ionadas local Blog

If you’re a small business owner, you’re accustomed to doing everything yourself: providing your company’s actual service, sales, admin, bookkeeping, etc. You might be proud of this or else hate it. Either way, certain functions of your company are critical for you to perform, and other aspects take you away from that core, critical work.

If you’re proud of doing everything, you see it as a way to be scrappy, keeping more dollars for yourself. If you hate it, you think you simply can’t afford to hire someone to take the load off. In both cases, you may be failing to see the forest for the trees.

People start businesses for any number of reasons, but two of the main ones are 1) to do something you love and 2) to make money. Are you achieving your goals? Let’s see:

Do something you love
If you’re a computer whiz, you might open an IT company so you can set up networks and fix computers—work you’re happy to do all day long. But if you’re doing your own admin and bookkeeping, then you’re spending a certain number of hours every day or week away from the IT tasks that you actually enjoy! When you do tasks you don’t enjoy, you diminish your overall satisfaction and increase chances of burnout.

Make money
Ultimately, we’re all trying to earn a living. Let’s say you’re a CPA billing at $175/hr. If you work 8 hrs/day, you have the potential to earn $1,400/day. If you’re doing your own business support, tasks that cost substantially less than $175 per hour, you are not maximizing your earning potential. In fact, you are literally wasting your time.

Makes sense but you’re not sure where to start? First: Figure out the 3–5 most critical tasks that you perform in your business. They’re critical because you’re the only one who knows how to do them or you do them best, or those tasks bring in the most revenue.

Once you’ve identified those tasks, your goal must be to stop doing everything else! (Really.) In Eat That Frog, author Brian Tracy tells the true story of Cynthia. She identified her 3 most critical functions and got her boss’ buy-in to focus only on those tasks (and to eliminate or delegate the rest). He also agreed that if she doubled revenue, he would double her salary. In just 30 days, Cynthia increased her productivity so much by focusing on those 3 tasks that she did indeed double revenues and doubled her salary. On top of it, she actually reduced her daily workday from 12 hours down to 8!

You may still be thinking that you can’t afford to delegate or outsource the rest of your company’s functions. Any time you perform business support functions, you take time away from doing work you can bill or else generating leads and making sales. If your time is worth more than, say, $18/hr, you will make a profit by outsourcing your admin. It’s that simple.

Just imagine what you could achieve if you got to focus on the reasons you started your business in the first place! You would be happier and more successful, and you would make more money. Who can argue with that?

Abigail Mahnke is president of The Outsource Resource , a one-stop-shopping agency for small businesses in Austin, TX, providing a range of business support services that enable companies to stay focused on their revenue and growth, while ensuring that their other critical functions take place. These services include administrative assistance, bookkeeping/QuickBooks, marketing/social media, graphic design, project management, organization and more. She’ll be speaking in more depth on this topic on Friday, 11/6 at the Taking It to the Next Level business conference. You can also visit her booth on Tuesday, 11/10 at the Austin Open 4 Business Conference.

All opinions expressed in guest blog postings are those of the specific post’s author, and may or may not reflect those of Brian Combs or ionadas local.