It is hard to write about running in a small business in a way that doesn't sound like you read it in a fortune cookie, "Be honest and you will succeed", "Do not do work that can be done by your employees or you will never have time to sleep." There is a reason for that. A lot of the ideas key to success are not rocket science, it is actually putting them into practice that is the hard part....
I work well over 40 hours a week and often I resent that I think other people in the company are not working as hard. My partner pointed out a few things I was doing that could be done by other employees. This is one of the more difficult habits - and it is a habit - for managers of all levels to learn, including small business owners. Have everything, and I do mean, everything, done by other people whenever possible. Your employees are not as highly paid as you, so if they can do a task, even if it only takes 15 minutes of your time, you should be forwarding that email to your employees to follow up.
Those fifteen-minute tasks can easily add up to hours a day. Besides, each of those tasks that your assistant or assistant manager or whoever performs is one more bit of experience for that person. You definitely do not want to be the only person in the company who knows how to set up a conference call.
There are a lot of reasons for not delegating work, none of them very good. These include not wanting to inconvenience workers or appear petty by delegating small tasks, procrastination to avoid difficult decisions or unpleasant parts of your own job, selecting activities that are more interesting over those that are more important, etc.
Solve your own problems instead of expecting other people to do it for you. As I mentioned, I was working over 40 hours a week and resenting it. One solution open to me was to have more of the work done by other people. A second was to be paid for all of the hours I was working. If my partner worked fewer hours than me and we received the same pay, I was not very happy about it. At first glance, it might seem like the problem is someone else - why aren't other people working more hours? Looked at logically though, who told me to charge the company for only 40 hours a week instead of all of my hours? No one. So, I am resentful of the results of a decision I made.
What will I do with the extra time? Keep learning. That is another fortune cookie bit of advice. "Never stop learning." It is yet another piece of excellent advice most managers ignore. My list of new technologies I want to understand better is very, very long. I do spend time on plane trips reading books on design, programming languages I want to learn and more but when it comes to conferences or training courses, I always make the excuse that I don't have time. The fact is, it is far more crucial for me to be aware of both the latest technological developments in distance education and the latest policy changes affecting people with autism than it is for me personally to edit the latest issue of our newsletter for families.
As I said in my last blog entry, honesty is harder than it looks (or something like that). The keys to success in small business may be easy to state, but achieving those 'obvious' solutions takes frequent honest appraisal of the stupid mistakes we all make.
What's that, you don't make stupid mistakes? Okay, well who is the one not being honest now?
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