If there’s one mistake that holds business owners back it’s this: they try to do too much. And, I happen to be guilty of this myself.
I don’t mean that they try to grow too fast or expand too far. I mean that they try to do too much on their own. They tend to look at their business from the perspective of self-employment, rather than as a business owner.
When we are in a self employment mindset we are focused on….
- Creating our own content.
- Writing and/or sending our own newsletters.
- Posting our own social media updates.
- Building our own website.
- Doing our own bookkeeping.
- And the list goes on (and on and on).
This may seem like a great fiscal approach at first glance. However, it’s not only killing our productivity, but keeping our business from growing too.
Here’s why: We’ve created our self a glorified job and end up spending more time “figuring out” how to do all these little things, and not enough time on profit producing activities.
If designing beautiful jewelry is where your talents lie, then writing and sending a newsletter to nurture your potential customers is a waste of your time. Are you a bookkeeper? Then learning how to build a website is taking you away from important money-making tasks. If you’re a service provider, spending time creating a new sales page for your new service is not a good use of your time.
Others can do those things more efficiently (and for less money) than you can.
Here’s another problem with trying to do everything ourselves—we burnout or start to dislike our business. And when you’re burnt out and/or unhappy with your biz, your creativity goes down the drain and you AVOID your business like the plague.
Before you know it, things are slipping through the cracks. Newsletters don’t get sent, products don’t get added to the website, follow-up calls aren’t made, sales pages aren’t completed and business building tasks never get finished.
There’s got to be a better way… right?
It takes a little bit of a mindset shift, but getting out of your own way, means shifting from self-employment to business owner.
The key to really getting things done in your business and building momentum is to know where your strengths and weaknesses lie, and to only do those things that you are good at and enjoy. Everything else can be handled by someone else.
So with that said, lets add more time in our schedule, avoid burnout and make things more fun!
What was that… did I hear a resounding Hell Yes?!
Awesome! Lets Do This…
Start by making a list of all the tasks that you find yourself procrastinating on. Those are the top candidates for outsourcing. Prioritize your list according to just how much you dislike the task, as well as how easy it would be to turn over to someone else.
For example, you might really hate to update Quickbooks, so you would hire a bookkeeper. Or, maybe you never have time to send a newsletter or don’t enjoy it — then outsourcing this task should be at the top of your list.
You don’t have to outsource everything in your business, but you’ll find that when you concentrate on what you do well and let go of the things you struggle with, you’ll love your business a lot more, and be naturally more productive, too.
Now, I want to hear from you… what’s at the tip top of your list to outsource? And, if you’ve already outsourced some of your tasks, what are you over the moon happy about having done it? Leave a comment below!
