Make Yourself Expendable(ish)

As a business owner, you know all too well how many things you have to do each day. This list can shrink and grow, but it’s hardly ever totally empty. This can make it difficult to maintain a reasonable work life balance.

This “work life balance” thing is one hard lesson we've learned over the years, and are still figuring out. In some ways, you have to maintain a high level of service and quality in your business- that's a given. But on the other hand, occasionally you'll realize that not everything has to have your fingerprints on it.

Recently, we’ve been dedicating time to creating automations and defining clear boundaries of responsibility for everyone on our team. This has helped clear many things off my desk, but has still taken lots of practice. As the business owner, I often have my grubby little mitts in every single facet of my business. Creating a “one duty- one person” atmosphere helps everyone (including me) to know what their responsibilities are in the first place, and helps me know who to go to if we have an issue. Automating works on tasks that happen over and over and don’t need much attention other than “getting done”.

Still, getting things automated and helping my team know their expectations is step one. If you’re a business owner, you know how hard it is to limit your need for control over everything. My honest struggle was overcomplicating everything to try to make it “perfect”. The best way for me to become more expendable to my business was to- truth be told- lower my expectations… of myself. Setting clear expectations and then actually allowing my team to do their jobs should have been “easy”, but it takes some time if you’ve been a small business owner who is used to doing it all. My super-smart-well-thought-out-method? Not looking. Yes, really. I try to only check in on what my team is working on weekly, and I check on automations only when they report an issue. This approach seemed immature to me at first, but I’ve realized it’s about the only way that actually keeps me from taking the reins again and muttering that well known phrase, “I’ll just quick do this….”.

What ways have you found to automate and outsource your business duties? Are you looking for a way to outsource your website design or social media management? Then get in touch, and let’s see if we can help to make you more expendable(ish)!