How To Build Your Business, And Not Become A Slave To It

1. Avoid Tearing Your Hair Out

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: You know that you have reached maximum capacity when you are about to “tear out your hair”. Step one: stop what you are doing and look at exactly what you are working on. Are you working on non-billable administrative tasks or are you doing billable work a majority of your day? If your response is the former – it may be time to get an assistant. When you hire someone you make more money because you have just delegated the mundane and you are spending your time on additional billable work.

Thanks To: Michele Smith of M Communications

2. Run Away From Home!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: All business owners should physically “run away from home” at least once each week. Starbucks, the library, anywhere except our office where we get pulled into working IN the business. Even if it’s only for an hour, this strategic thinking time allows us to work ON the business instead. Begin with the vision of where you want to be in 5 years. Back into what structures, systems, processes & people are required to scale it to your desired size. Stuck? A coach or SCORE can help!

Thanks To: Elene Cafasso of Enerpace, Inc. Executive Coaching

3. Leveraging Your Time

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: The biggest time stealer for me is not having a clear to do list. I found that creating a list that breaks down the tasks into sections such as Calls, Emails, Research, Action Items keeps me on task and not randomly wandering the web with no clear purpose. I get things done quicker and have time to do things that don’t require me to be chained to an electronic device all day!

Thanks To: Kara Allan of Kara Allan & Associates, LLC

4. Free Yourself To Create!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: I own multiple stores and put off hiring an assistant for years. When I created a tv show to promote my industry, I was forced to hire an assistant & HAD to delegate. The tv show turned into shopping bus tours which turned into an online community/store for consignment shoppers and is now it’s own company. Next we’re creating books & videos. None of this would have happened if I had stayed in the stores. It took me 15 years to hire help and I wonder how much more what we would’ve accomplished if I dd it 15 years soon. Don’t make the same mistake… hire help now!

Thanks To: Tracy True Dismukes of ConsignmentChic.com

5. Start With Virtual Suppliers

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Start your small business with virtual suppliers who have lots of unused capacity. With smooth Internet-driven order flows, you can go as fast and as easily as your marketing can take you. By relying on other organizations to do as much as possible, you can focus on the key tasks of defining offerings, running marketing tests, and adjusting to changing market conditions. If your offerings need to be changed in major ways, you’ll be able to easily shift to other virtual suppliers if necessary.

Thanks To: Donald Mitchell of The 400 Year Project

6. Don’t Be A Cheapskate!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Focus on doing what ONLY YOU can do! The businesses that scale (MAKE MORE MONEY!) are those that GET HELP! Don’t do everything yourself. Pay for expertise like legal advice, accounting, administrative support, marketing, web site development, graphics designers, and other collaborators. As a business founder, you need to run your business as if your time’s valuable. Get the advice, expertise and support you need as soon as you can possibly afford it, while making sure you don’t run out of cas

Thanks To: Kimberly Wiefling of Wiefling Consulting, LLC

7. Systems Are Like Recipes

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: If you are going to free yourself up and work ON the business, you need to create the system of what you do in the business on a day to day basis.

Think of it like a recipe – a pinch of this, a cup of that, 2 tablespoons of process.

Make it exact, precise and logical – just like a recipe does. There are no vague ideas in a best selling cookbook! There are even pictures to show you what the finished product looks like.

Thanks To: Tim Callcott of Icon Business Solutions

8. Be Expensive

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: When an entrepreneur’s business is small, and resources are scarce, it is better to have fewer customers paying premium prices. Price is a tool for establishing value perception, not a measure of cost. A designer shoe is worth $400 first because it is priced at $400. The same shoe will sit on the shelf at $100. Allow payment over time. Discount if you must. Premium prices give you the freedom to provide the extras that delight your customers, and the resources to work on your business.

Thanks To: Brian Massey of Conversion Sciences

9. Practical Marketing Expert

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Hire a Virtual Assistant and outsource anything you aren’t good at, don’t really need to do yourself, or can pay them less than your own hourly to take care of. VAs can triage email, build and update Websites and blogs, help you use online tools like social networking to market your business, and much more. Because they bill by the minute and don’t typically require a commitment in terms of hours, you can start small then scale up to using them more as your business grows.

