It’s a familiar story. You start a business but then find yourself working all the hours you have, often for less than you pay your staff. It’s hardly the dream most people set out with – to create time for family, earn more, or simply enjoy the freedom of working when and how you want.
So, what’s holding you back from running the business you dreamed of? Here are three prime suspects – the things that steal your time and energy:
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Hoarding responsibility
No one does your job better than you, right? If you’re an ‘owner/doer’ – someone with a great technical background in your product or service – it can be hard to relinquish your hold on the ‘doing’ in favour of the ‘owning’. But, if you don’t put people in place to take care of the ‘doing’, you deprive yourself of the space you need to look at the bigger picture. If you’re too busy fulfilling orders, you can’t look at strategy.
It’s not just about putting ‘doers’ in place. It’s about recruiting talented people who you can trust to make decisions without you. Ultimately, you want people who do more than keep your business ticking over; they’re ready to help you grow it.
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Inefficiency
Many clients come to me complaining of a lack of time: time to get the basics done, time to plan to grow, and time to focus on other things for themselves. A lot of that comes down to chaos – time spent chasing payments, or starting orders from scratch, for instance. In a lot of cases, that chaos could be greatly reduced by having the right systems and processes in place.
Although it might initially take time to implement, having a defined structure to how you work could seriously free you up in the long term. Structure also makes it easier to expand – taking on staff, increasing your product range, or even progressing towards an ‘endgame’ like franchising, for example.
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Fire-fighting
Do you feel as though you’re constantly on the back foot? If there’s no space to be proactive, only reactive, there’s no big picture thinking happening and the days pass with little sense of onward progress. You need to be able to plan for the future – your future – as well as the future of your business. This is really a case of mastering the basics so you run your business, not the other way around.
How to reclaim your time
Capturing these common ‘time thieves’ is about more than freeing you up to do more strategical thinking. It’s really about putting you in a place where you can concentrate on getting the things you want out of your small business. Do you know how many holidays you’d like to take a year, for instance? Or, the kind of hours you’d like to work?
Running a small business can be a difficult, and at times isolating experience. If that rings a bell, I’d like to help. Together, we can create the kind of business you always wanted to run.
Book your first FREE coaching session (worth £495) to learn more.
