Here’s a common scenario I run into when doing crisis management in a company. A business owner meets me in the middle of their office, surrounded by mountains of paperwork, clutching their phone, which is always drained of its battery because they are on it so much that the charging cord is dangling from it just in case…. Almost always they are in the final stages of physical exhaustion, dark circles under their eyes and when that phone rings they actually flinch and then desperately claw at it, so afraid to not answer it and possibly miss out on much needed revenue that they don’t even realize how ineffective this lack of focus makes them. It is not uncommon for me to be in a meeting interrupted several times by phone calls. The owner always looks at me apologetically, holding up a finger or even mumbling “sorry I have to get this” and mistakenly thinks that they are handling their business. What they are really doing is putting out forest fires with a water gun.
One of my first recommendations in this scenario is for the business owner to get some help, ASAP. Without help, I cannot even begin to be effective because they will never be able to direct their focus on addressing the crisis. If you are exhausted, lack focus, cannot concentrate and if you can’t put your phone down, you need to hire someone.
In my years of helping small businesses, this is one of the biggest mistakes I see many of them make – waiting to hire until the last minute or trying to handle it themselves. People problems are
messy problems and that may be one of the reasons why small business owners are so afraid to take this necessary step. However, the hard truth is – you cannot grow without a team. You cannot even survive as a business without a team.
Here are the top three reasons why:
1. You are the top revenue producer in your company. You should not be doing work that you
can pay someone to do.
2. It will take you much longer to do work that you are not passionate about. This always leads to procrastination, which always leads to losing your hard earned money. For example, if you don’t invoice, you will soon lose track of who owes you money. If you don’t keep up with your legal and tax paperwork, you will owe penalties and interest. If you are always on the phone because you cannot put it down out of fear of losing customers, you will create relationship problems with your family. This will cost you money when you have to pay someone to tell you what I’m telling you right now. Hire someone.
3. Finally – when you duplicate yourself, you duplicate your ability to produce revenue, exponentially.
The bottom line in all of this is that you need a team. When you are putting your business plan together, you need to include hiring people in your timeline. Hiring without a plan will always cost you because you will be tempted to do it out of desperation and this almost always ends in disaster.
Stay tuned next week when I talk about different ways to hire and how each will affect your company’s ability to grow.