Learn to Delegate and/or Outsource
As we learned in the Basic Business Concepts course, no one is truly successful by trying to be a one-person show. You need a team. The problem is that a lot of small business people have a hard time determining what to delegate.
You may have started your own business so you could be your own boss, but you also end up being your own sales staff, secretary, accountant, publicist, customer service department, financial planner and anything else needed. But not all of these tasks associated with running a business have equal value, especially if you look at them in terms of your personal Return On Investment (R.O.I.)
Using your management tools, list all of the different business-related tasks you perform in a single week to determine how much time you are spending on each type of task. For example, how much time did you spend on bookkeeping or on marketing?
One of the easiest ways to determine your personal Return on Investment is to simply look at the bottom line. Add up the number of hours you spent in a particular year on bookkeeping tasks. Now consider how you make your profit. What do you charge to deliver the service you provide, or how much product would you sell in that time frame?
For instance, if you spent ten hours on bookkeeping tasks, and you charge $50 an hour for your services - then those ten hours you spent on bookkeeping have 'cost' you a potential $500. Let's extrapolate that out. How much does doing that particular task yourself cost you over the course of a month and a year? In this example, doing your own bookkeeping costs you a potential $1200 a month. The bottom line says that you can't afford to keep doing this yourself.
Money is not the only way of determining your personal Return on Investment. There is also the 'human' cost. How are those hours you are tucked away doing bookkeeping affecting the things that are important to you, such as your family life, lifestyle, or even your health? Is bookkeeping more important than your family? I don't think so.
The basic reason most people go into business for themselves is because they want to create a better life for them and their families. If you spend all of your time trying to be a one-man show, then not only will your business stall or fail, but there is a good chance that the other parts of your life will start to fall apart also.
For instance, I have the business knowledge to do practically every part of this Institute. But I know that by doing that, I would lose thousands of dollars because of the extra months it would take to get the site up and running. The other point is that if I am going to go through all of the work of building a business (and it is a LOT of work), then I want to enjoy doing it. Well, the parts that I enjoy are writing/educating people and designing the web site. So that's what I should be doing. The artwork, beta testing, accounting, moderating forums, and some of the marketing can be done by others working within my guidelines. That leaves me time to go to the movies once in a while.