There’s a great deal of emotional investment wrapped up in this business you’ve created, and from the moment of its conception your mind is never far from it.
In the early days, your business may take up all your waking hours, and often many of the hours you would prefer to be sleeping. It consumes seemingly endless supplies of your resources without producing any income. And many of the lovingly prepared plans you made during the gestation period will prove to be completely unworkable!
The next few years are a period of rapid learning. Marketing. Sales. Admin. Accounts. Human Resources. Payroll. Your area of expertise may be nothing to do with any of these but you still have to find time to figure it all out. You may outsource one or two areas to a professional, like your website for instance, but for the most part new business owners have to do pretty much everything themselves. They are intimately involved in all aspects of their business every single day.
But what happens next? Eventually your business will grow to the point where you’re turning down new opportunities because you’re still trying to catch up on last week’s opportunities.
This is the time when you have to make a choice.
Letting go…
Your baby’s ready to go to college and you have to decide. Do you let it go?
Like a helicopter parent, you can stay in control of every detail in the day to day life of your business, even when it should be capable of some level of independence. You can do everything yourself, just to make sure everything’s done ‘just so’. You can sign off every decision personally because, well, your business is at stake here.
You can choose to limit your business to what you can personally manage on a day to day basis. Or you can choose to let it go.
Choosing to let it go doesn’t mean the process will be easy. As any parent will tell you, letting go is possibly one of the most difficult stages in their parenting life, but, if you want your business to fulfil its potential you have to let it grow into an independent entity.
Manager … or leader?
You can become a leader in your business instead of a manager. Because as Philp Bain says in his book Start to Grow, poor leaders want to be indispensable. They want to create a business that can’t run without them, but great leaders want to be redundant. They want to create a team that can function in their absence, they want to create systems and processes capable of running smoothly without their input. They surround themselves with exceptional people and they get comfortable delegating, empowering, promoting, and trusting people’s judgement, so they can think strategically and focus on taking things to the next level.
You see, there are new markets for your business to explore, new skills for your business to acquire, new technologies for your business to assimilate. You can’t do it all. You can’t even manage it all. If you want your business to fully develop you have to let it go. Surround yourself with exceptional people. Create systems that will support your business goals. Learn to delegate. Inspire others with your vision for your business and empower them to build it with you.
Are you ready to start building the team that can take your business to the next level? As a Virtual Assistant with experience of helping small business owners grow their business, I can help you take that step to transition from solopreneur to leader. Contact me here or by phone on 07761 903816 for a complimentary consultation to explore ways I might be able to help you.
