Are you a busy business owner feeling overwhelmed by the mountain of admin tasks you have to complete each day? Are these low-level tasks preventing you from propelling your business forward?
On this episode of Get Savvy, we're talking about the trap that we see so many business owners fall into:
Trying to be all of the things in your business.
When you first start out in business, it is all you.
You're going to do all the marketing, the sales, the delivery, the strategy, all the accounts, the admin, everything. You are all the things!
But you’re spreading yourself too thin, and that can't go on forever.
As humans, and as business owners, we can’t do all of the things in our business really well.
It's just not possible. Inevitably the wheels are going to fall off the wagon.
It can be a bit of a reality check for business owners to realise that they’re holding on to so much and that they might need the help of someone else.
We hear all sorts of excuses about why someone doesn’t want help with these tasks:
“Nobody else can do the things that I do really well.”
“No one's going to know what to do or have the skills.”
“Only I know how to do these things.”
“No one else is going to care enough about my business or the things that they need to do.”
Affordability often comes into it as well. For example, not being able to afford to have someone else do these tasks, or feeling like it's a waste of money because you could do them yourself.
We also see business owners not thinking that they have time to put into training someone.
“It's going to take me so long, it's just easier if I do it myself.”
It's easier if I just do it myself.
To propel your business forward, you have to move past the mindset of ‘it’s just easier if I do it myself’.
Because you're right, at the start it is easier if you do it yourself, and faster. But if you keep doing it, you're always going to do it.
This leads into the opportunity cost of you doing these things (even though it seems easier to do them yourself), that prevent you from doing the important things in your business.
You're not generating revenue, you're not getting leads, you're not making sales, you're not servicing clients - all of those really, really important things that will impact your bottom line.
You're focusing on admin tasks that shouldn't be a priority for you as a business owner.
Here are the five types of tasks you should be delegating:
- Accounts
- Repetitive tasks
- Making arrangements (event planning, appointment bookings)
- Content creation
- Anything that’s outside of your skill set
These five categories are the easiest to outsource first.
Be conscious over the next week with every single task you’re doing, noting down anything that falls into those five categories. You’ll start to see the kind of things that you can get off your to-do list.
So, what could you actually do to grow your business once you've freed up that time?
As a business owner, you know the strategies that are going to have the biggest impact on your business, and they're all going to be based around revenue generation.
Finding and following up on leads, networking, servicing your current clients. When you have that time and headspace to focus on these things, you do a better job of them.
Want to learn more about the types of tasks you can delegate? Check out our resource ‘101 things to delegate to a virtual assistant’.
