When you’re starting a business, the term “delegate” can cause you to cringe. As a business owner, you want your hands to be in everything. From personally answering every email to ordering business cards that are just right, it’s difficult to imagine ever handing over the reigns for tasks in your business.
However, after a couple of years of doing everything myself, I learned that many of the aspects of my business that I was struggling with and wasting a lot of time on were actually hindering my profitability. For example, creating, editing and updated a website and doing anything remotely technological frustrated me within five minutes. Once I learned to delegate these tasks to interns and hired help, my time and my brain were freed to focus on revenue-generating activities.
Similarly, once I searched for and brought on interns, I was able to free up a lot of time that was spent doing mundane texts, such as labeling videos online, organizing articles and blog posts, and other brainless activities. As an intern, I remember starting from the bottom up doing these sorts of activities. It’s how you get experience. Therefore, not only am I now offering experience for an intern, but also I am generating more free time for me to work on profitable activities and activities that allow me to use my strengths.
It’s important to do some deep soul-searching when starting your own business in order to determine what your strengths actually are. For example, I thrive when I’m in front of people. Sitting behind my computer, typing away, isn’t where I shine. However, when I am in front of a camera and know that people are watching me, as if I am in front of them, I feel my strengths exuding from myself. It is then when I am at my best. Therefore, whenever I am asked to write an article or blog post, I always ask if I am able to create a video to share the content instead of writing the content. This not only allows me to use my strengths, but it also is a time saver! Whereas it may take me 30 minutes to write this content in article form, it would take me three minutes to record this content as a video.
So in order to step it up in your business, make sure that you focus on your strengths. Use them. Embrace them. And then take some time to reflect on your weaknesses. Can you delegate them? How much time will you save? How much happier will you be? Ultimately, the more time you spend working in areas of your business the utilize your strengths, the more profitable your business will be.
Article by Stephanie Mansour, CEO of Step It Up with Steph www.StepItUpwithSteph.com
