Are You Running Yourself Down as an Entrepreneur? Escape the Rat Race

If you are feeling like you are jumping from one task in your business to the next, and your job as an entrepreneur never ends, you are not in a good place. Balancing your personal and business life, managing your clients and staff requires a certain level of organizational skill. You should always try to improve your time management, and find managerial hats to drop, so you can take your business to the next level. If you are an entrepreneur who often feels stuck, you should consider the below advice.

Get Help

You will have to accept that there are only so many hours in the day, and you will need to get help if you constantly feel overwhelmed or spend too much time putting out fires. You can outsource some things, take on an employee, or even employ an agency. Even if it is just for a short term, there might be people who can handle specialist tasks more efficiently than you. Once you find them, you will realize that you were missing out on productive time doing things that are not your specialties.

Outsource

One of the best ways of dealing with emergencies and increased workload that is temporary is outsourcing some jobs. If you feel like you are wasting time trying to manage your social media accounts and are still not getting any results, you might need to talk to a professional who can make it work for you for less than you would pay yourself. After all, you will always have to make a decision whether or not one activity is the best use of your time as an entrepreneur.

Strategize

When you feel like nothing is in sync in your business, you might want to change your business model and strategy so it will serve your long term goals better. You might want to look at the processes in your business and find out how you can reduce resource allocation and optimize them, If you have never come across lean management, or you think that it is all about manufacturing, you should read up on the topic. You can easily put processes and checks in place to reduce waste of time and resources.

Prioritize

When you have a busy schedule, you will need to prioritize the tasks ahead. A good approach can be to ask yourself: “does it make the boat go faster?” and if it does not, you should move the task to the bottom of the pile. There are urgent and important tasks in your business,  and you should deal with them first, but your ultimate goal should be to focus on the non urgent and important tasks, so you are more in control of what is going on.

Automate

If you look at your business as  a prison, and are not enjoying the small tasks, it might be time to automate. Thanks to the great software engineers of today, you can manage your time, your resources, schedule posts and social media promotions, monitor your feedback score, and even engage with your potential clients using a sales funnel and email marketing sequence. There are plenty of things you can automate that can save you hours every day; set up automatic computer security scanning, cloud backups, and invoicing. You can even get a company to take care of your gst registration, so you don’t have to deal with the paperwork. No entrepreneur likes dealing with the small details; it is not where their strengths lie.

Take a Step Back

If you feel stuck in your business, it might be time to take a step back and have a birds’ eye view, If you want to see clearer, you will need to take yourself out of the equation every now and then. Create a SWOT analysis about your business, take a break in the mountains, and clear your mind. If you are working in your business, you can not effectively work on your business.

Make Yourself Replaceable

Your ultimate goal should be to build a business that runs without you. No matter if you are a consultant and you have personal relationships with customers, or a designer, you will eventually want to just oversee the processes. It is crucial that you create training policies and documents, and make it easy for your staff to take over a project when they need to. After all, you will need  a holiday when you don’t have to worry about how your business is doing and how your staff is managing the tasks.

Improve your Focus

One of the main problems entrepreneurs have when it comes to strategy development and managing their different responsibilities is focus. There are plenty of great productivity tools you can use online that will help you get better results and manage your time more efficiently. Even a simple app, such as the Pomodoro widget will help you track your tasks and productivity and schedule your work better. You can also have a calendar that will remind you of your important appointments and help you manage your staff remotely. Collaborating through the internet will help you save time on traveling and setting up.

Block Scheduling

If you want to make the most out of your productivity, you will need to practice block scheduling, Your brain takes 25-30 minutes to switch from one activity to the next, and this means that you will need to block schedule tasks. For example, if you are generating leads on LinkedIn, set aside a couple of hours for this, so you can really get in the mindset. Schedule all your staff and customer meetings for the same day, so you can save time traveling and focus on the same ideas, instead of jumping from one to the next.

Being a business owner is not easy. You will have to manage multiple activities, as well as your staff, your time, and your customer relationships. Take a step back every now and then and review your processes to see how you can optimize and simplify them.