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Entrepreneurs are famous for their ability to work long hours as they tirelessly build their companies, especially in the early stages of a startup. Excitement, passion and a healthy dose of caffeine are often enough to keep an entrepreneur powering ahead. While burning the midnight oil might be sustainable for a short time, entrepreneurs can quickly become overwhelmed with balancing financial stress and a mountain of administrative tasks. This can lead to decreased productivity, loss of excitement for the business, missed opportunities, decline in quality and financial instability.
For this reason, it’s important for small business owners to recognize when it’s time to start getting tasks off their plate and seek additional help. This is especially true if you are a solopreneur who is actively looking to scale your business beyond what you can handle personally.
Related: Learning to Let Go of Control and Delegate Can Be Hard. Here Are 3 Components to Make It Easier.
Automation, outsourcing and recruitment — Oh my!
The good news is that there are plenty of options to help you optimize your business and reclaim your most valuable asset — your time. With additional bandwidth, you can put effort into other high-value activities like sales or strategic planning. The challenge can be deciding which option is right for the job.
The first option any entrepreneur should explore is automation. This is typically the easiest and lowest-cost option. Many of the business programs or software available today come equipped with some form of automation. For example, you can set up filters that reduce the amount of time you spend sifting through email or install a chatbot that answers customer questions on your social media. Automation is typically best for simple, repetitive tasks — however, artificial intelligence is quickly getting better at performing complex tasks.
The next option is outsourcing. This can be more expensive than automation but is typically cheaper than hiring an employee. Outsourcing is best when you have a specialized task, especially if it isn’t a full-time job. For example, you may want to outsource bookkeeping instead of struggling to understand the complexities of accounting. This can save on frustration if accounting isn’t your expertise and doesn’t require the same commitment as hiring a permanent team member.
You may reach a point where it’s critical to recruit and hire full-time employees. This can be expensive due to the associated costs of payroll taxes, training, equipment and benefits. However, hiring employees gives the entrepreneur more control and ensures they are dedicated to the task at hand and not split across a number of clients like outsourced labor.
Related: How I Transformed My Business by Letting Go of Low-Value Tasks and Focusing on High-Impact Activities
Avoiding the common objections from entrepreneurs
Getting additional help is easier said than done. Let’s face it. Entrepreneurs can be quite stubborn when it comes to letting go of control of their “baby.” There are a lot of misconceptions that hold entrepreneurs back from getting the additional support they need to supercharge their business.
“Hiring employees is too expensive”
Hiring employees is no doubt one of the most expensive parts of operating a business. While hiring an employee may be a shock to the wallet initially, it may come with financial benefits to offset this expense. For example, hiring a new team member to process orders from existing customers may free up time to work on new business pursuits, ultimately growing your revenue and profit. At the end of the day, you have to decide if the benefit outweighs the cost. This is why it’s always best to look at automation and outsourcing before committing to the responsibility of hiring a full-time employee.
“No one can do it as well as me”
There may be some truth to this sentiment. As an entrepreneur, you’ve poured blood, sweat and tears into the business. But you shouldn’t let being a control freak hold you back from reaching your business’s full potential. Consider this: Nearly every major company has had to overcome this challenge at some point. Do you think Jeff Bezos would have been able to grow Amazon beyond his garage if he decided to do everything himself? Not a chance.
The reality is that others may not do as good of a job, and that’s okay. Your objective as the business owner should be to try and help your team understand how to perform the work to your standards. One of the best ways to do this is by having clear processes and workflows for them to follow to ensure it’s done exactly how you would do it yourself.
“I don’t have time to train someone”
Passing a task to another person or setting up an automation does require an initial investment of time. However, the long-term efficiency can be enormous. The good news is that you don’t have to boil the entire ocean at once. Instead, start small and iterate on your delegation process. As you free up a little time, you can then use that time savings to implement new time-saving tasks. The best solution is to focus on the highest impact or most time-consuming activities first rather than things that will provide little benefit.
Related: Hiring vs. Outsourcing: How to Recognize the Right Moment to Add Talent to Your Team
Ultimately, building and scaling a successful business requires entrepreneurs to swallow their pride from time to time and get the additional help and support they need to be successful. By creating optimizations through automation and delegation, you can grow your business without the crushing stress of having to do it all.
