Did you ever feel like you were spreading yourself apart with having to do a million things — all by yourself — to keep your business running? If you’re running a business by yourself, I’m sure that you know what it feels like to be overextended. The pressure of having to do everything yourself can be pretty overwhelming and stressful, to say the least.
Nowadays, young entrepreneurs are always talking about teams… teams… teams… Sure, having a team can be a great thing and for some businesses it’s almost necessary to have a team. But, I don’t think that having a team correlates to success in all cases.
If you have the determination, the vision, and the burning desire to succeed, then things like not having a teams isn’t going to hold you back. You’re going to make it happen! In this day and age, anyone can start and build a company without the need of partners and employees.
Think about it, things continue to get cheaper and cheaper as time goes by. Take a look at the Internet entrepreneur who can hire a great designer, find a solid coder, dish out a few bucks for hosting, and having a fully functional business up and running in a matter of a week by spending only a fraction of the price that you would have paid years ago.
And of course let’s not forget about the large supply of creative, innovative, and hard working freelancers out there who are constantly looking for work. These are the people that make running your own business — without a team — possible.
But who am I kidding? Indeed, you can start and run a business without a team and attain successes — but at what cost? As your business begins to grow and the responsibilities start adding up, you’ll soon find yourself itching to either hire someone or take on a partner to balance the load.
As a founder of a business it’s great to be involved in every facet of your organization. You, more than anyone, should know your business inside out. But as you grow, things don’t stay the same.
When you find yourself having to spend more time responding to customers, media inquiries, and things of that nature, when you can be working on closing deals and going on important meeting, and steering the company in the right direction, then you know that you have a problem.
There comes a time where you have to draw the line and concede to the fact that you are only one man. And when you come to that realization, the next step is think about duplicating yourself.
Image you had someone who knew just about your business as you did. They knew how to respond to customers, update the website, send out the newsletters, and even close some of the deals. Such a person would free up your time to start focusing all your energy on steering the company in the right direction. And in may instances, you may have to make a few duplicates of yourself.
For instance, if you find yourself spending countless hour on building and updating your websites, then find a coder. If you find yourself spending all your time doing customer support, then find someone to help answer the phones and respond to emails. If you find yourself spending all your time responding to media inquiries, then find someone who can help with the responses.
I’m a firm believer that the founding entrepreneur should be devoting most of their time to things such as innovating, overseeing projects, being the creative director on new developments, coming up with major ideas, and the person who goes out there and meets the people who can help grow the business.
When you spread yourself thin by continuing to run every little element of your company by yourself, then you being to render your own abilities useless. A mind that is caught up doing a million things at once is a mind that is destined to fall apart. Decentralize your business now, not later when it may be too late.
What do you think. When is it time to start duplicating yourself and take on employees/partners to spread the workload? What are the signs that tell you when its time to start giving up some responsibility? Employees, contractors, or partners?
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Great article! This is something that I’ve given a high priority in my business and have successfully put in place recently. It is definitely a liberating feeling when you have others helping to make things go smoother and more efficiently. Managing people takes time though. FYI: Generally, I would say is that it takes about 20% of the time to manage someone to do a task compared to the total amount of time you would do it in. So, keep that mind.
One of the best things about having others help you out is the new approaches they bring to solving the same problem. Surprises like this are great eye openers–and wonderful refreshers.
Great thoughts. Read the eMyth by Micheal Gerber. It is similar to the theme of your article and I believe that every enterpreneur should read it.