As a small business owner, you need to constantly be working on your business and this means making strategic moves, calculated decisions, and taking the occasional risk in order to achieve growth. If you are not able to do these things, you may find yourself struggling to compete and stay afloat.
One of the biggest barriers to small business growth is not financial worries, constraints, or management, but business owners avoiding growth because they think it will mean they have to work more. As the owner of a business, they believe that they are the only person equipped to work on their business and, over time, this leads to burnout, missed opportunities, and stunted growth.
Delegation, however, is a key way that business owners can get around this problem.
Delegating for Small Businesses: How It Can Help
Although not all small business owners are in love with the idea, delegating is one of the best things they can do in order to promote growth. Here are some benefits of delegating for small businesses.
1. It promotes better focus
If you are finding yourself burned out and bogged down by an immense workload, even if it’s just the little things getting you down, imagine the amount of time that could be freed up by delegating some of your less important tasks to other people.
When you free yourself from mundane day-to-day tasks that can be handled by somebody else, you are able to focus more on the other important aspects of your business that fuel growth.
2. You have time to think about new ideas
One of the best benefits of delegating for small businesses is how it frees up more time for small business owners to focus on developing new ideas.
After all, when you are inundated by small tasks that can be delegated to other people, you don’t have much time to focus on these new ideas that could be the breakthrough your business needs for its next phase of growth. Delegating gives you both more time and space that can be spent on thinking of new ways to grow your business and take it to the next level.
3. It makes you a better leader
When you delegate smaller tasks to your staff and begin spending more time focussing on your company’s bigger picture, you become a better leader. Employees will feel more empowered and trusted when they are delegated tasks to be getting on with and this will, in turn, make you less of a micromanager and a much better leader.
You can go one step further and include your employees in the exploration of new plans and ideas by asking for their creative input, opinions, and skills.
Delegating for Small Businesses: How to Do It
Simple—just start handing out tasks for people to do that you want to be freed from.
Think about the aspects of your business that are holding you back, causing stress, and keeping you awake at night. Do you really need to be handling these things? Are there repeated and mundane tasks that commonly appear in your schedule that can be handed down to somebody else?
If you do need to be handling the tasks that are causing you stress and lost sleep, think about the other smaller and more mundane tasks that you can handle and delegate these instead. By cutting back and creating some head space in your life through delegation, you are able to realize the valuable benefits that it can bring.
While delegating tasks that you are accustomed to handling can feel alien, particularly for a business owner who has spent their time and effort building everything up, it is something that will need to be done eventually and the sooner you grow comfortable with the idea, the better.
Don’t Be Afraid of Hiring Extra Help
Delegating for small businesses is great, but it isn’t always enough. Sometimes you need to bring a few extra bodies on board in order to cope with a growing workload. If you neglect to do this, you could stunt your growth. After all, employees are a long-term investment that promote growth and prosperity from within.
