Your Bad Backend Makes You A Bad Boss

For a stay-at-home mom, that first week of “no kids at home anymore” is weirdly emotional.

The day kid #5 walked into kindergarten like he owned the place, I spent it floating on an inner tube in my friend’s pool, listening to 80’s music and giggling like we were 16 again. But by day 3, I was standing there like, “What do I do with all this time now?”

I had spent 15 years teaching myself how to build things online: Blogs, podcasts, digital marketing, sales… ‘for fun’. All of it, while raising littles and start thinking, “I’m pretty sure I can get someone to pay me for these skills.”

And I wasn’t looking to start my own business at that point. I was just finally done pretending those skills were “cute side-hustle skills.”

There was a woman I’d hired as a coach at one point, and she was looking for an integrator (basically a business manager who makes the business actually function). She’d seen what I could do as her client. She liked my work. She trusted me.

She’d also just had this big revenue jump, the $150k kind-of-big, and her goal was to scale to $250k the next year. So she hired me, and I was so excited…at first.

Then I started working inside her business.

Friend, I was NOT prepared for what I walked into.

Nothing lived where it belonged. Important info was scattered everywhere. Half of what existed was outdated. There were NO clear processes.

And every week, she wanted “results” from me… but she had zero systems for me to run, and no training for me to build from.

Week after week, I could feel the weight of her business starting to crash on top of me.

And here’s the part that still makes me laugh a little (now that I’m not crying about it): after three months of getting off our calls and basically dissolving into tears, I had a full-body, primal “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!” scream… after she clicked out of our meeting.

Because no matter what I did, it wasn’t good enough… and the real problem was: she didn’t even know what “good” was.

She couldn’t define it. She couldn’t measure it. She couldn’t communicate it.

And she definitely couldn’t support it with any kind of infrastructure.

So I finally had a come-to-Jesus moment with her and said (in nicer words than I felt like using):

“Here’s the problem. You have no systems. Your backend is a mess. There’s no cohesiveness between what you say you want and what actually exists. You’re blaming me for outcomes I can’t control. Something has to change. We either put systems in place and train me properly… or I quit.”

And her response was: “I could learn how to communicate with you better… or I could just hire somebody cheaper.”

And that was that.

Here’s why I’m telling you this:

I want you to be a successful business owner faster and a messy backend turns good team members into “bad hires.”

If your business is held together by random voice recordings in your Notes app (you know who you are) and whatever you remember at 10:47 PM that becomes the fire you have to put out at 8 AM…

If you can’t clearly define what success looks like, be it deliverables, standards, timelines, decision-making, priorities…

If you keep thinking, “I just haven’t found the right person yet… ”

Friend, this is the part most people hate to hear: the fix usually isn’t to just hire better or even to use AI.

(Don’t shoot the messenger)

The fix is to clean up the backend.

After that first online job experience, I stopped telling people I was going to “work for them” and started telling them the truth: I was going to “manage their business for them.”

I leaned into backend systems, built an online business management company and kept seeing the same pattern over and over:

Some people were embarrassed by the mess… and they let me help them fix it.

Some people were embarrassed by the mess… and they got angry.

But either way, the problem wasn’t me. And it wasn’t their past VA’s. And it wasn’t their past contractors.

It was the backend of their business and if they wanted to scale, or even just sustain it, they HAD to make some changes.

Weekly Challenge:

Backend Triage (because “everything” is not a strategy)

Make a list of the top 10 backend fires in your business. The stuff that makes you feel low-key stressed even when revenue is good.

Examples:

• Client onboarding.
• Invoicing / getting paid on time.
• File organization.
• Project tracking.
• Content Creation.
• Fulfillment (how work actually gets done).
• SOPs (or the fact that you don’t have them).
• Team roles (who owns what).
• Follow-up and handoffs.

Then do two things:

1. Circle the one that’s making everything else harder.
2. For the next 7 days, focus on fixing that one thing like it’s your job. (Because it is.)

(Want AI to help you with this? Subscribe to The Caffeinated Entrepreneur: The Refill to get the AI prompt that helps you implement the Weekly Challenge every Friday)

Because you likely don’t need more people. And you probably don’t really need more AI.

You need one less point of chaos.

If you want me to show you what this looks like when it’s done right with systems first, AI second, team third, I’m teaching a free webinar on building an AI-powered business in Notion (aka: your operating system, so you actually have something to hand off when you hire).

Grab your seat here: https://leadsmarterco.com/webinar

Now,  DM me the word HERO and tell me: What’s the one backend “room” in your business that needs to be cleaned out first?