Entrepreneurs Money Tips

If you could find a way to spend less time doing the day-to-day work in your business and simultaneously increase your profits, would you take advantage of it?

Of course, what small business owner wouldn’t jump at this chance?

Unfortunately, while it sounds good to many of us, the discipline and time required to delegate work and responsibility often times stops us from hiring help.  Although it would allow us to be less tactical, more strategic, and as a result more profitable, outsourcing tasks often times does not happen.

The Entrepreneurial Myth
Michael Gerber documents this scenario in his classic book, the E-Myth. He tells the story of an entrepreneur whose business won’t grow because she tries to take on all the necessary tasks herself.  He goes on to explain how using something he calls the “Entrepreneurial Model” allows business owners to make their enterprises competitive by focusing their attention on the strategic aspects of their market.

Said another way, the Entrepreneurial model has less to do with what’s done in a business and more to do with how it’s done. The commodity isn’t what’s important - the way it’s delivered is.

When the Entrepreneur creates the model he surveys the world and asks, “Where is the opportunity”? Having identified it, he then goes back to the drawing board and constructs a solution to the frustrations he finds among a certain group of customers. A solution in the form of a business that looks and acts in a very specific way, the way the customer needs it to look and act, not the Entrepreneur.

“How will my business look to the customer” the Entrepreneur asks. “How will my business stand out from all the rest”?

If you’re so busy focusing on the day to day, nitty gritty details you’ll never have time to ask the questions or do the research that Gerber suggests and your business will eventually struggle as a result.

Don’t get me wrong, the daily work must continue in order for the business to survive and grow, the key point is you don’t have to do all the work yourself.  You have to know what needs to be done and how to find the right people to do it.  This may not be obvious right from the beginning, in which case you may not be ready to outsource the work.

Where Should You Start?
As you work in your business, you’ll recognize the tasks that are most important to your business. Not only that, you’ll figure out which ones you enjoy and are good at.  You’ll also notice the areas where you struggle and could use help.

The easiest place to start outsourcing is probably in the areas you’re the worst at and like the least.  Think about what happens if you pay an expert to do work you’re not good at. They’ll likely perform the task faster and better than you. Then you’ll have extra time to optimize your current income, study your market for opportunities & threats, and build stronger relationship with your customers.  The benefits of outsourcing the work can outweigh the costs of hiring someone.

How Do You Know When It’s Time?
Your business will probably hit a point where you feel like it’s no longer growing. If you know you could bring in more income by improving certain portions of your business and/or expanding into additional opportunities but just don’t have time, that’s probably a sign you’re ready to outsource some tasks. 

It may not be the most comfortable decision you’ve made and it will take time to do it right but hiring help is vital the future success of your company.  I’ll talk more in later articles about how to find people to help with your business and how to define what tasks to assign them.