If you answered yes to any of these questions, you will benefit from what I am about to share with you, because I was just like you not too many years ago. But, due to what seemed like sheer dumb-luck at the time, I discovered a way to turn it all around.

On December 1, 1984, at the age of thirty-five, I bought Girl Friday Telephone Answering Service, an ailing telecom business in my hometown of Bend, Oregon. The total purchase price was $21,000; the down payment, $5,000, which I borrowed. There were seven employees, 140 small clients ($40 per month each), and 400 square feet of office space.

I changed the name to Centratel to reflect the changing times and then set out to blaze new trails as any new business owner does. But it didn’t happen.

Despite growing volume, our profits weren’t increasing. The business was a disorganized nightmare, always on the brink of disaster, and my personal life, what there was of it, devolved into shambles. Within a year, I went through a divorce and then proceeded to do my best to bring up my two children as a single, custodial parent. Things were bad.

Marching ahead without pause, we quickly began to see results as confusion diminished and cash flow came under control. In the first six months, my work week dropped from a hundred hours to sixty. Then, in the next six months, it fell below forty. In the next two-year period, our client base grew from three hundred to seven hundred as my work hours still progressed downward.

It took a long time to straighten things out, five long years actually. But as I look back, that’s understandable because we were figuring out the details of the Work the System methodology from scratch. We invested (and sometimes inadvertently wasted) time and money as we experimented with new concepts, tried to find the right management people, and stumbled with the system documentation.

Despite the setbacks and the additional workload, my physical involvement with the company’s daily operations continued to decline. Today, I spend just a couple of hours a week working on Centratel business. One of those hours is for our weekly staff meeting and the other is for paying bills and attending to various R&D efforts.