Are You Working in Your Business or On Your Business? The Key to Growth is Delegation

Growing a business is of one of the most challenging endeavors a person can choose to undertake. The road to success is paved with the many mistakes business owners make along the way. For business owners, running into a cash crunch, mispricing products, underestimating the competition or any number of avoidable mistakes, are symptomatic of a much larger mistake many make, which is to spend too much time working in the business and not enough time working on the business.

What’s Holding You Back?

For business owners at any stage in their business, it can be the difference between being proactive and looking into the future versus living in a reactive world that never seems to go the way they want. It can also be the difference between success and failure.

With most business owners, they are the only person setting goals and thinking about the future. Who else is more genuinely motivated to grow the business?

It is the business owner’s responsibility to identify problems and delegate solutions. However, every minute spent working in the business on tasks that can be delegated is a minute not spent working on the business—planning and strategizing to get to the next level.

The Business Owner’s Curse is Self-Destructive

To ensure their success, entrepreneurs must rid themselves of the “business owner’s curse” which is the need to feel like you must do everything yourself, wanting to be in control of everything all the time because you don’t believe anyone can do it as well as you.

Business owners can’t wear all hats all the time if they expect to grow their business. And frankly, most business owners aren’t very good at administrative or back-office tasks, which are essential but do little to grow the business.

The Remarkable Rewards of Delegation

To grow their business, business owners must create the conditions that allow them to focus almost exclusively on their core competencies and those activities that lead directly to revenues and profits. That requires delegating all non-revenue generating activities to staff or outsourcing them to outside specialists.

That can require extra resources and time—to get staff or service specialists trained and establish an oversight structure for monitoring and measuring their performance. But the results can be astonishing. Giving up control of those aspects of your business that you don’t even like doing can have a massive, positive impact on your bottom line.

Imagine being able to focus most of your time on

• Client-facing activities
• Marketing your brand and building visibility
• Strategizing business development
• Elevating your client experience
• Continuing your education and self-development
• Building a more efficient operation around a motivated team
• Achieving a healthier work-life balance

In other words, strong delegation allows you to spend significantly more time working on your business than in your business, which can be the difference between growing it and getting hopelessly lost in it.