When you start a small business, you often feel compelled to do every little task yourself. Being the “chief cook and bottle washer” may be necessary in the beginning, to get your small business off the ground. But it can actually hamper your growth in the long term.
Taking on work that can be done by your employees (or outsourced to specialists) costs you time that could otherwise be spent on things that build your small business. Like strategies for improving operations, customer service, and sales.
You need to delegate routine tasks to give yourself more headspace to dream big and stay motivated. It’s thinking time that you need to grow your business.
Whether you run a retail shop, restaurant, service business, or other type of small enterprise, make the most of your precious time by delegating these five tasks:
- Financials. Unless you’re an accounting whiz who takes great personal satisfaction in balancing the books, it can be a painful chore to maintain your company’s financial records. It’s time-consuming work that requires focus. Preparing financial reports, receiving and paying invoices, filing taxes, and payroll are tasks you can outsource to a professional bookkeeper or accountant.
- Marketing. Absolutely oversee your marketing strategy to make sure it fits your brand ideals and business goals. But outsource the execution of your thoughts and ideas to specialists in web design, video and web content, search engine optimization (SEO), traffic analytics, social media marketing, and public relations. Vicinity makes it simple to run an effective loyalty program within your marketing strategy. Set it up to run Autopilot in the background—it crunches your Vicinity customer data and sends out text-message promotional campaigns, automatically. Autopilot is programmed to send different offers at different times, based on customer purchasing behaviour. (Read about how Autopilot works, or call 1-855-292-9766 to ask your Vicinity rep for a demonstration.)
- IT support. Invest in the best small business computer network and point-of-sale system you can afford. Have it professionally installed and maintained, so you can rely that it works efficiently and keeps business data protected. Make sure add-on programs come with simple-to-install hardware or software and customer support, like your Vicinity loyalty program.
- Office admin. Ordering stock, calling customers, scheduling appointments, managing your calendar. These administrative tasks can be allocated to employees within their job descriptions and daily workflow.
- Jobs you despise. Taking hated tasks off your plate sets your mindset to “positive”. So it makes good business sense to delegate anything work-related that you hate to do. Cleaning the washrooms, organizing the stock room, washing dishes, dusting off displays or sweeping the floor might fall into this category. Plus it’s an opportunity for staff to learn about the mundane realities of small business success.