As a business owner you have responsibility, and LOADS of it.  When you decided to become a business owner, you immediately inherited the role of ‘jack of all trades’ by juggling:
Accounting, Finance, PR, Marketing, Bookkeeping, Sales, Social Media, Strategic Planning, SEO, Partnerships, Insurance, Legal, Branding, Competitor Analysis, Corporate Communications, Human Resources … you get the point. Sheesh, no wonder we’re exhausted.

The quote “Jack of all trades, master of none” rings ever so true in the world of owning a business. As much as you’ll want to do everything yourself … you little control freak you … you’ll ultimately hit a point where you’re overworked, overwhelmed and spending more time managing your business instead of doing what you’re best at — providing your core service to your client, and gaining more clients to further grow your business.
Here are a couple of suggestions that may help you get back to the business of being a business owner and leader, focusing on the skills you have already mastered, and letting a master of other areas assist you.

If time is money, then saving time means saving money.

Wherever you can save time in working In your business, and not on your business, you can use that saved time for the “good stuff”, your client work or business growth and sales strategies. Knowing when to work smart and knowing when to work hard will determine how productive your business will be. So work smart with managing your business and work hard on your client services and business growth plans.

Working smarter means reducing the time you’ll spend on the mechanics of your business so you can spend more time on the functions of your business.  The long standing answer to facilitate smarter business management is to outsource your work, either externally, or by hiring and onboarding new staff who are experts in the areas you are not.

When a business is considering outsourcing, the first thing they must decide is what can be outsourced. Director of Growth Management at CBIZ MHM, Gregg Landers, has consolidated the activities that can potentially be outsourced by businesses into three main categories:

1) Highly Skilled Expertise:

You may not need to pay the salary of a full time marketing director, but instead you could pay for someone at a marketing director level person to come in once or twice a month to provide tangible and strategic goals for the business’ position in the industry.

2) Highly Repetitive Tasks:
When you think highly repetitive jobs, you think data entry, accounts payable, shipping inventory or content generation. All of this can be outsourced as they are rather easily and quickly executed and frankly, a waste of a business owner’s time that could be spent on business development.
3) Specialised Knowledge:

If your business has an online presence but you don’t employ a full time web developer or digital marketer, it’s simple to change to an outsourced provider whose job it is to keep on top of all the latest and ever-changing trends in the digital space. It’s impossible to keep on top of the changes and growth in this area unless you can commit to it full-time. An outsourced expert in this area can easily manage your needs in just a few hours a week, and achieve highly effective results.  A good digital marketer will earn their keep, and then some.

As the owner of a business you may occasionally find yourself not being able to see the forest for the trees when you’re occupied managing all the different aspects of your business. It’s important to consider if anything in your business can be freed up by outsourcing it to professionals, and when you start looking at your business like this you begin to realise that clarifying the processes within your business will ultimately flush out the inefficiency.

Over to you…

Did you read this and realise it related to you and your business?  With the new year upon us, there’s no better time to start working smarter and that may mean outsourcing some of your business.  If you would like any help with design, digital strategy, PR or advertising, please get in touch with our team at Fuse Agency. We’d love to chat. Give us a call today on 07 3198 4890.