Why don’t you just keep doing it all yourself? Why does a business owner outsource at all? Especially if you have only just started your business, you don’t need help. Right?
As a small business owner, you have limited resources and your most precious resource is one you cannot reproduce: time.
I am willing to bet that you started your business, either because you were really good at something or because you had a great idea. Then, after registering your company and taking on the mantle of founder, director and CEO, you had a rather awful realisation: you have to do a whole lot more than that one thing you were really good at! And that idea you thought was so great? There are a lot of peripheral tasks that have to happen first. And at the same time. And after.
There is a lot more to business than doing something you are good at and trying to get someone to pay you.
If you are running your business alone, then you have just discovered that you need to be the CEO, the CFO, the marketing director, the administrator, the bookkeeper, the salesmen, the workshop, the tea lady, the janitor and everything else in between.
In every given day, you will have a minimum of ten (I would actually expect quite a few more, but ten at the absolute minimum) administrative tasks related to the running of your business. And the biggest problem with these time-stealing tasks? They are taking you away from the work that actually generates your income.
In other words, you are spending your precious time on tasks that aren’t making you any money. In many cases, these are also tasks that actually make you die on the inside as well.
Each of us has a unique skillset. One thing that we are really, really good it. One thing we love doing and because we love it, we do it well.
In my opinion, it is a crime to be spending your most precious resource doing things that make you unhappy. Especially if those things aren’t generating income. What a terrible, terrible waste of life.
In an ideal world, a business owner should be spending their time on three things:
1. Work that generates income
2. Work that drives the business forward
3. Personal time that keeps them mentally healthy
If there is a task in your business that does not fit into number 1 or number 2, then you should very seriously consider giving it to somebody else.
Now, I did specify that this is in an ideal world. In the real world, there are obstacles and restrictions that don’t make it easy for us to just simply give away every task we feel is stealing us away from important things. So you aren’t going to be able to put down this book and transform your business overnight into an outsourcing powerhouse. That is not how life works.
But you can begin by paying attention to what is stealing your time and starting to form a picture in your head of what your day should look like. A vision to work towards.
Stop taking your time for granted. None of us know how much we have, it’s infinitely precious and it should be jealously guarded, measured and looked after.
If you would like to learn more about how you can use outsourcing to grow your business, you can grab our free eBook, here!
This article was originally published on LinkedIn, you can read it there if you prefer.
