Small Business Owners Face some Big Challenges
“If we want something done right, we have to do it ourselves.” We’ve all heard that statement – especially from people who are micromanaging a situation or trying to do everything all alone. That might have worked in college when we were assigned a group project and we ended up doing it all by ourselves, but it’s not how we should run our business!
Many business owners are great technicians. They know how to paint a house, they can make awesome chicken parmesan, they understand how to prepare perfect taxes… and that makes it extremely difficult to let go and let the staff take care of those parts of the business. We are business owners because we wanted to own a business – not because we wanted to work seven days a week and run every aspect of the business. If we’re spending every day in the field running our businesses, how can we be focused on building our business?
As we head into this new year, we might want to consider challenging ourselves to hang up that tool belt or take off the apron and spend the next few months trusting our staff to run the day to day aspects of the business. We don’t need to step in and make every pan of lasagna and, if we don’t think our staff can handle it, then we need to train them to do the job at the level we expect. We can be available for guidance, but we can’t step in to make every decision and run every job.
Once we’re able to step back from the daily technical needs of our business, we can turn our attention to training our company leaders, building and implementing systems so the business can run without us, marketing and promoting the great products or services we provide, etc.
Take time to clarify where your business and you want to be at the end of this year, then set goals to make it happen. One of those goals could be to spend more time working on our business rather then in the business. . If we spend the amount of time we would normally spend in the business working toward that goal, we will be amazed at what we can accomplish.
Every business owner understands how difficult it can be to delegate the daily operations of our businesses and take on the role of a CEO, but that’s the only way to grow a successful business without burning the candle at both ends. If you find that your business can’t run without you or you can’t seem to delegate as needed, then give me a call. I can help you to develop systems and processes so that you can learn to work on your business rather than always in it.
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