At the beginning of any business, the owner does almost everything himself/herself…. or even does 100% of everything. And this is normal.
However, as your business progresses, you get to a point where you are increasingly overwhelmed with work. Something more,
the more successful you become, the more tasks you accumulate and the busier you get.
And less time is left for important, strategic things.
You are probably familiar with the concept of the four dimensions of time. In my opinion, the first to promote it was Stephen Covey (the author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People), but you can find it in many other authors and teachers on personal development.
In general, these 4 dimensions refer to things that are urgent or non-urgent on the one hand and important or unimportant on the other. Over 95% of business owners and managers are so focused on the things that are urgent (whether they are important or unimportant) that they do not have time to focus on the important but non-urgent things.
However, what are the consequences if you have such a reactive mode and spend most of your time on day-to-day operations?
When you start doing everything and being responsible for everything and coordinating everything, there is no time left to work on the business . Think about it: most people work in business, but every small business owner needs to work on building new systems that will bring them more business in the future. These systems (marketing strategies to attract new clients, an approach for follow-up communication with clients, a referral system, etc.) may not be urgent to work on them right now, but if you do, your business moves to a whole new level.
And the question now is:
how to free up time to work not only on day-to-day operations, but also proactively on our business?
The first solution is relatively simple: to delegate all activities that could be done by someone else . This seems easy to say, but not so easy to apply.
What is likely to happen if you try to delegate your tasks to other people?
From my own experience, I know how we think we cannot delegate things to another person because no one else can do it as good as us. Or the risk is to convince yourself that you can’t afford to hire an extra person. You know, the money factor…. “I can’t afford to pay a full salary.”
In fact, each of us can be the best at one, two, or three things only .
And if, for example, you are the best at attracting clients for your business, then it is right to delegate everything else to other people. And it is logical that the activities that bring little money, you can delegate to other people without a huge financial burden. Why? Because (this is what we miss when we say “I can not afford it”) in your free time you will be able to focus on the things you are best at and that probably bring the most money to the company.
I offer you
three initial steps on how to successfully delegate and free up time for yourself:
- Make a list of everything you do in a typical day (or a typical week).
- Decide immediately which of these activities you can delegate to the current people on your team.
- If you don’t have a team because you’re the the only one in your business, or your team is small, estimate how much it would cost to hire someone to take on each of the activities you do (you’ll find that it’s not really as expensive as it you think it is). Start delegating and freeing up time to grow your business and most of all to work on your marketing to attract more ideal clients.
Your task now is to make a list of these activities that you can delegate and immediately look for a solution for at least some of them – to whom you can delegate them. Don’t be in a hurry to say that you can’t afford it… .. Some of these activities will require 2-3 hours a week…. and it’s probably not so impossible to hire someone part-time (even if you only free up 2 hours a week, think about what you can do with that time and how you can generate more income than it costs you to pay someone for these 2 hours per work).
Once you free up time for the strategically important things and this starts to bring more revenue to your business, move on, delegating the rest of the things from the list you’ve made.