Business Owners And Founders: Don't Make This Common Mistake!
It’s exciting to be an entrepreneur, a business owner, the founder of a company, isn’t it?
It begins with a dream, with an idea.
There is a rush of excitement as you put your plans into place, secure your funding, and set the wheels in motion. You’re feeling confident, optimistic, and ready for anything.
Your dream is now a reality.
You’re fielding calls. People are interested in what you’re doing. Your name is getting out there and customers are coming in. You start to make some money.
Your business is growing. It’s a validation of your dream and a testament to all your hard work.
But there now seems to be even more hard work than ever.
The daily tasks of keeping your business going are beginning to feel like a grind. There is less time in your calendar to do all the things that got you excited about starting the company in the first place.
Less time to come up with your next, better idea.
So, you make your first hire, two, or three.
Ideally, you're hiring people who can take some of the burden off your shoulders, people who can handle the day-to-day operations, so that you can get back to the higher-level work of setting strategy and developing new opportunities for your business.
There is just one problem: You can’t let go.
Your business is growing. More and more people are involved, but you find yourself hanging on to the control you were so used to in the beginning.
You realize that you have created a structure that requires everything to go through you, that you must approve all decisions, and where you are responsible for doing all the quality control.
Eventually, you become the bottleneck in your business.
That grinding feeling is still there, it's not getting better.
Everything starts to slow down, even the company’s growth.
The irony is that holding on too tightly to control makes your business
less productive... and less successful.
Letting go of some of that desire to be at the center of every decision will free you up from that grinding feeling and allow you to get back to what you are best at, what sparked you to start your business and to become a founder in the first place.
It’s time to relinquish some of that control.
In order to shift to the next stage of your business you need to start delegating more of your responsibilities to others.
As you do so, you must begin trusting the people around you. You need to trust that your employees are capable of handling decisions on their own and in the best interests of the business, even if part of you still believes that no one can do the jobs as well as you can.
Your business now needs managers, processes, organizational structures, as well as the implementation of business KPIs and performance metrics.
Successful business owners who have made this shift have done it by finding someone external to consult with, someone with the expertise and the experience to navigate the challenges and light the way.
Someone who knows how to take businesses all the way from startup to the big time.
It’s time for your business to be run like a business, no longer like a one-person-show.
Going through this shift is a very difficult time for most business owners as they are letting their baby go and see it walk unaided, all by itself.
Thanks to you, your business has grown bigger, it has become more complex.
But by now, it has become impossible for you to be everywhere all at once and to do everything yourself.
It is still your business, but the time has come for you to delegate some of your work, and to start to work ON your business, rather than just IN it.
That uneasy feeling is perfectly normal.
Trust yourself. Trust the team around you.
You can make the shift to the next stage and see your business grow again, just as long as you can delegate, be a leader (not just a manager), and focus on the big picture.
Strategy is now your friend. Get help. Because you can.
So, as a first step in your new shift forward, find yourself an independent business advisor.
Find a specialist who can give you unencumbered business advice and guidance, someone you can safely bounce ideas off, and someone who can help you stay strong when you feel the temptation to revert back into micro-management mode. 😉
Your business deserves it. And you deserve it, too.
Here’s to your business success!
Peter Strohkorb
About
Peter Strohkorb is the Founder and Principal of Peter Strohkorb Advisory, the international Sales Acceleration Advisory firm with a growing list of clients in the B2B services and tech space in the US, Australia, and in the UK.
Our motto is: “More Sales, Faster”.
And that is exactly what we deliver to you, our clients.