As a small business owner it’s pretty safe to say that you have started your business through the love of your product. You are going to know everything about it, was not quite the case for me, but hey-ho, you can learn as you go along. Sure thing, I did that!
With that in mind, especially at the beginning before you have built a team around you to help with the monumental task of selling yourself, your brand and your product, there will be things that you are not an expert with. Whether that’s marketing, social media or accounting, you can learn this as you go along. But these gaps in your knowledge can bring stress, obstacles and mismanaged time.
So how do you identify these pressure points and how do you solve them? Well, you don’t want the outside world to see these weaknesses and you plod along. You work long hours to make sure these much-needed tasks are done effectively and to the best of your ability. But this also takes you away from doing what you do best. For me in my business, fortunately, I had a business partner in the beginning and we had a very ying and yang working relationship, what I wasn’t good at, he was and vice versa.
However, that relationship didn’t continue to the very end of our business and I had to identify my pressure points. Please do not let anyone fool you about this, there is only one thing that will allow you to discover these, and that is straight-forward, brutal honesty with yourself. As I have mentioned in a previous article, you and only you will know your own strengths and weaknesses and you need to accept these. You don’t need to say these weaknesses out loud to another person at any time, but as soon as you accept these within yourself, the sooner you can do something about this and spend your time much more effectively.
Examples of delegation in the workplace
Accepting your weaknesses is not a bad thing. Let’s remember the old cliche that accepting your faults allows you to grow and develop. It is exactly the same for your business, as it simply cannot be allowed to continue as your business’ survival cannot afford you to struggle and persevere with them.
Let’s take as an example of something I wasn’t particularly great at, namely blog writing. 😁 In the beginning, as I did not know everything I had to know about my product, trying to create blog posts that would work with our overall marketing strategy involving keywords for organic search engine growth was something I quite honestly sucked at. My business partner was much better at this and took the lead with these. So when the time came for me to have to create these myself, without the safety net of my business partner, I ended up working late trying to create purposeful and quality blog articles. Before I did something about this I was tired and became irritable when I realized that I had to stop what I was doing as it was the time that I had set aside to write these. Overall, I lost time, was less productive and subsequently lost revenue.
I have always been one of these out of the box thinking type of people. I never really got my best ideas at networking events or brainstorming sessions, those came to me in the shower if you’ve read one of my other articles. For me to fix this, I decided to open up my website’s blogs to guest writers, and with my skills, I even managed to monetize this and I got paid by these writers for the privilege of using my business blog as a launchpad for there own future blogs or to garner more traffic and sales for there own site or brand. It was a win-win for everyone involved.
So how do you identify your own weaknesses, deal with these and how can you make this work for you? Well again, you will know how to separate out your own weaknesses. There is the old fashioned and traditional method creating a list, a little cliche and boring but each to their own. Download an app perhaps as there must be some kind of schoolgirl diary app on an app store somewhere, or very simply understand and have these defined in your own mind. This was my preferred method as I didn’t want the list to be seen by anyone!
Again, as you will know your own preferred method of defining your un-strengths (yes un-strengths because you can spin weaknesses positively) you will know how to list these. These are then easy to correct. There are numerous methods for delegating or outsourcing these. Is it time to look towards employing a person to manage these tasks? If you have more time to focus your energy to then potentially take your business forward or simply generate more revenue you can potentially off-set the wage cost. Outsourcing these tasks can be an easier and potentially cheaper option, but who do you choose and who should you trust?