What is the one part of your business that robs you of your joy and time?
With today’s remote outsourcing options, why are you still doing it? For instance, if bringing in new business is your jam, then focus on that. If writing code is more your thing, then laser in on that. If running the numbers floats your boat, then set sail with that. But don’t let the daily grind keep you from attending to your big-picture vision.
Let’s do the math.
Say that you really like the sales part of your business: networking, talking publicly about your product or service, following up on leads, and so on. You have figured out that each hour you spend in sales nets the business ~$500. But as you grow, you are spending more and more time with the details of onboarding clients, which is now absorbing most of your time. You discover that you can outsource your client relationship management for a fraction of that $500/hour and spend more time developing new clients. If you can actually increase the company revenue by outsourcing, why wouldn’t you?
Here's an example.
I’m beginning a fairly comprehensive research/writing project this month that will take me the better part of the year to fully complete. I also committed several months ago to a smaller writing project, complete with multiple character scripts. As I was starting to sketch out the smaller project, it came to me that a blogger friend of mine is between jobs and looking for something meaningful to do with her downtime. Did I mention she is also heavily involved in local theatre? I quickly acknowledged to myself that I really prefer to start work on the larger project so I asked my between-jobs-friend to create the character scripts for the other project and I will come in later and surround her scripts with the other components to complete the project. Could I just do it all? Of course or I wouldn’t have agreed to both but the point is that this creates a win/win/win scenario for my friend, who needs something to do and is a perfect fit; for myself, as I create mental space for the bigger project; and for the client, who benefits from the collaboration.
Let them go.
Those tasks that you just keep putting off because you hate doing them? Those work tasks that are taking up mental capacity and can be easily outsourced to others. Let them go. Not completely, of course, since they are no doubt critical to the holistic success of your company, but definitely give them away to people who like to do them and might even be better than you at it. Things like social media marketing, writing blog posts, client relationships, bookkeeping, managing projects, or even event planning can be outsourced with zero overhead. So, this year, take back your time! You will be so glad you did it.
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