As small business owners there is always going to be a percentage of tasks that we have to do that we really don’t want to do. But as I’ve aged in years, I’ve started to pay close attention to my energy levels. When I start craving substances like beer or even coffee, something isn’t right. It is important to be honest about identifying the places your energy is drained. You need to believe that you will be leading your business for decades.
This perspective requires you to ask, “Can I continue to do the task for the next 20 years?”
If you don’t answer yes to that question, you have two options:
- Hire. Find a partner or hire someone to do it.
- Fire. Just stop doing it. Fire yourself from the responsibility of doing it.
Hiring someone else is pretty straightforward if you can swing the money. There are lots of options these days to hire subcontractors or partners before you have to hire a full-time employee. For instance, maybe you are fighting with your website and you hate updating it. That is an easy problem to solve. Hire us! 😃
Firing can be a bit more complicated, but you have a couple options. The first is to think through if you really need to be doing this task. Is there a way to automate it? It is just administrative in nature and is actually something that isn’t adding value to your clients that you can just stop doing it? Or maybe this a business area that isn’t your sweet spot? For a long-time, as a part of setting up websites, our clients would want email setup. But as time has passed the sheer number of devices to support has become difficult and time-consuming and not enjoyable. We’ve stopped doing email support and simply refer our client to an IT partner. I’ll admit I was a bit nervous at first giving up this “business”. It took overcoming just a bit of fear to take the step. Looking back now five years later, I don’t think we’ve ever lost revenue or a client by doing this, but my happiness quotient has gone up substantially. In fact, so has my energy level and general enthusiasm for what we do each day.
What about you? Is there something in your business that you are prone to procrastinate doing? Is there a task that leaves you drained? Take a bold step and think about hiring someone else to do it or an even bolder step to stop doing it. Taking this action now is going to set you up to still love what you do in 20 years.
