One of the fastest ways to stunt the growth of your business is to try to do everything yourself.
Ideally, as the owner of your business, you should be spending most of your time doing tasks that would cost $100 - $1,000 per hour to replace. Here are the types of activities you should be doing or overseeing.
- Set a daily goal
- Interact with your staff, vendors, customers and other stakeholders
- Talk to other local businesses
- Networking (i.e. business networking meetings, Chamber of Commerce, etc.)
- Track your metrics
- Determine strategic vision and values
- Business planning
- Make important decisions that affect your business overall
- Oversee your finances
- Hire, train & supervise your direct reports
- Customer service quality assurance
- Brand positioning
- Oversee marketing and advertising campaigns
- Handle legal issues
- Administrative overview
- Supervise your team (accountability)
- Monitor inventory
- Oversee tech support
- Take time to be mindful about your business
And here are the types of activities you should be delegating to others.
- Social media marketing
- Blogging
- Content marketing
- Email marketing & management
- Market research
- Social media graphics and profile setup, design and optimization
- Search engine optimization
- Web design and development
- Accounting
- Administrative tasks
- Hire, train and supervise line staff or middle managers
- Data entry
- Lead generation
- Travel arrangements
- Production or labor
- Customer service
- Bookkeeping
- IT support
- Cold calling
- Providing customer services or managing day-to-day client account activity
If you spend your day on activities that cost less than $100 per hour, not only are you placing a very low value on your time, but you’re probably not spending time doing the work that you truly enjoy.
You should be doing the essential parts of your business that no one else can do – the creative, strategic and interactive aspects of owning a business.
The mundane tasks of responding to customer requests, growing your online presence and cold calling potential clients can be time draining, not leaving you enough to do to the other parts of your business that only you should be doing.
Most entrepreneurs don’t have much capital – and it’s important to be smart with your money. But sometimes you need to invest your money – and your time – in order to make even more money.
Your focus shouldn’t be to minimize costs, but rather to maximize your return on investment (ROI).
Think of it this way – the opportunity cost for every hour spent on $25/hour tasks is the $975 you could have earned if that time was spent on the $1,000/hour activities.
What tasks are you doing that you should delegate? What tasks should you be doing that you’re not because you’re focusing on lower level tasks?
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