Thanks To: Stacy Karacostas of SuccessStream Sales & Marketing

10. Train Freelancers!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: One way we’ve scaled our business is by training a team of qualified consultants on a specific consulting package. As a consultant, there’s only one of me, which limits my reach and income potential. I knew I needed to train others on my unique service in order to extend my reach, create jobs and grow my business. We trained a team of 15 in both live and virtual trainings, wrote a manual and stay in touch daily. When leads come in, we push them out and then monitor for quality control.

Thanks To: Shannon Meairs of Full Ride Inc.

11. Are You Financially Ready?

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: If you are looking to grow your business, getting ready for additional financial risk is imperative. If you are truly going to take the leap and step out of your business, you need to have the technology and the employees to run things while you are working “on” the business. If you thought having enough money in the bank to pay yourself was stressful, imagine the responsibility of paying an entire staff on a regular and consistent basis.

Thanks To: Sonja Hastings of Optimal Sales Search

12. Put Yourself Out Of A Job

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Just as a baby begins the weaning process with his first bite of food, a business owner starts the weaning process with the hiring of their first employee. For myself, hiring my first employee was a landmark event that served to shape the growth and direction of my business. It was the moment in which I gave up control of “everything” in exchange for specific, intentional focus on that which mattered most. It has remained, without a doubt, one of the best business decisions I have made!

Thanks To: Heather Ledeboer of Mom 4 Life

13. Don’t Major In The Minors

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: To “Major in the Minors” is paying too much attention to every detail. Instead put everything at your fingertips by tapping into the internet. Opt for a feed to cut down drastically on email, using everything Google can possibly offer (Calender, notes, etc) and then find someone to update it daily. This will free up an enormous amount of your time and allow you to grow your company while still having all of this information at your finger tips. Delegation is a good cure for frustration.

Thanks To: Edwin Soler of Libreria Berea

14. Systemize Or Loose It!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: As an entrepreneur, I found myself the lone wolf as my companies head trainer, lead clinician and guy-Friday for all the basketball camps. My one tip for all entrepreneurs, and what works for me, is Systematization. Create binders of how to guides for each aspect of your business. You must have a procedure for prospecting potential clients and sending emails, for managing clients, and even for dealing with the unexpected.

Thanks To: James Taylor of Taylored Athletes, Inc.

15. Get Focused To Break Free

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Set a list of your daily priorities to work on and ONLY do those TOP 5 things.

Delegate everything but genius or try to stop doing stuff completely & focus on getting the highest impact stuff done.

Slave mode comes from feeling like the business owns you, feeling like you have a never ending list of stuff to do. Reality is – you’ll never get it all done – so don’t try.

Thanks To: Cameron Herold of BackPocket COO

16. Block Out Time & Disconnect

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: The most important thing to do towards growing your business is to block out time to work ON the biz. To maximize the chances that the time block strategy will work for busy entrepreneurs: 1) go offsite 2) don’t tell anyone where you are 3) no phone 4) no internet and 5) make sure it is scheduled for the same time each week to create a rhythm.

Thanks To: Clate Mask, CEO of Infusionsoft

17. Delegate!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Chances are, you are in business to do something you love or are passionate about! When you know your strengths and weaknesses, you can focus your efforts on work that is enjoyable and you can be more effective. Delegating tasks you are not good at, or that you do not enjoy doing should help to reduce stress and provide more time to work ON your business!

Thanks To: Christy Leonard of Shelves to Drawers Company

18. Make The Leap By Documenting

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Many business owners can’t make the transition because they are concerned that the work won’t get done properly and that they will lose control over what goes out the door. The best thing they can do is document how things should be done so they can train others to do it the right way. Taking the time to document allows the owner to retain a sense of control and enables him to work on the business while others work in it.

Thanks To: Katie Tingley of The Tingley Advantage

19. Scale = Simple Plus Focus

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Not becoming a slave to your business requires to keys to keeping it scalable – keep your processes simple and keep your efforts focused! By having a specific day in the month assigned to do specific tasks keeps me from transitioning in and out of these tasks to do other things – like email (invoicing, paying bills, accounting, etc.) as all transitions are a waste of your precious time! By keeping my processes simple and devoting focused time to each, I minimize the time they take each month!

