The 3 Sure Ways to Avoid Business Juggling
Being a Solopreneur, or having to run a Small Business by yourself, Without the help of employees or associates can be very hard on your time. You spend the whole day extinguishing fires and trying to get some money producing work in the mean time. Certainly is a treat that almost every one person business faces. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
I have been working for my own since 5 years ago, and sometimes it has been very overwhelming to do the work of 4 or 5 people every day. Especially when you start getting more clients and you need to deliver to them in time.
Here, I’ll share with you what I do to avoid being caught in this constant juggling of things and roles around the office.
1. Define your roles
When you work solo there are plenty of activities that need to be addressed so the business can grow, besides producing the goods you sale, or the service you lend. I’m talking about marketing, bookkeeping, pitching prospects, making proposals, interviewing job candidates, customer support, etc. Sometime these roles don’t even leave you room to work your gig, in my case doing Architecture and Appraisals.
In order to learn how to deal with this must-do tasks, you need to define the roles within your business. I found in my business the following roles to fulfill:
Architect
Appraiser
General Manager
Book Keeper
Sales Manager
Those are the 5 roles I constantly juggle with in my business. What are yours? Who is fulfilling these roles? Can they be outsourced?
2. Some Roles can be outsourced
While not all you do every day in your business can be done by someone else, there are some things that you could outsource in order to free some time up and relieve some stress.
For example, you could outsource your bookkeeping to a CPA. I still do my bookkeeping, but I brought an associate so he could help me with architectural designs and drawing, this frees up some time for me to bring more clients to the business and take care of the managing side of it. Sites like Odesk or Elance are full of freelancers looking to have you as a client and help you free some time up for you to work on the producing aspects of your business.
You could also hire a virtual assistant to do research, send business proposals on your behalf and do some other online errands for you. In Chris Ducker’s Virtual Staff Finder site you can find a bunch of other activities wich can be outsourced to a VA.
3. Theme your days
A few days ago I stumble upon an interview made to Jack Dorsey (Square’s CEO) at the time He was CEO of Twitter and Square at the same time, he was doing two 8 hour shifts daily. So, in this interview, Dorsey talks about how he has a theme for each day of the week and he only works on stuff related to the theme of the day. His daily themes were something like this:
Mondays: Management and running the company
Tuesdays: Products
Wednesdays: Marketing, Communications and Growth
Thusdays: Developers and Partnerships
Fridays: Company culture and recruiting
I know that as a solopreneur isn’t that easy to work in just one area of the business each day, but you could do a variation of this by doing themed hours. For example, you could use 2 hours a day for management, 2 for production, 2 for sales and 2 for running business errands. Find the best combination of roles and schedule them as a daily routine in your calendar.
Working a solo endeavor doesn’t have to be that hard if you establish the adequate systems for running it.
I hope you find this post useful for your business and I invite you to share with us what are the roles you have to cover in your business and how is that you do it.
