It’s not a pretty picture. The D-I-Y, self-employed, superstar business owner who becomes the bottleneck of their own business. Is that you?
Many of my friends are busy, overloaded business owners and they often say they can’t out-source.
I’ve seen business owners drowning with email in-boxes overflowing, mail stacked on a desk. Checks lost in piles of paper. Marketing campaigns set up and forgotten – unmonitored. I once did a marketing analysis and found my client had spent $36,000 on a digital ad campaign over the course of a year and it had resulted in $0 sales! She was shocked because she had not been looking. She was not looking because she was doing so many hats herself. She needed smart, highly motivated support who could provide her with the right data so she could look in an instant and know what to direct.
Sometimes customer service requests or complaints sit on the owner’s desk unhandled only because they have not taken the time to write up how to handle such matters so staff could take the ball and run with it.
Some of these business owners have dreams of building large businesses and some just wish they could take weekends off. No matter what the goal, there is a solution.
In order for expansion to occur it is necessary to understand that hats must be documented and turned over to the right person who can get the job done correctly.
But how do you do that when you are so busy with your existing day to day production?
Unburdening from the top down is the solution.
It means freeing up your valuable minutes so that you can write the policies and technical “how to’s” that will make it possible for someone else to eventually step into the “shoes” of specific roles that should be delegated.
The easiest, quickest way to do this is to hire an Executive Assistant. This can be someone on-site or remote.
This person begins by handling and sorting all communications. Routing the vital business traffic to the appropriate person or to you. No more minutes wasted sifting through spam on non-vital comms. Even more importantly no more overlooked vital communications. A trained executive assistant can also pull data and do analysis of stats and finances providing key insights that open the door to more income with less waste.
One tool I use when helping overloaded executives is to have them list out all the jobs or hats they are doing. Maybe you spend 3 hours a week on bookeeping. Or perhaps you are doing bank recs yourself. Maybe you aren’t handling the finances until year-end.
Perhaps you need help writing the manuals for your business. This is another project that can be out-sourced. Simply use your voice memo feature or a transcription app to create 1st drafts that communicate how you do things or how you want them done and let an assistant transcribe, edit and format your procedures and policies into beautiful PDFs you can keep in your on-line library or print and have as policy binders in your office.
Unburdening from the top down and documenting policy and procedure is the only way you will build a business that can run without you.
If you need help with off-shoring or out-sourcing any of these functions, Expansion Desk is here to help. Schedule a consultation and experience expansion and relief!
by Jennifer Kelley Maas,
Co-Founder, Expansion Desk
