As entrepreneurs we have a thousand ideas a minute and not enough hours in the day to think about ’em!
If you’re just starting out, bootstrapping, growing – you’re no doubt doing long hours and tiring yourself out. That’s okay. It’s expected. A lot of the time you ARE the only one that can take care of a certain task, or project. However, a lot of the time there are certain tasks that you shouldn’t even be thinking about getting involved with (unless you’re an expert in that particular subject).
Today, I thought it might be good to look into this a little more.
Here are my ‘Top 3 Things’ that Remarkable Entrepreneurs should certainly leave to the people that do them every day for a living. By having this type of ‘Delegation Mindset’ we can a) work a few less hours, and b) genuinely get better quality work output.
When you’re done reading, I’d love to hear what else you think startup business owners shouldn’t be attempting themselves, instead delegating to the pro’s.
#1 – Any type of Graphic Design or Web Design / Development
Here’s a true story, involving… me… 3-odd years ago when I started to play around online for the first time, I decided that I could buy a customizable WordPress blog theme, spend a few hours tweaking it to the way I wanted it to look and then go live with my first blog post.
FACT – Business owners are, 9/10 times, perfectionists.
That afternoon turned into the evening, which turned into the wee hours of the night. It was 4am by the time I had finished ‘tweaking’ everything and the blog I was trying to set-up still didn’t look the way I wanted it to. I was tired, frustrated and overall, I felt deflated about the whole thing.
The next day I sent it onto a Web Development guy that I knew in Manila, telling him what I wanted and even attached a couple of sketches I had put together in regards to the way I wanted the homepage to look. Just 6-hours later I had my blog online and looking exactly the way I wanted it to!
This story will no doubt ring home with a lot of other entrepreneurs that might read this post. The moral of the story – get the professionals to rock out great looking logos, business cards, flyers and websites – whilst you focus on the income generating tasks, such as writing sales copy for your website landing page, or spending time with your number one client on the golf course!
#2 – SEO and ‘Online Marketing’ Tasks
This is probably one of the toughest topics I had getting to grips with when I started getting active online, in regards to promoting and marketing my business on the internet. That has changed a lot over time, obviously, as I have become a lot more knowledgeable on the subject by reading a ton of books, trail and error and asking as many questions (to those that ‘know’) as possible!
As someone who came from a very traditional, brick ‘n mortar business background (and who’s largest company, presently, is still very much in that category), I struggled with understanding SEO concepts. I soon learned that marketing a business online is a lot, LOT different to marketing one in the ‘real’, offline world.
From day one, I paid someone else to do it for me. Someone that had experience and understood Google and how ‘ranking’ worked, etc. And it paid off – for sure. Nowadays even though I’m a little more involved with the general strategies that we implement online, I still pay other people to do it for me, and I know one thing for sure…
If I had’ve even attempted to do this type of work myself when I was starting out, it would have been a complete disaster.
SUGGESTED LISTENING: Check out Episode 42 of the VBL Podcast with marketing professional David Meerman Scott for some of the most up-to-date marketing ideas and concepts for small business available anywhere online. David is a genius at this stuff!
#3 – Everyday, Repetitive Tasks
Being who I am, and doing what I do – this one is kind of a no-brainer.
Call it ‘working with a virtual assistant‘, or ‘outsourcing‘, or whatever you like – offloading the types of tasks that bog you down everyday as a hard working, ball-busting startup entrepreneur is just plain, good business strategy.
Whether you have to do a ton of online research; frequently have to update your social media channels; handle boring, repetitive book-keeping tasks; update your website content regularly; handle your calendar (note – I am terrible at this, and would be lost without my personal assistant doing it for me!); reply to boat-load of daily email inquiries or simply have to transcribe audio or video files, delegating work to other people, nowadays, as simple as 1, 2, 3.
Off-loading these types of everyday ‘busy tasks’, as I call them, is a great way to leverage your time, allowing yourself to get more done, with less effort and really focus on growing your business. At first that might mean spending more time on marketing concepts, or packaging ideas for your launch product. Down the road it could mean that you have more time to spend on putting processes in place for your growing empire.
Either way, working with VA’s and other types of professionals, people that do this stuff for a living everyday, is great business sense and you’ll enjoy the benefits of it, I’m sure.
That about wraps up my ‘quickie list’. Although, like I said, I’d love to hear from you on any other types of tasks, projects or processes that you feel startup entrepreneurs should simply hand over to the people ‘that know’, instead of attempting to do it all themselves.
Comment below, and lets see if we can get a bit of a conversation going!
