How many times have you heard this:
A small business owner must wear many hats
From sales person to accountant to bookkeeper to office manager, mentor, advisor, person who hires others, person who fires others, and delivery person, if you’re the owner of a small business, you will do many things. If you’re a one person operation or a part-time business or one that operates without formal payroll (there are about 21,000,000 of you out there) then you are also responsible for taking out the trash. If you don’t do it, no one else will. As a mentor of mine once said,
The janitor is not coming.
This doesn’t mean you actually have to do all of these jobs, you just have to see that they get done. You may be great at spreadsheets and numbers, but horrible at writing web pages. You might be great at talking for hours with your friends in social situations, but get stuck giving sales presentations or making sales calls to potential clients. There are two things that you can do to make your business life better in this regard:
- Recognize your own shortcomings
- Delegate these tasks to others
There is one thing that we talk about saving, creating, setting aside, making, spending, getting, losing, and having that we can’t do any of those things with: time. You can’t save time, you can’t spend time, make it, lose it, set it aside, or do anything else with it. You simply move from before to now to after with no control. Time isn’t money, time is everything.
Learn to do what you can to make sure that your time is the best time you can possibly have. Hire people to do tasks so that you don’t have to. Ask people for answers to questions that would take you longer to figure out yourself. Pay for things that you could do yourself but would take away from some other task that you could be doing to increase revenues. Surround yourself with people who are positive, helpful, constructively critical, and who help you accomplish your goals. Find a place to be and a way of being that lets you work without feeling trapped.
Remember: the janitor isn’t coming and the trash still has to be taken out. Figure out how to get the job done and still be able to enjoy the rest of your life.