10 Tasks Every Entrepreneur Should Stop Doing Themselves
Being an entrepreneur is exhausting, and many can often fall into what’s called the ‘founder’s trap’. This is the reality of working in your business, rather than on your business - which is what you should be doing.
Whilst wearing every hat in the business might seem like the best thing to do at the time, you should only be doing this until it gets to a point when it’s financially possible to outsource those responsibilities.
By not handing over those responsibilities, it ultimately leads to burnout, stalled growth of the business, and missed opportunities that may have helped you scale up.
It’s good to shift the mindset from you doing the work to someone else doing it for you. Here are ten tasks that every entrepreneur should stop doing themselves sooner rather than later.
The Core Delegation Framework
It’s important to be aware of the difference between the administrative tasks and the strategic ones when it comes to cost. For example, if you’re doing the admin as a founder, then you may only be paying yourself $15 an hour in theory, as opposed to the $500 an hour for strategic tasks.
Identifying the few things only a founder can uniquely do helps you to figure out what then needs to be outsourced to others. For example, the vision of the business, fundraising, and key partnerships are likely responsibilities to fall onto the founder. However, for admin tasks that can often be automated, the use of internal staff or a virtual assistant might be required.
The 10 Tasks to Stop Doing Immediately
Let’s break down some of the tasks that you should stop doing as a founder and give to someone else. Whether that’s hiring full-time staff internally or utilizing the cost-effective freelancing option instead.
#1 Invoicing and Basic Bookkeeping
Invoicing and basic bookkeeping are something you may feel you can do in your sleep once it’s something you’ve established. However, it’s often repetitive and takes away a lot of the focus you would otherwise have when it comes to generating sales or pursuing new opportunities.
Having a freelance bookkeeper or using automated accounting software is a much better way of alleviating the task elsewhere.
#2 Calendar Management and Meeting Scheduling
There’s an endless back-and-forth that comes with calendar management and meeting scheduling. Finding a 30-minute slot can be a big daily time sink.
With that in mind, it’s good to rely on the software instead, like Calendly for scheduling. You could also look at hiring a Virtual Assistant.
#3 Customer Support and First-Line Enquiries
Answering the basic FAQs will often result in having to constantly interrupt deep work and creative thinking. These two are important factors in growing your business and helping it thrive.
Helpdesk software can be useful for customer support or perhaps a ticketing system. Alternatively, you might want to invest in a part-time customer service agent.
#4 Social Media Scheduling and Daily Posting
Handling your social media platforms can be a full-time job in itself. If you’re neglecting your social media platforms, then that can cause a delay in growth. Curating, formatting, and uploading content daily can yield low strategic value for the founder, even if it provides a false sense of productivity.
A social media manager or content scheduling platform is helpful for growing your business and opening it up geographically to the rest of the world.
#5 Basic Website Maintenance and Technical Troubleshooting
Spending a few hours every so often fixing broken plugins on WordPress or formatting glitches is a terrible way of spending your time as a CEO.
A freelance developer should be implemented in order to take on these often complex and time-consuming tasks so that founders can focus on the bigger picture at play.
#6 Data Entry and CRM Management
Manually typing leads, cleaning spreadsheets, or updating contact cards is mindless work that is going to drain your mental energy. When it comes to general mental energy, if you’re draining it all on mindless tasks, then you don’t have enough in the tank for the big stuff.
Low-cost virtual data assistants or Zapier integrations are great for helping free up your valuable time.
#7 Travel Planning and Logistics
Hunting for flights or comparing hotel rates, and organizing your own itinerary is one that can take up a lot of your time through the operational workload. A VA is one who can build a travel profile and helps in booking everything seamlessly.
#8 Graphic Design for Daily Marketing
Fiddling with Canva templates for slide decks or blog graphics is a slow and unprofessional effort to make, compared to an expert’s work.
Hiring a designated graphic designer or using a flat-rate subscription service, this helps in your company’s efforts for daily marketing.
#9 Initial Candidate Screening and Recruitment Sifting
Reading through 200+ resumes to find the right candidates for your next hire can eat up entire workdays and even weeks. Therefore, it’s helpful to have someone who can do it all for you.
A freelance recruiter or an automated applicant tracking system is a good way to deliver the top 3% of candidates straight to your desk. It can cut down the recruitment process greatly.
#10 Video and Audio Editing
If your business is producing podcasts or YouTube videos, then editing these can be a highly technical and time-consuming effort.
That’s why, just like social media management, a specialised freelance video and audio editor is useful to have.
The Economics of Giving Up Control
It’s good to calculate how much revenue you could potentially be losing as a founder by focusing on the small stuff.
Spending $500 a month on support is one that unlocks over $5,000 a month in new sales activity.
Stop Doing These Time-Wasting Tasks.
Scaling a business requires shedding yourself of the tasks, not collecting more of them. True leadership is often about leverage and not about hard labor. Start offloading the most frustrating tasks and instead, delegate these to internal hires and outsourced services.
By doing so, you’re going to help improve your opportunities for success as a business owner this year and beyond.
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