5 Reasons Small Business Owners Need to Delegate
By: SmallBizClub
Being co-founder and CEO of a startup company for the past 18 months has taught me the importance of delegating. As your company grows, you’ll find that doing everything yourself is simply impossible and relying on a team to help you is a must. I know this is hard for some of us who like to do everything ourselves. This is personally one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn how to do. However, as our company has seen tremendous growth, my business partner and I realized that running a company remotely was going to require more organization and delegation of tasks to keep up.
Here are 5 reasons why you should consider delegating responsibilities to others
1. Help achieve balance
Be an entrepreneur while also balancing all the other demands of life, like being a parent, staying healthy, making time for hobbies and giving back in the community. As much as we would love to do it all, it’s vital we try to make time for all aspects of our lives that are important to us. If you don’t achieve balance, you can also reach burnout and that is not good for anyone.
2. More time spent on your strengths and less on your weaknesses
Whether you are running a company, running a household or running a team at work, the quicker you realize your strengths and weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses of those around you, the better you are. Figure out what everyone is best at. With a background in business and finance, I handle the bigger picture and act as the CEO and my business partner is a graphic designer so she works on a lot of our marketing collateral. Having team members assist us with customer service needs, operations, PR, writing and social media helps free us up to work on what we do best. Delegation improves efficiency. Whether working with in-house employees or contracting out with an agency or independent contractor, people whose skills better match the work will be more efficient at getting it done. This allows you and your company to be more efficient. Now you have freed up time to spend on everything from operations to new business ideas and growth. This will only help your bottom line!
3. Maximize your time and efforts
Delegating does not mean you give up control and that is something I had to learn. It means you are maximizing your time and efforts and you are a part of team that is going to make it happen! In order to continue to push forward and grow, we needed to hire more employees and delegate tasks and responsibilities. Knowing your own strengths and weaknesses allows you to maximize your time and efforts for the greater good of the company.
4. Empower others through effective leadership
Once you start delegating, you’ll help to develop future leaders while also becoming a better leader yourself. As you encourage team members to develop themselves, you are also developing your coaching and mentoring skills. This is something we have not always done a good job at when schedules get slammed. It is important to take time to communicate with your team members to make sure they are being enabled and feeling like they are succeeding and praised as well.
5. Allow your company to grow
Typically when a company is started it starts with one or just a few people. You do it all in the beginning. Control is sometimes hard for people to give up, but just because you delegate doesn’t mean you are giving up control. You can still effectively set deadlines and times to review. When delegating you can create departments with hierarchy systems that will allow you to expand your original mission and efforts. You can then focus your time and efforts on the important tasks.
Author: Kristy Dickerson, keynote speaker, businesswoman, and active CEO and co-founder of STARTplanner, has devoted her life to providing hope for individuals who are looking to achieve balance, success, and happiness within their own lives. Dickerson has been sought after for keynote speaking due to her relatable story, no excuses tone, valuable advice, and upbeat personality that she entrenches in all aspects of her brands. She believes and preaches that individuals have the ability to do anything they want. Through business coaching, workshops, and speaking she has shown individuals how to make change happen in their life and small business.
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