How Delegation Can Fuel Your Business's Success
We understand the desire to control all areas of your business, but you can't realistically do it all. Here's how to delegate certain tasks and actually gain more control over your business.
When Skills Become Liabilities
Entrepreneurs are known for having unbridled determination and fierce independence. While these attributes can help lay a foundation for a startup, they aren't always the most practical assets in its day-to-day operations.
It makes sense that entrepreneurs would want full autonomy over all aspects of their businesses. After all, the typical entrepreneur single-handedly takes ideas from concept to creation by gathering resources, recognizing opportunities, cultivating networks and implementing strategies. This often promotes a jack-of-all-trades mindset that can help fuel entrepreneurial success.
Over time, however, founders are faced with all sorts of management challenges as their businesses expand. To ensure growth, smart entrepreneurs learn how to effectively work on the business, instead of working intensely within it.
Reframing Your Outlook
While it makes sense for entrepreneurs to use their unique talents on big, important jobs; there's rarely a good reason to burn the midnight oil completing tedious operational tasks. Despite this realization, some business owners still resist delegation due to cost concerns, lack of trust or outright perfectionism. In many cases, however, all of these reasons are only perceptual. Despite common preconceptions, there are ways to secure help from highly trained support people without paying for yearly salaries, bonuses, paid vacations, 401K plans and medical insurance.
Finding Reliable People
When a growing venture requires skill sets beyond an entrepreneur's expertise or bandwidth, the founder must seek out talent. Unfortunately, while there are a number of benefits to having a large full-time staff, cost is not one of them. Because they operate with limited resources, most startups can't afford a trained team of in-house employees. In turn, many entrepreneurs rely on skilled virtual assistants to handle daily administrative and receptionist duties.
In addition to unchaining entrepreneurs from tedious tasks, specialized virtual assistants are able to handle demanding and diversified schedules. The right support professional often brings unique skills that might fall outside a business owner's expertise, including web development and maintenance, professional writing, billing, bookkeeping, social media management or market research. Since they have undertaken comprehensive training procedures, virtual assistants can also acquire a deep familiarity with each entrepreneur’s business for timely support that's tailored to the client's unique needs.
Gaining More Control
According to research, most entrepreneurs have difficulty fitting a day's worth of work into a single 24 hour period. A recent survey showed that more than eight out of ten small business owners work well over 40 hours per week, while just under 20 percent work more than 60 hours. In most cases, a lot of these hours are spent on daily operational tasks and other time-sucking responsibilities.
Many entrepreneurs relentlessly tackle these jobs, because they want to maintain control over their businesses. But do you really have control if you're unable to spend your time working on the things you value most? By delegating lower-level responsibilities, you can better control your business trajectory by focusing your talents on growing your company.
Intelligent Office offers innovative business solutions for busy entrepreneurs. Contact our office to learn how our highly trained virtual assistants can help you meet your unique business challenges.
