straight.

Where are you actually spending most of your time? And she said that she was spending a good chunk of her day, around five hours, just on picking, packing, and dispatch. Now, here's where I need to be honest with you about what I thought when she said that. I have had this conversation before, many times. And I know what the pick and pack problem generally is. It's that the back of the store is a mess. Nothing is labelled. Whether we're talking a warehouse or a storeroom.

Stuff is everywhere. Nothing is labeled. No one knows where anything is. The owner can usually find something, or there's one person in the business who can generally find everything because they put it there and they've been living in that space for years. But any new person would walk in and have no idea. That was my assumption going in. But I was wrong. Turns out Colleen has everything labeled, coordinated, and is extremely organized. So at this point, score one Colleen.

Sal, zero. But I still couldn't work out why she was spending five hours a day doing this herself. I couldn't even work out why she was picking and packing at all, given where her business was at. She was so far past the point where, as the owner of the business, she was still picking orders. You know me, I'm a straight shooter. I asked her outright, almost under her breath. She said, Well

Got a mental block about giving away that responsibility to somewhere else. I know I can do it faster. Almost under her breath, she said, Well, I don't really know about giving it to somebody else. I know I can do it faster. I know how long it takes me. If I give to somebody else, will the orders even go out correctly? Will people get the right products? Am I just gonna end up with a whole bunch of angry customers complaining that their orders were wrong? Huh. So I simply said to her, walk me through what it looks like when you pack an order.

Salena Knight (04:47.572)
I always love to reverse engineer. So I'm sitting here going, if this is where our time is going, and this is the biggest thing that is holding the business back, because five hours picking and packing orders, we just gotta work out how we don't do that anymore. So walk me through what it looks like when you pick and pack an order. So she did. She prints everything out that needs to be picked, she picks it, she brings it all back to the packing bench, and then she goes through each individual order and packs it into the post bag, into the satchel. Because

Colleen knows every product and every skew. She can just pick the item from the trolley and put it straight into the bag. I am always thinking like Amazon when it comes to pick and pack. I want everything so systematized that you can literally pull in a warm body off the street in peak season and they know exactly where to go, what to pick, and how to pack it. And so I said to Colleen, why do you pick before you pack? It just doesn't make sense to me. Why don't you just pack straight into the individual order bags? See?

This is me. I'm getting down into the nitty-gritty. And she said, I've tried that, but for me, picking everything at once is faster. Huh. And it was in that moment I realized what she just said. For me, she knew it was faster for her because of the way her brain works. The system that she had built was the system that worked for her brain, for the way that she moved around the storeroom, the warehouse, through the different aisles.

The way years of doing this exact thing had been optimized specifically for one person. Not for a process that someone else could follow quickly and accurately. A process that works for one person and that one person who shouldn't be doing this at all. Now, some people would call that maybe a control issue or a mindset issue. When you've been doing something for years, handing it off does feel like letting go of something. But that's not what I saw. What I saw was a system that

That had no existence outside of the person who built it. There's a difference between a system that works and a system that can be handled by somebody else. And they are not always the same thing. Both of them are going to get the orders out. Both of them might run efficiently. And from the outside, you might not be able to tell them apart. But only one of them can exist without the founder. And one of them doesn't. What Colleen had built.

Salena Knight (07:13.752)
Honestly, it was extraordinary. The batch picking, the system, the invoice processes, it was genuinely efficient. But not a single part of it was written down. And this was one of the most organized persons I've met. It wasn't written down, not because she couldn't be bothered, but because when something becomes instinct, you stop seeing it as a process. It just becomes how you do something. The micro decisions disappear.

The sequence becomes automatic. And before long, that system only exists in your head. And you can't hand off instinct. You can't write a job ad for instinct. You can't train somebody on their first Tuesday on instinct. The reason Colleen believed that nobody could do it as well as her wasn't that this was a uniquely complex task. I mean, people pick and pack all around the world every single day. It was the way that she did it.

had never, not once, been made into something that somebody else could easily follow. So just like me and my dishwasher stacking, the reality is my way is the best when I do it. Everything comes out clean. The dishwasher is stacked to maximum capacity. But if your method only lives in your head, you are the only person who can ever do it. And that means you are going to be doing it forever or getting super annoyed that it is not being done right.

And the reality is that is not sustainable. I do not want to be the only person who has to stack the dishwasher. So things have to change. When it comes to Colleen, I did the math with her. I always try and like for someone who failed accounting, again, I do not go anywhere without my calculator, my friends. Everything is just let's math it out. You don't have to be great at numbers to make money make sense. So simple, simple process.

