One of the biggest blocks you face as an entrepreneur is knowing how to leverage your time. AKA, trying to do it all yourself. This is a big issue for many entrepreneurs. And there are a million solo entrepreneurs out there whose businesses have died a sad death because they tried to do it all themselves and never leveraged their time enough to spend it on the things that would grow their business. Don’t let that be you.
The symptoms of trying to do it all yourself are:
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lots of unfinished projects
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fear of letting go
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and no delegation, which leads to a lack of results.
The effects of trying to do it all yourself are:
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lack of growth in your business
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missed opportunities
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and poorly executed projects.
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone, a big number of my coaching clients deal with this problem in their business too. So how do you fix it?
1. BUILD A TEAM
The critical shift you need to make, so you can find more hours in your week and effectively leverage your time, is to build a team.
The biggest reason most entrepreneurs don’t make this shift is they believe they can’t afford it. But if you work out how much your time is actually worth, your hourly or daily rate, what you could be doing with your hours or days if you had more time is huge. And once you work that out you’ll quickly realise you can’t afford NOT to hire a team because the return on investment is so worth it.
2. HIRE HELP NOW!
You need to hire people even before you can afford them because if you don’t you’ll end up getting caught doing all the daily tasks that someone else could be doing and you never get enough momentum to explode your results.
For all the parents out there working your butts off in your business while trying to juggle parenting, my number one piece of advice is to get a nanny. They are worth their weight in GOLD. A good one of course!
The cashflow dance is a challenge, I get that, but the amount of new businesses that have failed due to the mindset that you must do it all yourself because you can’t afford to get help is astonishingly HIGH.
3. LEARN THE BASICS & THEN DELEGATE
Now having said that, while I’m all for finding experts to handle different area of my business — there is a lot of value in learning the very basics of everything before passing it over to someone else. When you learn the basics you:
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Understand the skill required and therefore you’re more effective at hiring
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You can ask better questions and analyze the results better
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You can create instructions and a manual for others to follow, cutting down your training time
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And once you learn a skill that becomes yours for life it adding to your value as an entrepreneur.
In my business one of the smartest moves I made early on, was to hire customer support and administration help and also to outsource things such as marketing. Another thing I’ve learned the basic of has been code and HTML so I can make quick updates to our websites without needing a developer every time, but of course for bigger tasks and projects we also have a developer on call.
So having a very basic understanding of all aspects of your business is essential but thinking you need to know everything is just a block and becomes an obstacle to growing your business.
You don’t need to be an expert at everything, what you need to do is invest some time learning the basics and then find people who are experts and build a great team around you.
So ask yourself, how can I delegate so I can get back to doing what I love and growing my business?
