Tired of having to take care of everything? Stop it already!

You have a vital duty for your business and you can’t accomplish it if you are doing everything else.

Below are some examples of tasks that you should NOT be taking care of yourself.

Technical work

I’ve mentioned this before. In order to be most effective at building wealth for yourself and your company, you must allow your staff specifically hired for these tasks to do the technical work.

Just like you are the expert at leading your company and creating wealth, your staff are the experts at doing their jobs. Make sure everyone is working where their specialties lie.

Finance and accounting work

Just like technical work, you should not be slaving over the balance or income sheets of your company. Leave this to the finance professionals and accountants that you have hired.

Being knowledgeable as to where you company is financially is very important, however this can be accomplished by being given a summary by your financial staff. Reviewing your financials may be necessary at times, but make sure to limit this to only on occasion.

Basic Supervision

Your staff are experts at the technical work. You may not be qualified to supervise the work in which they specialize in. Furthermore, supervising does not create wealth.

Therefore if you spend your time with basic supervision, you are taking time away from what you do best. You are also depriving someone else from doing an effective job at this supervision. This will create inefficiencies if you don’t ensure that everyone is utilizing their strengths properly.

Cleaning

You may be getting sick of looking at a messy office with dirty floors, but spending too much time cleaning up is not going to generate wealth for your company. Hire a cleaning service to take care of the dirty floors.

Please note, however that cleaning is not the same as being organized. Ensuring that you remain organized is something that you should be committed to doing in order to remain productive. Losing a piece of paper you just placed on your desk isn’t the makings of a productive environment.

Web Design

I am a horrible violator of this. However that is why I can tell you for certain that you should not be doing this yourself. Sure it saves money but it does not save you time and it pulls you away from making the valuable decisions that you need to.

Customer Service

Good customer service is vital. However your voice is not the first that your customers should hear when they call your phone number. Delegate customer service to another staff member. Consider even empowering this staff member to make certain decisions themselves to make unhappy customers happy again. This way you aren’t tied up making routine decisions.

Routine Tasks

If something is routine, it can most likely be automated. If automation is too expensive, it can most certainly be delegated or outsourced. Stop performing these routine tasks and assign them to someone else.

Research

You should not be researching anytime after the initial start-up phase. Once you start generating some revenue and you want to continue to explore new ways to bring in income, delegate the market and competitive research to someone else. That way, you can get started on your next idea instead of getting tied down to all of the technical work.

Advanced marketing

If you have the funds and are going into any expensive/advanced marketing, it is advisable to hire an expert. This may be obvious for most cases, nonetheless, don’t underestimate the value that a marketing expert can add to your campaign if you have the funding.

This goes for internet marketing as well. Search Engine Optimization, Pay-Per-Click, etc can all be effectively managed by an expert and achieve far better results than if you handle this yourself.

In a perfect world, all entrepreneurs will have enough money to ensure that the experts are taking care of all of these things. This is clearly not the case. If you don’t have the money to delegate everything where necessary, do your best to assign the most time consuming tasks and the ones that require the most specialty to someone else. You won’t regret the results.

Do you want to be paid the same amount every year for the rest of your life, doing the same amount of work every day? Of course not! That is why you went into business for yourself.

Yet there are plenty of business owners who look to fire their boss yet keep all of their same obligations and pay. Instead of seeking growth of profits, many business owners see only one benefit to owning their own business: not having a boss.

Many business owners fail to see the other benefits of entrepreneurship:

• Your business is a sellable asset
• Your business can bring you income and income growth
• You can structure your business so that you work less, not more

While these are some additional benefits to owning your own business, lets look at some reasons why going out on your own, yet still seeking the same, fixed salary is a bad idea.

It suggests you are forsaking growth

I have had many conversations with my a friend of mine, who runs his own accounting firm about this. He generally is the only one in his business who works on middle to large sized corporate accounts, a large revenue producing source for his business. Because he is overworked, he doesn’t have time to take on any more of these large clients.

I have explained to him on numerous occasions that if he were to hire another accountant who is experienced in working on these larger corporate accounts, he would have enough resources (time) between the two of them to take on more of these clients and thus, grow their revenues.

He refuses to do this, however, because he says that another experienced mid to large corporate accountant will cost more than the other accountants that he employs and it will cut into his profit margin thus reducing his take home pay.

We see here that he is neglecting long term growth in order to maintain short-term pay. While I have come to accept his viewpoint as reasonable since he is nearing retirement and is unwilling to take on as much risk, it is foolish for any newer business and/or younger business owner to forsake growth in the interest of maintaining a fixed salary.

Any business who isn’t focusing either on growth or reducing the business owner’s face time shouldn’t call themselves a business at all.

You are essentially, working for yet another boss: an overworked you

If you are working for a salary, you are neglecting growth because you are stuck doing all of the work yourself. You will be overworked and unable to reduce the amount of time you spend on technical tasks. In fact, the only possible way you can grow in this scenario is to work more.

Being an overworked boss may make it more difficult to manage your staff effectively and make it harder to lead your business to become even more profitable. You will become more stressed out and quite possibly take things out on your staff or yourself. Neither is a good situation.

More money for you!