Let's say we get somebody in at $20 an hour to pick and pack. Five hours a day, that's $100. Colleen, do you think more you could make more than $100 if I gave you back five hours every day? Of course. Let's just say this new person is slower than you. Let's say they take 50% longer because they don't have your years of experience and they don't have that instinct. Now we're at $150 for the whole day's worth of orders.

Salena Knight (09:38.232)
Colleen, do you think you would generate more than $150 if I gave you back five hours a day? Yes. So where's the problem? It's me. That. That right there. That's it. And I want to be clear, I'm not saying this to be glib, I'm not saying this to shame Colleen. But the mind is exactly where this lives for almost every store owner. The reason that it lives there isn't stubbornness or ego, it's that the system was never designed to exist.

without you. And so handing it off doesn't just feel scary. It genuinely seems impossible. Because there's no nothing to hand to anyone yet. So I thought we were done at this point. I thought we'd math it out. It was simple. How can we not bring somebody else in to do this? Even if it was just putting a camera in the corner and filming yourself doing it. But with this newfound co confidence

Colleen told me about her ordering. So I pick and pack for about five hours, but then the other chunk of my day goes to ordering. Now, Colleen's business has, if not high hundreds, probably thousands of SKUs. And of course, they all come from multiple suppliers. Now, because Colleen's approach is to never be out of stock, yes, listen to Sal. She had built this whole manual process of going into every supplier's website.

Scrolling through the hundreds of SKUs per order because if one of the suppliers didn't have something, she would immediately go to somebody else. She didn't want to wait for a supplier to come back and say that they were out of stock. She was already moved on, it was coming from someone else. That is completely logical, but it is also completely founder-brained. And completely inside Colleen's head. I asked Colleen if she'd ever considered using purchase orders. Just means when stock hits a certain level, the order triggers.

It means that a team at a team member can answer any customer inquiries about whether a product is out of stock and whether it's coming in. It means when it arrives, you simply just scan it in. It also means that you can send that to your supplier and have them do all the hard work in the background. It's hours freed up. But it also means that Colleen doesn't have to be the only person holding all of this inside of her head. Same pattern, different task.

Salena Knight (12:04.898)
The ordering process, like the pick and pack process, had been optimized around one person. And that one person was already at peak capacity. Near the end of the conversation, Colleen said something that I kept thinking about. She said, I'm happy where I am. I just know I could be doing more. That's not contentment. That is someone who has built a ceiling so solid that they've started to mistake it for a flaw. I'm happy where I am, as in, I've accepted this.

This is just how it is. But underneath it, I just know I could be doing more. As in, this could be bigger. I just can't see the way through. The cost of misreading this as a trust problem, a control problem, a mindset problem, is that you keep looking for a person to handle of this off to, but you don't can't find them. Or if you do find them, it doesn't work out because there is no process for them to follow. And so what ends up happening? You take it back and you are right back at where you started.

Doing the thing that you built for your brain and nobody else's. The business stays exactly as big as it as you personally can hold. Getting to the next level, making more money, hitting a million, five million, twenty million, whatever that number is for you. It isn't some dramatic twist of fate. It's not winning the e-commerce lottery. It's I offloaded the thing that was taking five hours a day, and the five hours I got back, I put into the things that the business needs from me. And as a result,

We made thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process. That's all it is. One thing handed off, hours freed up. Another task automated, two hours freed up. All of that compounding starts. But you can't get into compounding all of these things when you are still the only person who runs the system. Here's what I want you to do with this. Pick one thing in your business that you genuinely believe.

Nobody else could do as well as you. Not dishwasher stacking. The thing where if someone offered you to take it off your hands, your gut reaction would be, well, you're not going to do it as well as me. And then ask yourself, why? Is it because that task genuinely, genuinely requires your specific expertise, your years of knowledge, your skill, something that takes time to develop? Or is it because the way you do it hasn't been written down?

Salena Knight (14:31.18)
Those are two very completely different situations and they need two very completely different responses. If it is genuinely complex, okay, great. What's the plan to keep it with you intentionally or find someone who can eventually grow into it? If it's just that it's never been written down, or that it only works for you, well, there's the work. It's not hiring, it's not a mindset shift, it's just documentation, it's just a process.

It's making sure that the thing that lives in your head exists somewhere that a stranger could find it on Tuesday morning. Because you can't hand off that gut instinct, but you can turn instinct into a process. And a process can belong to anyone. So start there. Pick one thing, ask the question. Thank you so much for being here. I will see you on the next episode. So that's a wrap. I'd love to hear what insight you've gotten from this episode.

And how you're going to put it into action. If you're a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena Knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently, or gave you some inspiration, or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review on your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the

The more independent retail and e-commerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it's a win for you, a win for your community, and a win for your customers.