Are you looking to start your own business? The path towards entrepreneurship can be a long and arduous process, often involving long hours of dedication and sacrifice. If you’re highly motivated and in it to win it, this tip will help you to become a business powerhouse. You’ll produce your best content/products in a fraction of the time and scale at a much quicker pace. Let’s dive in and see how you can build your business quickly and efficiently.
Starting Your Business
If you’re looking to start a business, it’s likely that you have developed a skill. This skill has been mastered over time to the point where you can provide value to others. It’s at this point you can begin working on building your business. The time it takes to launch can take any number of hours, days, months, or even years depending on your business. Once you’re ready, it’s off to the races!…or so it seems.
Wearing Many Hats
The life of an entrepreneur is one that requires you to wear many hats. After launch, you may find yourself doing any number of tasks outside of your true skillset. Someone starting an online business may find themselves learning about and performing any number of the following responsibilities:
- Finding domain & web hosting
- HTML
- CSS
- Content Management System (WordPress/Drupal)
- Conversion software/other plugins
- Design (design software, branding, image editing, etc.)
- Research
- SEO
- Analytics
- Content creation
- Product creation
- Social media marketing
- Email marketing
- Company vision/future
- Bookkeeping
- Taxes
- Plenty more!
Now, that’s quite the list. Someone could dedicate an entire career to simply one of these tasks and as an entrepreneur, you may encounter them all. It’s good to have some knowledge of these tasks, but the problem is that all of them will eventually bog you down. Let’s take a look at the issue with an example.
Let’s say you’re a Shopify pro and you’ve created a number of online stores that are doing very well. Daily tasks include managing returns, customer complaints, writing emails, marketing your products, and so on. You have the idea to create an online course showing others how to build their own online store. You begin working on it when you can, but find yourself bogged down by the daily support of your online stores and never really get around to it until years later. At which point, sales are marginal because there’s so much competition.
Time Spent
The problem here comes down to where you spend your time. A 5 minute email here and there throughout the day or some image editing for the website isn’t that big of a deal, is it? It’s not a problem until you realize it adds up over time. Should a Shopify pro who’s crushing it with their online store be spending their time writing emails to customers or creating/uploading product pictures and descriptions? Likely not, they should be spending a majority of their time focusing on what they do best and how to grow the business. This is where the key to business growth steps in…delegation.
Delegation for the Win
Delegation is the process of handing responsibilities off to others. As a skilled professional, you don’t need to spend your time on tasks that can easily be handled by others. For instance, as a Shopify professional, you could easily delegate email, customer service, and marketing to a qualified virtual assistant. This would free up your time to focus on creating new products and services, to fuel business growth.
Now, I know what you’re saying, “I can’t afford a virtual assistant”. But it’s quite possible, you can’t afford not to have one. Yes, it’s probable you will take a $15-$20/hour hit on your cash flow, but over time, it will allow you to grow your business substantially larger than you could have otherwise.
For example, say that hiring a virtual assistant allowed you to create that Shopify course within a few months. You start making sales immediately that accumulate to hundreds of thousands of dollars by the end of the year. Does that hourly virtual assistant cost really matter at that point? No, it’s negligible compared to the profit, time, and business growth gained.
Becoming a Business Powerhouse
To fuel your business growth through delegation, you need to analyze your daily tasks. Anything that can be done for under $20 per hour should be delegated to someone else. This not only goes for business tasks, but daily life in general. As a high level professional, should you be concerning yourself with yard work and chores every weekend? Unless you find yard work therapeutic, it should be delegated to others so you can focus on more important things like family/friends and business growth.
The more time you focus on what you do best, the more business you will generate. This is how businesses grow and how your business will grow. You can’t be a one-man/woman show forever because that will severely limit growth while your time slips away on minor tasks. Hire out and fuel your business by focusing your time where it counts.
What are your thoughts, have you delegated work to others or plan to in the near future? Leave any comments or questions below!
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