Probably the most obvious benefit to focusing on growth rather than fixed, short-term income is that your potential for larger payouts increases. Who doesn’t want a larger payday? Change gears and look for growth of income rather than something that is stable and fixed.

You are working to maintain your income

Since you will be dedicating more time to maintaining your current pay, you will be spending minimal amounts of time planning growth, new revenue streams and new businesses for yourself. Your time is not dedicated to growing your income but maintaining it. You are violating a cardinal rule of giving your time unlimited value and that is: failing to delegate when you can and not focusing on bringing yourself more cash inflows.

Can anyone think of any other reasons why continuing to work for a salary is a bad idea? Does anyone disagree with these points? I am very curious as there are a ton of different reasons why one goes into business and there may well be some great reasons to work for a salary that I am overlooking.

How would you like to earn $600 per hour? How about $2,000? $10,000? Sound enticing? Well, if you know how valuable your time as a business owner could be, this shouldn’t sound that enticing at all.

Why? Firstly because this ties a specific, fixed value to your time. Granted, earning $10k per hour is a lot of money, allowing you to earn $20 million dollars a year if you work 40 hours per week, but it still requires you to actually be there, doing the work in order to make the money.

In order to earn money this way, you are required to work in order to maintain your current pay. I find the concept of working to grow your bottom line much more fascinating and much more worthwhile.

Delegating tasks or outsourcing isn’t enough for entrepreneurs. It may free up your time, but if you are still doing work that maintains your current income, you aren’t focusing enough on growth.

This concept follows the same principle as E-Myth author, Michael Gerber’s mantra of “Work ON your business, not IN it”. Working IN your business, as Michael explains, really only makes it more difficult to grow, since 100% of your time is spent handling the day to day operations and 0% of your time is spent on growing or improving your business.

What you SHOULD be spending your time doing is taking on the visionary role of the entrepreneur. Michael argues, that taking on this visionary, leadership role will allow you to build a “World Class Company”.

If you own a doll making company, should you be spending time making the dolls? No, at least not in the middle-early stages of your business. What about supervising those that make the dolls? Again, no.

As soon as you can afford to hire someone to complete operational or manufacturing tasks, supervise your different departments or any routine task for that matter, you should most likely do it.

The less time you spend handling the operational and routine tasks the better. If these tasks keep you busy enough, chances are you are making enough revenue to hire someone else to do it. Why is this so important? Is it to spend more time with your family or friends? It can be, but it is mainly because you have a vitally important job that you are not fulfilling if you are stuck handing the various tasks of your business.

What is this important job? Leading and creating more wealth for you and your company. Lets start with leading. By leading, I don’t mean managing. By leading, I mean steering your company in the right direction, making sure your company as a whole is perusing the best, most profitable (and promising) projects. This way, you are ensuring that your projects, which are literally, your business’ investment portfolio, are the safest, yet return the most amount of money as possible to the bottom line.

There is an equally important, if not more important aspect of serving as the Entrepreneur-In-Chief of your company and that is creating MORE wealth for you and your business. Now that some of your time is dedicated to ensuring your current projects are as efficient as possible (in terms of risk and return), you have an even more important task as an entrepreneur: finding new cash flows.

This means innovating new project concepts that can deliver more revenue for your business. And once you have drawn up the initial concept, hand it off to some of your creative people to start developing it and implementing it, so you can get started on creating another new income generating concept.

We can take this one step further though. Why restrict your time to only innovating new projects? Why not use your time to put together more businesses? If you follow Gerber’s mantra of “working ON your business” you can consistently create new businesses and projects, all different kinds of income streams and then delegate further development and implementation to others. All you have to do is lead, tweak and watch the revenue begin to flow in.

The true beauty of this system lies in how efficient you are with your time and how well you implement Gerber’s mantra into your work flow. If you are ruthless in restricting routine, management or operational tasks so that they are delegation-only items, then 100% of your work-time can be spent growing your income rather than maintaining it.

Here, you aren’t earning $100, $500 or $10,000 per hour because these are fixed numbers. Your value per hour will actually continue to grow exponentially the more income streams you develop.

This is the true essence of entrepreneurship. You will be serving as a full-time business starter, rather than part-time entrepreneur, part-time manager, part-time line item supervisor and part time manufacturer. You will be finding more and more ways to create income and you will be filling your personal and business portfolios with successful, income producing, sellable assets!

Please note, however, there are times (depending on the business) where showing your employees that you are willing to get your hands dirty as well and help them with their work is important for your employees’ motivation. Never neglect your employees and always keep their needs and motivation in mind.

While it is important to be as efficient with your income-growing time as possible, you should set aside some time for ensuring your employees needs are being met. You will always do this better than any manager, since their productivity affects your wallet.

This income-growing concept may apply more to established businesses and less to new businesses. However, having this idea in mind when you start to grow will allow you to build your business around this idea early, making it easier to implement.

Newer business owners with little revenue will find it extremely difficult at first to delegate as much as possible, however keeping this idea in mind will allow you become more productive with your time as soon as the opportunity arises.

Note: Steve Pavlina wrote an excellent article about valuing your time. It is a very insightful article, it has strongly influenced my view on this matter (and this post) and I encourage you to read it.