Do You Have a Job or a Business?
Planning. Training and development. Sales. Office support. Marketing. Customer service and support. Bookkeeping.
Small business owners, especially when they are just starting out, try to do all the jobs themselves. It’s not easy to let go, delegate and trust someone else to do what we ourselves know how to do so well, and we hesitate to take on the expense of hiring and outsourcing.
But to be successful, small business owners need to protect their time so they can grow and evolve the business. We need employees and partners. If we get stuck spending all our time working IN our business, we won’t have time to work ON our business.
Working IN vs working ON your business
When you are super busy, it’s easy to lose sight of how you are spending your day. So, the first step is identifying the tasks you are performing and sort them into two groups, working in and working on. Here are some examples of each category, but you may have others that correspond to your business.
Working IN
- Making, doing and fixing stuff for the office, shop or retail environment
- Activities related to posting jobs, screening candidates and related hiring activities
- Administrative tasks
- Answering calls and emails information requests
- Scheduling meetings
- Invoicing
Working ON
- Leadership development
- Strategic planning
- Goal setting
- Building strategic partnerships
- Automating processes and setting up systems
- Networking
Finding the right solution
Allocating your time at work is a balancing act. You’ll need to consider many factors – like your budget and your strengths – against your overall business plan and put together a competent and dedicated team to support you. At this point you may be thinking, Whoa, this sounds really time consuming. where am I’m going to find the time to come up with the right solution?
This is where working with a business coach who brings objectivity and years of experience working with entrepreneurs can really help you find the right solutions for your needs. For example, you might think a specific task is something you personally must handle, but a coach has an outside perspective and can help you see how you might delegate it.
Another advantage is a coach works with many businesses like yours and already knows the nuts and bolts of running a business, setting up systems and using business planning and management tools. Most importantly, meeting with a business coach will force you to set aside time to focus on your goals and the roadmap to achieving them.
Whether you have a start-up or an established business, I can help shift your focus to working ON your business, not IN it, so you have more time to do the things you need to do to grow your business.
If you would like to learn more about how this might apply to your business, let’s talk:
