Hi there Crusaders.
How many functions are you personally responsible for in your business?
One of the biggest challenges that entrepreneurs face is the ongoing struggle to grow our businesses because we’re wearing too many hats.
We do everything in our business.
We ARE the business!!!
There are two underlying reasons for this:
- When we started our business, available financing options were very limited, if not completely absent. We simply couldn’t afford to hire help and had to do everything ourselves.
- We’re control freaks at heart and don’t trust others to operate unsupervised in our business. We believe we can do it better, and it’ll take longer to explain to somebody else than to just do it ourselves anyway. (Sound familiar?)
But just because this comes naturally to us doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It’s far smarter to leverage your time with talented help than try and do it all yourself.
It also allows you to work fewer hours inside the business, and more hours on the business.
My advice is that you start sharing your workload, in a structured and controlled way, as soon as you can afford to.
It’s a function of Time-versus-Money.
Initially, you have to save money by spending your time doing stuff you can’t afford to outsource. But, you need to get to a point where you’re spending money to save your time; as soon as possible.
So for the next two weeks, we’ll look at the various options and opportunities that you can use to outsource certain functions. To help you create your own support structure over time.
You see, your time is way too valuable to either:
- try to specialise in areas that are not part of your core business focus, or
- waste on mundane administrative and repetitive tasks.
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So . . . let’s get started.
First, you want to create three lists to identify everything that you CAN outsource.
1 – Things you hate doing.
Write down what you dislike doing in your business on a day-to-day basis. This could be anything from administration to bookkeeping. These are usually simple, repetitive tasks that can be fairly easily taught. Then reinforced with a documented procedure for completion.
(This is where you start building your Standard Operating Procedures?)
2 – Things you can’t do yourself.
The daily elements of the company you don’t have any experience in. These could consist of social media marketing, graphic designing, or accounting and financial management. The stuff that you’re either not legally qualified to do, or that you know you’re not good at.
3 – Things you shouldn’t be doing.
These can be real game-changers for your business. Ask yourself honestly: What shouldn’t I be doing? Is this my calling? Do I want to be an expert in this? What are my real priorities? Is this a craft I want to master? Is my time better spent on something else?
These are often once-off functions like creating a logo, building your website, or doing specific market research. They can also be ongoing activities like creating content, making videos, or copywriting.
This may take some time and several sessions to build three comprehensive lists, but it will be worth it. Now save this list and start systematically offloading these functions to either a Virtual Assistant (VA) or a professional Freelancer.
For the next two weeks, I’ll cover the pros and cons of appointing and using these outsourced professionals as part of your ‘virtual team’. Next week we’ll cover freelancers, and then virtual assistants the following week.
If you would rather I covered Virtual Assistants before Freelancers, drop me a line and let me know before the end of the week, and I’ll change it.
In the meantime, get cracking on preparing your three lists. Good luck.
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