Beware Of Wearing All The Hats In Your Business
As a business owner you have to wear many hats to make your business work.
You have to be the Entrepreneur – the one with the ideas and the vision. You see problems and gaps in the market and are willing to take the necessary risks to solve that problem and profit from it. As you notice the gap in the market for a particular product, you hire all the right people needed to get it up and running.
You also will be the Specialist – the one that implements your vision. You take your vision or part of it, and make it a reality.
Then there’s the Manager, where you come in every day and make sure things get done, work gets delivered and the vision stays on track. They make it recurring.
It takes all three types for a business to succeed yet it’s extremely rare for a single person to be good at all three. Many small business owners are either the Entrepreneur or the Specialist or both but rarely the Manager.
This is why if you’re the sole operator of your business, you’ll need to find a way to have all three bases covered. You can do this by outsourcing or hiring.
Don’t try to take on too many things and have them slip through the gaps. Lack of having a marketing role is often why a marketing powerhouse never gets up and running the right way. It’s why e-newsletters don’t go out to subscribers or customer complaints never get answered.
The business owner might agree that tending to these things are great lead nurturing ideas but they’re too busy being Entrepreneur or Specialist and in the absence of Manager taking care of the marketing powerhouse, they don’t get done.
For your marketing powerhouse, you need to have systems in place. As you come up with marketing ideas, go out and hire graphic designers, web developers and copywriters that would make it real for you, then get admin help or use fulfillment services to make it all recurring. As shown earlier, most of this can be automated and what can’t get automated should be delegated.
Lack of a functional, running, marketing powerhouse will harm or possibly kill your business.
Once you’ve locked in what needs to be done and when, the only other thing you need to determine is who will be responsible for delivering on each of your scheduled marketing activities. Again if you’re a small or sole operator of your business, don’t try to do it all yourself. When possible make repetitive operational activities someone else’s responsibility.
This will free you up to do higher level marketing tasks like designing and testing new marketing campaigns or improving the value of your offering.
As entrepreneurs we tend to have a “can do” mindset. When something needs to be done, we get tempted to just roll up our sleeves and just do it. However, spending too much time doing things that aren’t in our area of expertise or aren’t a good use of our time can quickly become a very expensive undertaking.
Remember, when it comes to money, you can always get more of it, but when it comes to time, you can never get it back.
Another concern when it comes to entrepreneurship, is in the area of quality. Therefore, we tend to not want to outsource or delegate tasks. Will they get done as well as if you were doing them yourself? Probably not, but a rule of thumb to use is if someone else can do it 80% as good as you can, then you should delegate it.
If you’re a control freak and perfectionist, letting go can be difficult. But it’s necessary if you’re going to get scalability and leverage in your business. Otherwise you end up paying yourself minimum wage for routine tasks while sacrificing high value tasks such as building your marketing powerhouse, which can take your business to a whole new level.
Finally the most common complaint is that it’s too expensive to hire or outsource help. This was true a few years ago but not anymore thanks to the wonder of the new world economy. There’s a wide range of talent in Southeast Asia, India and Eastern Europe that will work for you at a fraction of the price of local employees and contractors.
There’s a good reason large corporations outsource a lot of their routine operations to these locations. They are full of workers that are talented, eager, well educated and are fluent in English.
You can assign tasks and have them magically happen while you sleep. It’s not just about cost, it’s about scalability. Thanks to online job boards like Upwork, Freelancer and 99 Designs, you can hire an army of personal assistants, graphic designers, web developers and almost any other skill you can imagine.
You can fill almost all types of skills on demand to work on a project basis or as part of your team on an ongoing basis. The Internet has broken down geographical barriers and enabled anyone to have a global workforce. Never before has so much talent been so readily available and been so cost effective.
Globalization of labor and talent is a reality and has been for some time. Previously reserved for large corporations, it’s now in easy reach of small to medium businesses and entrepreneurs like you and I. This is a real game changer. As entrepreneurs we should embrace change and find ways to leverage and profit from it.
My advise to you is “don’t fight it”. As you become more successful you can create local jobs as a byproduct of your success. When you have gotten to that place of success, you can give generously, benefit your local community, most of which wouldn’t be possible if your business fails.
Give Yourself the Ability to Fire Yourself
If you took some time away from your business, when you came back would it be in better or worse shape than you left it? Would you even have a business left to come back to? Think about it for a second.
Many business owners are set up where the founder or founders perform all the roles within the business. Operating in this way dooms them to remaining small and prisoners of their own business.
The end result is where they find themselves having no time to work on the business because they are too busy working in the business. They can’t get away from their own business because they haven’t developed and documented systems and processes.
They may be financially successful, their business may be thriving with a loyal base of customers but the problem is that they are stuck – shackled to their business. What would happen if they would get sick for an extended period of time – their business would cease to exist.
Your goal should be to remove the biggest bottleneck from your business – YOU. The day will come when you need to take time off, go on to another venture, hire more staff or even as mentioned before – SELL IT.
If you’re a sole operator or a small business, it’s not a problem if you’re currently performing all or most of the roles in your business. The problem lies when you have to perform all the roles in your business. If you find yourself indispensable, you are a bottleneck and the business will only move as fast as you can.
As mentioned in the section above, you can replicate your business by building business systems. One way to make the replication process possible is by using checklists. They’re easy to create, follow and track. Once you create a list of all the tasks performed in your business, you’ll be able to start documenting exactly how these tasks are performed.
Now that you have business systems in place, if you wanted to delegate or outsource a task, it’s going to be much easier to hand the person a step-by-step process rather than just giving them ad hoc training and watching over them constantly to make sure they do it right.
So now scaling your business becomes even more possible as you add people and let it run without you.
More importantly, this ensures that your customers get a consistent experience. When staff joins or leave your business you want to ensure that customers still get the same world-class experience. And having documented systems is by far the best way I know of doing this.
