Are You A Business Owner Who’s In Her Own Way?
Have you hit a profit plateau? Or maybe you’re thinking about changing the way you do business to a model that provides a higher margin. You might be able to break through your ceiling with the people that you have, but you’ll probably need to change some processes even if you don’t need to re-evaluate your staff.
But of course, as the business owner, you might be the biggest bottleneck of all! September 22 is American Business Women’s Day. To celebrate, consider delegating a task that can (and really should) be done by someone else, whether it’s a virtual assistant (VA) or one of your employees.
Business owners beyond the start-up phase often prevent more productivity in the workplace
It’s completely understandable, but the person standing in your way of more profits could very well be you. Because you’re the founder, and when you started the business you handled the vast majority (if not all) of the tasks yourself no matter how menial.
As you built processes and systems as your business grew, you remained a player in most or all of them, because you were doing a lot of the work. In start-up phase, it makes sense that a lot of the work has to go through you.
But as you’ve scaled and built and added employees, there’s no real need for you to be in the midst of all the doing. Now is the time to transition to working ON the business and figuring out how you’re going to reach your next profit milestone.
When you’re involved in everything and no longer need to be, you become the bottleneck. You’re the reason that you can’t break through, because you’re still doing the work that someone else should now be doing.
And since you’ve got a finger in every pie, every process slows down when it has to go through you. Now you’re losing productivity because your staff has to wait around for your time to free up so they can move to the next stage of their process.
Don’t feel bad if you realize this is you – it happens a lot for a reason! It’s a natural consequence of building your own business, and you’ve probably been too busy to take a look at what’s happening. Once you recognize what’s going on, it’s time to reconsider your processes and systems and decide whether you need to be involved at all. And if you do, it should probably be in a supervisory capacity.
The biggest bottleneck blocking your way to more profit and a more productive day
Granted, businesses are all different and every founder has a different way of doing business. Having said that, very often the problem in the business is that the wrong people are doing the wrong tasks at the wrong time.
To grow, your business needs:
The right people doing the right tasks…
That means the business owner shouldn’t be working on client intake or client onboarding, or reviewing client documents, etc.
If you have a CPA firm, for example, your lower-level accountants or even administrative staff should be entering numbers into the tax return software and following up with clients.
Staff that’s better at interfacing with clients should be doing client work, and every employee needs training on their job duties and how to run the software you’ve chosen. That’s not your job as the business owner, either. You can set the tone and expectations, but training is up to managers or even vendors.
… at the right time
If most of your employees are morning people (lion or bear sleep chronotypes), they should be left to do their “thinky work” during the morning. Again, using an accounting firm as an example, that means working on tax returns or strategic planning in the morning. Don’t interrupt them for meetings or emails or admin, but save all that for later in the day.
As the business owner, you also need to carve out time to get your own work done and set expectations that you won’t be available at these times. You’ll get more work done in a shorter amount of time when you’re able to focus.
It’s not just your time and energy that affect effective time management
None of us has an infinite lifetime. Even if you believe in freezing your head after you die or whatever, no one lives forever. And if you’re like a lot of business owners, there’s a lot you want to accomplish during your lifetime.
That means you have to prioritize. You have to consider the opportunity costs. Of course, continuing along your same path while dreaming of doing something else is a choice as well.
You may be a bit of a control freak and not want to delegate out some of the work that should really be passed on to someone else. You don’t have all the time in the world, and all the time you spend on tasks that can & should be done by others is time that you sacrifice for something else.
You will stay stuck in your current profit situation if you don’t relinquish some control, because there are only so many hours in the day. You can move to a higher-margin business, or you can continue to be in control and involved in every process. You can’t do both.
The sunk cost fallacy is a productivity and profit issue for many business owners. We’re taught not to quit and to keep going no matter what. But when you realize that you may be headed down the wrong path, it doesn’t really matter how much time and money and energy you’ve already spent. You’re never getting any of that back, no matter what you do.
What counts is what you do going forward. If you continue down the wrong path, you are giving up on the right path. (Or at least a path that’s a little less wrong!) Time and energy are not infinite, so there is a cost to doing the same thing when it won’t get you the result that you want.
Fortunately, the pandemic gave us a good word. The wrong path isn’t a failure, you just need to pivot!
Recap (tl;dr)
As the founder of your own business, you may be the biggest bottleneck that’s preventing you from achieving higher productivity and thus more profit. Try delegating a task for American Business Women’s Day so you get one thing off your plate.
Not sure where your productivity bottlenecks are? Schedule a free consultation to see if I can help you find them and solve them.