When you first start a business, you will very much be involved in the front lines, taking care of admin, customer service, sales, and so on. But as you grow, your responsibilities grow, too. You don’t have colleagues and workloads, you have teams and processes. Being stuck in the front line soon becomes an obstacle stopping you from using the influence you have. As you grow, you have to learn to work on the business, not always in it.
Negotiate time to tackle the issues
Time management is an essential skill for all and while you might always have to take care of the necessary admin, it can take up your whole day if you’re not careful. Set aside specific times in your schedule to hold meetings and brainstorm on things like improving payroll, customer service, employee motivation, and so on. You might have some ideas you want to build on, but it takes some time and effort to think of how to start actually implementing them.
Find your right-hand
You will always be the leader of the team. But you shouldn’t always be their manager. The day-to-day aspect of managing the team can take up all your time easily, so it’s time to start finding the other leaders in your business, too. www.startupgrind.com can give you some great advice on finding the right leadership material. They become the link between you and the rest of the team from now on, so you’re not entirely removed from the issues faced by the workforce, but it doesn’t become your sole responsibility.
Know when you need outside help
There are some changes and some services that you’re not going to have the manpower, the expertise, or the resources to make by yourself. What’s more, there are some problems you’re under-qualified to handle yourself, which can take up way too much of your time by yourself.
This is especially true of dealing with tech issues, and IT services like www.cyberjaz.net provide a much more effective solution. As you grow, outsourcing will become a necessary stepping stone. Learn from the services you outsource to and have an aim of one day making those processes internal. But don’t clog your workday and your business up by taking on new tasks you’re not necessarily ready for.
Make it systems-dependent, not person-dependent
A lot of business owners have anxiety about leaving some of their old duties behind because of the “only I can do it” mentality. This means your business is person-dependent and should that person not be able to do that job, the job goes undone. The risk in that kind of thinking is clearing. Finding the best ways to systematize business processes is the only solution. Make the knowledge accessible and set it in stone so that anyone with the relevant skills can pick it up just as easily in future.
It’s important to spend time on those front lines every now and then. It’s all too easy for an employer to lose perspective of what work is like for the rest of the team. But you have to ensure you’re not getting stuck in the day-to-day and missing the opportunity to enact wider strategies.