Thanks To: Ann Farrell of Quantum Endeavors, Inc.

20. Invest In Software – In House

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: The key to scaling a business is to create software that grows with you & takes over your day to day tasks. When I started my meal delivery business, I did everything from printing the labels to doing the deliveries now my software can do almost everything but the deliveries, maybe one day
I now have the time to focus on growing the business instead of the day to day responsibilities that my technology can do for me.

Thanks To: Zalmi Duchman of The Fresh Diet

21. Watch For The Repeating Task

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Always be watching for any tasks that you repeat. It’s so easy as an entrepreneur to think that no one else can handle the tasks I have to do each day, but the truth is any repeatable task can be outsourced or delegated. You just have to notice a task is repetitive, step back and determine how you could instruct someone else to complete that task, and whether that time savings justifies the effort.

Thanks To: Mateo Baisden of 360 Internet Management in Oklahoma

22. Sell Solutions, Not Time!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Develop products (even service products) and/or packages, instead of creating a business model where you bill by the hour for your time. This prevents the constraints on your income of how much time you can work and how much the market will bear for your hourly services. It also prevents customers from price-shoppig. This business model is more profitable and more scalable. If a customer wants to pay less you can subtract services from the package.

Thanks To: Maura Thomas of RegainYourTime.com

23. Time Is Money

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Start putting a value on your time. Hire out for every job you don’t need to be doing. If you are doing tasks that you could pay someone $20/hr for, you need to stop doing them. If you value your time at XXX/hr, tasks that are less than your time is worth need to be hired out. Automation is key, and hiring for these jobs will help scale your business much faster. Focus on tasks that will enable your business to grow fast and make you a lot of money. Outsource the rest.

Thanks To: Billy Murphy of BlueFirePoker

24. Needlework Community Builder

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: STOP trying to do it all. Just because you are busy does not mean you are being effective. As the owner, you need to work on the vision of your company’s future and ideas on how to make that happen. Put a team in place to make sure the administrative duties and other day to day tasks are being managed effectively. Choose a goal, create a plan of action and utilize the strengths of your employees to carry it out to fruition.

Thanks To: Colleen Leader of Loose Thread Stitchers

25. Tap Into Global Intelligence

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: The best thing I did to go from Slave to Mistress of my business was to OUTSOURCE GLOBALLY: I have hired 2 virtual assistants with different, complementary skill sets. One VA is part-time and US-based, who is a specialist in the InfusionSoft CRM platform I use to run my coaching business, and the other VA is a full-time SEO/list-building/link-generating marvel in the Philippines who does all the work needed to drive traffic to my new site (under development) geared to generating passive income.

Thanks To: Philippa Kennealy MD MPH CPCC PCC of The Entrepreneurial MD

26. Hire A Va!

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: The best way to get out of the trap of working IN your business is to outsource the tasks that can be better done by someone other than yourself. Hiring a VA has allowed me to work on the most important tasks in my business that can’t be done by anyone else – coaching my clients to new heights of success. So my VA works on administrative and other tasks while I get to focus ON my business. Creating innovation and successful outcomes for my clients which translates into more revenue!

Thanks To: Maureen Campaiola of DARE To Be Phenomenal

27. Keep It Simple Stupid, Or Else

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: You have an infinite number of opportunities available to you as a business owner. The problem is, so many people try to do everything poorly instead of one thing awesomely. Because they do everything, they spread themselves too thin and are unsuccessful.

Pick one thing, cut everything else. Focus on being really good at that one thing and you’ll find yourself back in control of your life and your business.

Thanks To: Brandon Mendelson of Earth’s Temporary Solution

28. Get Clear On Winning

Don’t Be A Slave To Your Business: Define excellence and winning, as clearly as you can, for a set timeframe, usually 18 months to 3 years out. This empowers others to make the right decisions moment by moment so you don’t have to remain involved in every detail. Once others are clear on where you want to go, they will be much more likely to focus their own energies on helping you get there.

Thanks To: Holly Green of The Human Factor, Inc