Stop juggling: how to choose which business hats to keep wearing and which to delegate
Discover the key to scaling your business by identifying which roles to keep and which to delegate. Learn how to break free from the juggling act and focus on your strengths to transform your business.
How many hats are you wearing?
When you are starting out you will be wearing all the non-billable hats.
Good for making money because everyone else is billable and you are keeping them happy, busy and paid.
Bad for scaling and wearing those hats with true excellence.
Terrible for your stress levels.
The dangerous roles are the ones you are quite good at.
If you find yourself running a business, even if that business is currently just you, then you are dangerously quite good at the following:
- Finding work
- Selling work
- Making sure clients are happy
- Making sure the team is happy
- Invoicing enough money to keep this whole thing going.
You'll juggle these so much that it doesn't feel like a set of discrete roles, it's just… being you.
Which hats should you wear?
However, some of these things you are only quite good at, so you can't be excellent. You also can't take a day off, so your efforts aren't sustainable. And there's only one of you, so you can't scale
You need some other heads for the hats, but first you need to decide which to stop wearing. If you stop wearing the right one it can be transformative for you personally and for the team.
- Imagine HR done well.
- Imagine doing sales activities that reach out to the right clients and don't just react to what lands in the inbox.
- Imagine someone with the time to become best friends with your best client.
- Imagine some room to breathe.
Some roles are easy to stop because you can't do them or hate doing them.
Choosing to get an accountant because you don't like numbers is easy. It's harder to get a sales person or client manager and trust them to deliver.
However you need to decide what to stop doing and you need to be careful with your choice.
The influence of the roles you choose
Those roles are influential. Your strengths and weaknesses in them are going to appear in everything your business does.
Your passion or lack of passion for them is going to be amplified and it's going to be noticed.
This is where culture comes from.
Bits of you are going to be ingrained into how your business works.
Which are your best bits?