Fire Yourself!

It's time for another Rev Up Your Business Video and I’ve got two questions for you:

1. Do you want to grow your business?
2. What do you do in your business?

Are you putting a significant amount of your day to day, week to week, onto growing your business... as in “Working ON the business?"

Or do you find most of your time is going into “IN the business” stuff?

If you started your business as a technician, chances are, you were really good at what you did - the technical thing - whether it was selling shoes, or fixing cars, or software development, or whatever it was, and the business grew around you, because you were really good and you had a lot of demand.

Sound familiar?

And then you got really busy and you hired some team, and they help you out here and there, but you might still be stuck doing a lot of the technical work – the day to day stuff that generates money for the business.

If that’s the case, AND you want to grow your business, we have to start making some different decisions with your time.

To the extent that you’re doing the technical work – the "IN the business" stuff – you don’t have time to do the "ON the business stuff" which is about getting your business growing:

• Increasing your profitability
• Helping you explore new markets
• Gain new client base, etc. 

Here’s an exercise to help you get some clarity on how to work your way out of that "IN the business" time, and get more time "ON the business".

Are you familiar with an  Organizational Chart? 

An Org Chart is a list of all the different roles in a hierarchical sense in the business. So you’d have:

• Owner and Chairman
• Layers of management
• Finance, service delivery, product delivery, admin, marketing 

Make that Org Chart for your own business, even if it’s just you in the business, or one or two other people, what are all those roles? Not the jobs, and not the people, but the roles that get fulfilled day to day. (Watch the video for an example)

Break that all out. The next thing is to put your name next to every role that you do either partially or completely. These are all the things that are keeping you from your "ON the business" time. Everything that’s service or technical delivery is keeping you busy. 

The next step is: how do we get you out of that? Identify the one area that you:

• Spend a lot of time in
• Has the least amount of value for you doing it, or
• You just don't like

Let’s find a way to either systemize it so it can be done more quickly. Can you delegate it to someone on your team? If not, are you able outsource it to an expert? If not, can you hire someone that can look after that for you so you can free your time up for doing the things that only you do really well, and for running your business.

So that’s it. Have fun with the Org Chart and I’d love to hear back from you on what you’re doing and what you’re going to stop doing, and what you’re going to do with the time that you’re getting back from your IN the business technical stuff.

Till Next Week!

Cheers! Dan