A pros and cons list of things a business owner should or shouldn’t do themselves gets pretty long. I've done plenty of both... things I wasn't ready for and things I should have gotten help with. In a small survey I did with my speaking audiences, I asked what they wished they had done earlier in their business.
Hire sooner, said most people. But hire for what?
What should you, as the business owner, be doing anyway?
SHOULD NOT Do it all
SHOULD
Mark Cuban, businessman and film producer, offered a different take in a recent INC article:
Is Cuban’s approach efficient or effective? If you think about that even a little, efficient and effective is the better option. But there's a deeper option.
IT DEPENDS.
I often rely on Peter Drucker when trying to decide:
There is nothing more ineffective than doing something
more efficiently that needn’t be done at all.
Especially for the solo-preneur or small business owner, running a business can be overwhelming. If you delegate too early, you lose knowledge and control of how a process works. If you wait too late, you’ll never grow.
How would you make the choice about what needs to be done at all? Start simply:
Does this need to be done? Does it need to be done now? Does it need to be done by me?
There was a villain…
Several years ago, I worked with a performance artist who was educated in the arts but not in business. He was brilliant in his teaching, and growing his clientele, but new to the US way of doing business. It became obvious to me that there was enough money coming in that he should be able to take a decent salary, but he claimed to be broke.
I asked to review his most recent P&Ls, and now suspicious, referred him to a trusted accountant.
There was a villain. One of his students had volunteered to run his front desk and manage the accounts for him. He was grateful. She recorded the receipts, but not the cash she was taking out of his business.
It had seemed more efficient to turn the bookkeeping over to her, but it was certainly not effective. And he didn’t know enough to catch it.
Another story illustrates the opposite point.
We have met the enemy, and he is us.
No one has ever said this better than the POGO cartoon. While it may seem like doing everything yourself is the most efficient option, it isn’t in the long run.
Another client, skilled in bookkeeping and cash flow management, was reluctant to delegate (and pay) anyone else.
Her super-power was in design and project management, but her business was growing so fast that she was doing the books at 3 am. Sleepless nights had an ill effect on her family life and her business. And she didn’t have the time and energy during the day to find someone she trusted to turn her books over to.
Let’s say, we had to pry her hands off that task. Still, she knew how to oversee it and what to look for in someone else’s work.
But another client, raised in a family retail business, never stopped for the day till the money was counted. In his own service business, he used his skills to keep his books up-to-date daily. It was second nature to him, and he wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if he had not “closed the till”.
Same skill needed—for one person, it was efficient but not effective to do it herself. For the other, it was better to do it himself, and invest in help with something he was not good at.
The entrepreneur’s dilemma.
These examples illustrate the entrepreneur’s dilemma. We all have a limited budget of money, time, and energy. We must prioritize and spend that budget wisely.
If you don’t know enough about the different parts of your business, you run the risk of not making good, effective decisions. But you can’t DO everything yourself forever. That is not efficient in the long run.
A new business owner might feel compelled to handle all functions in their business for several reasons:
Why should a business owner do (or know how to do) all the functions in their business? And why should she not try to do them all herself?
(Disclaimer here: If you’ve read this far, it’s because I know how to write a good newsletter, or you love what I say, or you're my cousin. Or all three. If you read on, I have enlisted a new helper we might call Chatty, to generate succinct lists of pros and cons. So, for your consideration…)
While it may be tempting to try to do everything yourself, business owners, recognize your limits.
Learn the essentials of your business. You can grow into finding trusted advisors and colleagues. Then begin to delegate tasks to others who can contribute their expertise and help the business thrive.
Lorette Pruden has helped hundreds of small business owners, sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders grow their businesses and manage that growth since 2000. She specializes in the Formerly Corporate—so many small business owners who’ve worked with her come from a corporate background that she finally wrote the book on it.
