Entrepreneurs are the first ones with the great idea and, more importantly, the first ones to bring it to life. You do more in an hour than 20 people can do in one day.
But how long can that last? Entrepreneurs have a tendency to fall into the “I have to do it all” trap. No one gets the vision as much as you do and no one can possibly do your work as well as you.
In falling into this trap you create a bottleneck. There are limited hours in the day so do you update the database, make those new business calls, work on that report, meet with your product vendor, confirm meetings”¦
If you are like me you probably answered, “Yes, I do it all and stay up late to get it done.” I hear you! But, after 20 years running businesses and launching my own, I’ve realized that truly successful entrepreneurs don’t do it all. In fact, they do very little. It’s not because you can’t, it’s because you shouldn’t.
As the entrepreneur your main job should be to grow the business, not manage the business. Growing the business means you are focused on revenue generating tactics. Managing the business means doing day-to-day tasks.
Entrepreneurs who thrive know that their time is best spent on high-impact activities that bring in business, whether that’s a product or service sales. Here are a few time-intensive activities that you can refer to others to help you focus and hey, if you get the right people on board, they may even do it better than you!
- Social Media: You can write the blog, but someone else can pull it apart and grab sentences to post and tweet. They can organize, upload, and manage all of this if you provide them with great content.
- Database: A lifeline of many businesses, but let me ask, are you better served collecting the business cards that should go into the database or uploading each contact? What if you wrote notes on the back of the card on what to do next and someone else uploads it and even creates tasks in your calendar to follow up? That’s more like it.
- Research: If you have a client, it’s wise to do some research on them even while they are still prospects. There are people out there that are brilliant at doing research and providing you with a folder of rich learnings. Let them do the research, you can spend your time reading and interpreting the data.
Look at your business. List out all the things you do during the week. Now go back and circle in orange the high-impact activities that grow the business. Whatever is left are things you should consider outsourcing.
About The Guest Author: Tamara Kleinberg is a serial entrepreneur, idea tinkerer, lover of disruption, and the Chief Imaginator at imaginibbles. Her imaginibbles Shoppe is a hub for entrepreneurs to showcase and sell their shockingly cool, crazy-creative products and a must-stop for all rule-breakers, sideways thinkers, and all who seek the latest and greatest imaginative, not yet known to all gifts, products, and must-haves.
Business Diagram Photo via Shutterstock
