As a business owner, I learned quickly that to have a growing business, you need to work ON your business, not IN it.
In 2013, I was making enough money to support myself and my family, but I felt like I was working all day, every day and if anything strayed outside of how/when I usually did things… it was chaos. I just spent a ton of late nights working to catch up to get things back to normal and I was trying to do 10 different jobs at once.
I had to figure out how to get back to work on my business and not “in” it.
Thankfully, I did and I want to share with you what helped me go from putting out fires to being able to work creatively “on” my business again.
- Develop a plan of what you’d like to work on once you have the time to do it. You don’t want to just jump in and hire one to free up your time if you don’t know what you’re going to do with it. What are some ideas you have that you felt like you haven’t had the time to run with? What are some things you want to test out? Write these down and make a plan for what you’ll work on once your time is freed up.
- Determine what you enjoy doing the least. Another thing you could do is here is decide what task would be the easiest to hand off to another person. For me, I knew I couldn’t stand e-mails. I really love connecting with people, but e-mails were just taking up so much of my time and didn’t really feel all that personal to me. I’d rather meet on a call or face-to-face with someone. So, I knew that was something another person could easily do and taking that off my plate made me feel like I had more momentum to work on the business.
- Create a system or checklist someone else can follow. It’s going to be hard the first time you let go of control and assign a task to someone else. If you create a system for a new person to follow, you’ll get the results you want and they’ll know exactly what you expect from them. Clarity is key.
- To find a hire, do a trial job with them. This is actually a great way to get know if people get hit deadlines, problem solve on their own, and what their skills are. I’ve actually paid several different people to do the same job so I can see how each one handles the task.
- Once you find someone, have them commit to a 3-month trial. It’s easier to hire someone and think they’re taking up more time than they should be. That’s actually normal. It takes time to train someone to do things correctly. When I onboard someone, I expect that it will take time to train them and help them be successful at their job the first couple of weeks they start up until the 3 month mark. If it isn’t working for one or both of us, that way they have an easy way out and if it does work, then we know it’s a great fit.
- Now that your time is freed up, implement your plan!
This all sounds great in theory, but after reading this, you may be wondering who your first hire should be to help you work in your business.
Here are our top picks:
- Accountant
- Administrative Assistant
- Video Editor
- Producer
- Manager
We dive a little more into why these are our top picks and what they do in this week’s livestream above.
Thanks for reading! Hope this helps you grow you team.
Keep changing lives,
Tim
CREATOR SPOTLIGHT: The Business Brush TV – https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4SEac3mbGdOFefXc1jvIVg