I started my business for a few basic reasons … perhaps you had the same reasons.
You wanted more freedom – both financially and with respect to time.
You wanted more flexibility than the typical 9-5.
You might have wanted to have a business AND have the freedom & flexibility to pick up your kids from the bus or to help your aging parents when they had appointments.
And I’m guessing that you wanted to make an IMPACT on your corner of the world. You have a BIG message you want to share and you want to get the word out about it. Whether that message is about changing people’s lives or perhaps even their businesses.
So the question I have for you today is …..
do you have the FREEDOM & FLEXIBILITY now in your business that you thought you would have?
If you do – then high five and congratulations!!!
However, if you don’t, then I’m curious …. Have you asked yourself, why not?
Here’s a couple of reasons that you might not be getting the freedom & flexibility you want in your business:
1. You’ve become the bottleneck – yup!!! Hard to admit it but as our businesses grow, we often become the very thing that stops us from growing. Perhaps it’s that we haven’t learned to delegate so we are DOING all everything in our business.
I call that Chief Everything Officer. And while it’s true at the start up of our businesses, we do have to DO absolutely everything. That’s what an employee does – whatever the boss tells them.
However, in order to grow, we have to be able to take off our EMPLOYEE hat and put on our CEO HAT. We have to take a step back from the day to day ‘doing’ activities and we have to plan. We have to purposefully look at our company vision, our goals and then align those with HOW we are going to accomplish them.
We have to take time to look at BIG picture items about the direction of our company. We have to stop ‘winging it’ and create a plan for HOW we are going to achieve those big goals we have dreamed about. That’s why I recommend to all my clients that they set aside a CEO Date with themselves on a regular weekly basis to act like the CEO.
So when was the last time, you wore your CEO hat?
2. You’ve been prioritizing the wrong activities. Another hard pill to swallow, I know. Let’s examine this one. There are essentially 5 core entrepreneurial activities:
- marketing & sales
- customer service
- client fulfillment
- admin and operations
- business growth & development
When I ask most of my clients where they are spending the majority of time during their week, very often it is spent in administrative and operations – things like: answering emails; billing; creating social media images; writing follow up emails; etc. and perhaps client fulfillment (working directly with clients).
With a focus primarily on admin & operations, a business doesn’t have the necessary leads or sales conversations to be predictably profitable. A better use of time would be to focus primarily on marketing & sales, then business growth & development!
The goal of your business should be to make more than enough money to delegate the admin & operations. The goal is to make enough cash to pay yourself, then hire out any activity that isn’t in your ‘zone of genius’ (or your DNA!). Should I repeat that — make money to hire out what ISN’T in your zone of genius!!!
A re-evaluation of your daily tasks is necessary on an ongoing basis. Recently, I realized that I was spending at least one hour a month billing customers! Now although that doesn’t seem like a lot — it adds up to 12 hours a year!!! I’d love to gain back that some of that time to allocate it to creating better marketing videos. So an examination of my finances and my ‘zone of genius’ has brought me to the decision that it’s time to either automate my monthly invoicing or delegate the task.
What tasks are you doing that you can delegate each month???
So these are just a few of the reasons why entrepreneurs aren’t reaching the freedom & flexibility in their businesses that they truly desire. However – you can change the way you do business – you can wear the CEO hat!
I invite you to join me on June 26 for a CEO Planning Day where you’ll get to wear your CEO hat for the full day. We’ll take time to figure out if there are tasks in your business that you can either delegate or automate so that you can gain more freedom & flexibility in your business. Register TODAY here.
Because … after all – that’s why you started your business in the first place!!!
I can’t wait to support you in turning your BIG DREAMS into reality!!
Till then … BE UNSTOPPABLE!!!
Diana
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