It can be easy as an entrepreneur to try and wear all the hats yourself. We get that. It takes a lot of moving parts and a variety of skills to grow a business. However, there’s a lot of things that aren’t, uh, necessarily in your wheelhouse that can suck up a lot of time and effort. It’s important to know what is the most effective use of your time. Delegation or farming out tasks can free up your time so you can focus on the things you need to do to grow your business.
A lot of people hesitate to delegate some of these tasks because they think that if take care of it themselves, it will save money. That’s not always true. Sometimes short-term saving has long term costs.
65% of business don’t last 10 years. As Will Figueroa mentioned on our videocast, BeGrowthDriven, 2 of the main enemies of business are distraction and destruction (or implosion.) It’s possible that by focusing your time and effort on tasks and elements of your business that aren’t your specialty, you could be destroying future opportunities and distracting yourself from what your purpose. The example Will used on BeGrowthDriven was that of a coffee shop. If you love the art of coffee and the dedication and focus that you put into your coffee is what makes you great, then stepping away from that could hurt you. If the coffee shop owner is dealing with IT problems and technology instead of perfecting the coffee, it will be harder for them to scale the shop successfully.
One way to make sure you’re focusing on what makes you great is by collaborating with businesses with different areas of specialty. Delegating tasks to them will help you stay focused on honing your own “Zone of Genius.”
Obviously, every company has different specialties so the tasks that need delegating will be different. However, these 5 are things that often fall into the category of thing that small companies try to do themselves and then up regretting it later.
#1 All the IT stuff
In this digital age, some IT services are a requirement. If you don’t know how to set up behind the scenes of a website or cloud services, it can be very time consuming (and expensive) to learn. There are so many companies and entrepreneurs who focus on IT services and management. They can help! Having it don’t right in the beginning will make it easier for the future.
#2 Compliance
Every year more and more regulations are added to the internet. Regulations about data usage, cookies, accessibility, etc. There are even more regulations if you are in specifics fields such as the medical and health industry. If you break a rule you didn’t even know was there can have serious consequences! Delegating compliance services to a specialist makes sure you don’t have any nasty surprises down the road.
#3 Branding
Branding is more than just a logo. It’s the entire outward facing personality of your brand! It can be difficult to look at your brand objectively, which is one of the reasons while delegating branding is a good idea! A graphic designer or branding agency knows the right questions to ask to help you figure out who your brand is. And they know all the technical things that need to happen to make sure your branding has the pieces you need to grow your business.
#4 Web Design
There are soooooo many free (or cheap) web design tools out there and honestly, some of them are really great! However, designing a website can be a lot more complicated than it appears. There’s a lot of technical aspects behind the scenes. Things like DNS and Domain Hosting are time consuming to learn how to set properly. Web design can be overwhelming and frustrating if it’s out of your element and might be worth delegating.
#5 Digital Advertising
Digital advertising is a massive field. There’s digital display, and programmatic adverting, and social media. There are entire agencies that do only Facebook ads! It can be difficult to know where to begin with online advertising: What software should you use? What’s the right channels for your business? What creative will work best? How much money should you invest? Where should you send the traffic you acquire? Delegating your digital ads will help you make money!
Some of these tasks we do for clients but others we delegate out ourselves! The key is to know what’s the best use of your time.
Did we miss any good tasks to delegate? Let us know!
