You wake up refreshed after getting a perfect night’s sleep. You’re full of energy and motivation and open your computer early and add 3 critical tasks on your to do list – you’re about to take your company to the next level! 🚀

You start the morning meeting with your team. 15 minutes on the calendar eventually spiral into a 50 minute call, just like every morning, followed by two one-on-one sessions to explain a few tasks. You take a break to reset, grab an early lunch and get back to it with fresh forces.

After lunch you have a handful of emails forwarded to you, half of them things that your team thought you should know, others needing advice or input. While you answer them another handful of messages pop up, so you take care of those.

It’s now 2 PM. You stare at your 3 critical tasks and realize you’re too tired to take them on, so you postpone them. At least you can search for a few more clients, so you spend the rest of the day browsing your network and the links you saved for lead generation, all the while switching back and forth between that, your inbox, team meetings, and PMs.

You plan on working in the evening when things are quieter, but drop that plan when evening comes around and your eyelids are struggling to stay open. You resolve to go to bed earlier and finally work on growing your company starting tomorrow.

You wake up refreshed after getting a perfect night’s sleep. You’re full of energy and motivation and open your computer early and add 3 critical tasks on your to do list – you’re about to take your company to the next level! 🚀

Notice a pattern?

This is how being stuck in the day to day grind feels like. Variables may change, but one thing doesn’t: you’re spending your time as a full time manager, not as a company owner.

That’s the first sign you need someone in charge of operations. If done right, this isn’t just a role you hire, it’s a totally different way to run your business. A way to scale your business.

Other signs you need to delegate operations

I won’t turn this into a listicle, but if the description above feels familiar, here are a few more signs you need to delegate operations so you focus on growing your company instead:

Clients are unhappy and need your attention specifically. If clients are working with you only because of you specificallythen you have a job, not a company. Turn what makes you special into your company’s best assets by taking everything you do great out of your head, turning it into great processes, and training great people to follow them.

Every decision relies on you. If people are turning to you for everything from double-checking their work to handing things over to the client, then they aren’t really working in roles as much as they’re assisting you in your day job.

There’s a lack of documentation everywhere. When somebody new joins your team, do they have everything they should do written down somewhere, or do they get to shadow you or a more senior member of your team? If you don’t have anything documented you’re actively wasting time at a rate of more than an hour per hour – your new team member’s time gets wasted, your existing staff’s time is wasted, and ultimately your time flies out the window.

You’re doing all the talking in team meetings. If everyone is looking at their webcam with a thousand yard stare and you have to repeat questions over and over again, that’s a sign that things aren’t going great, and you’re pulling everyone along by sheer force of will. What happens when you want to take a day off, though?

You’re not spending most of your time driving sales. As the head of the company, you should be driving business to it, not down in the weeds handling accounts and executing the day to day work. Sure, you may like it, but if you do that aren’t you just working a normal job?

You are unhappy. Your business should make you happy. If jumping from one fire to the next isn’t making you happy, that’s a sign that what you’re doing is unsustainable.

Delegating is a must. Hiring a person? Not so much.

The answer to all of the above is that you need to hire somebody to handle operations in your small business, while you focus on making it a big business.

We’ll handle the ins and outs of hiring an operations person in a future post – and there are a lot of merits to having a full time employee by your side – but we also have an alternative:

Work with us! We started our business after we saw a clear need for small business owners to delegate, and a path to helping them save up to 20 hours per week, while driving their company value through the roof.

Get in touch, we might just be the right fit for you.