When you’re a business owner (especially as a start-up).. you wear all the hats.
Accountant, social media manager (even though you struggle with content creation!), marketing guru, creator, master of all. After all, your business is your baby, right? However, there comes a point in your business owning journey when symptoms start to appear. You feel under resourced. You feel mental overwhelm. You feel overloaded.
Well. What if we told you that perhaps you are resourced? That you can in fact take that Friday afternoon off, and have a weekend watching the kids play soccer or catch up with you friends?
Answer? Outsourcing.
So are you someone who is ready for that next step? Let’s find out.
You are spending more time working in your business than on it.
No. Seriously. Think about it. How many hours have you spent working on your business, instead of IN your business this week? Because according to Sara Robinson on Inc. “”every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul.”
Whether it’s a torrent of emails that you are drowning under, your to-do list exploding and it hasn’t even hit 9am or you’re answering customer calls every 10 minutes (sound familiar?) – when you are left with little to no time working on growing your business, and in business development, than that is your symptom #1.
You are feeling stressed because you don’t understand certain things in your business.
Whether that’s the finances or numbers side of your business, or the nitty gritty back-end elements of SEO, Google Analytics or Facebook Ads that’s getting your white hairs growing, it’s important to acknowledge that we were not born to be experts in it all.
There comes a time in your business, where you need to admit to yourself that there IS someone who can take the wheel on certain tasks. Trust us. Once you’ve handed over the reins on niggly tasks that weren’t ‘quite right’ in your hands … you will breathe a sigh-of-relief (and so will your business).
You’re not EXCITED or CHALLENGED by your business/product.
We create our own businesses because we’re passionate about something right? We want to bring a solution, fill in a gap, put out our creativity into the world and build genuine relationships.
As with any job – you are bound to hit a slump. But as an Entrepreneur it’s easy to hit that slump HARD and quite quickly if you are trying to be 10 different employees at once. If you’ve found yourself lacking motivation, if the juicy ideas have halted and if your day-to-day has started to lack the challenges that actually FUEL our passions – then it’s time to take a step back and identify where you are spreading yourself too thin.
You’ve run out of ‘Project You’ Time.
“Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” – in other words, you need to look after you. Being busy is great. But being busy without help, can put you on the risk of burnout. And that is the biggest risk of all, as at the end of the day, you are your business’s biggest asset of your business. The person who you should also treat like an employee.
So there you have it. If you can’t remember the last time you took a weekend ‘off’, signed out early, made space in your calendar for a simple catch up with a friend or if your business is starting to feel less like your passion and more like a chore … you know what to do.
As they say…
“Alone you can do so little. Together you can do so much more.”