Happy January 1, 2017! My wish to you is that in 2017 you take your business to the heights you’ve always wanted to take it!
As you map out your goals for the year, I hope you use the planning prompts I shared with you last time.
But I also want to warn you of 3 mistakes that can hinder your growth.
We’ll go over the tactics to prevent these mistakes from happening in the mini-class I’ve mentioned to you in my last email. But if for some reason you chose not to join us, at least you’ll know what to look out for.
3 Mistakes to Avoid When Planning for Growth
Mistake #1: Growing a business where everything revolves around you
Sometimes we obsess over the idea that no one can do something as well as us. Our businesses are like our babies—no one can take better care of them than us. We become the centers of our little universe – involved in every task, decision, idea, and crisis situation that happens.
You know what I’m talking about if you feel:
- Trapped by what you’ve created
- That even though you are working non-stop, it’s getting you where you want to be oh-so-painfully slowly
- That no matter how productive you are it’s never enough
When how you do things is stored in your head, it’s simply not possible to let anyone do the work for you. You can find the best assistant ever, but she can’t read your mind.
Sometimes you’re willing to train someone but fail to effectively manage that person—giving them too much or too little freedom OR not differentiating between human error and a communication gap.
Either way, you have a solvable problem. More than that, it’s a problem you can prepare for. But however you handle it, I suggest you begin working on the solution sooner than later.
Because if you don’t get support for at least some of the low-leverage activities that are taking up all your time, you’ll never get to do the BIG stuff—the work you know you’re destined to share with the world.
Mistake #2: Never claiming your position as the CEO of your company
Practically all of us who start a business for the first time fall into a trap of working more in our business than on it.
Many of us start our small businesses to practice our craft and get paid for it without anyone bossing us around. Very quickly, though, we find ourselves overwhelmed by everything that needs to get done. That happens because we fall prey to seeing our business from the inside out.
If you are doing most things in your business, you’re an employee of your own business. This means your main focus is on checking off as many of the “to-do” items on your list as possible. The result? You have no time to look up. You have no mental space to consider if (and how) your actions today will actually bring you closer to achieving your year-end goals.
If you want your business to grow, you’ve got to step into your CEO role and focus on things you do best while leaving the rest to your team.
Mistake #3: Thinking that you’ll worry about delegation when you are ready to delegate
In one of my interviews with Danny Iny, he mentioned that best time to hire an assistant is when you’re at about 75% capacity so that there’s enough bandwidth to train them. However – he admitted – it’s not always possible because we tend to wait to ask for help until the very last minute when our situation becomes unbearable.
Since this is how we tend to approach delegation, the only remedy is to start organizing your back end processes long before hiring someone. Outlines of how you do repetitive processes will become the foundation of a training manual you can easily share with your new hire down the line.
