As an entrepreneur or business owner, are you getting caught up in day-to-day stuff? Just constantly fixing problems?

You need to focus on strategically building your business instead!

I've Been There...

For a long time, my main role as a business owner was fixing issues and dealing with problems. I thought this is what business owners and entrepreneurs did.

I was so wrong about that.

Why does this happen?

When you're in a management role of any sort, all the way up to business owner or entrepreneur, it's very easy to fall into the trap of constantly fixing problems, or "putting out fires" on a day-to-day basis.

You're the one who knows every detail of how to do the job, how to run the business. You know how to do everything, and you're the expert.

This basically happens if you're not good at delegation.

As an entrepreneur, your job is NOT to do the work.

Your job is to build the business, the processes, and the team that does the work.

It Starts with a Vision

Ok so you're not supposed to DO the work, and you're supposed to delegate instead. But where do you start?

Your very first step is to know where you want to go. You need to know what your vision is. What do you want your business to look like in 5 year's time?

Spend some quality time thinking this through. What will your business do? What sort of revenue will you be generating? How much profit do you want to make? Get clear, and excited, about what your business would look like in 5 years.

Then reverse engineer it.

Once you have your vision, work out what 5 big moves you'd need to make to get you there. Then break it down to what 5 big moves you'd need to accomplish in the next 12 months that would move you closer.

I suggest spending a couple of days on this at the start of the year, and then a couple of days each quarter to recap and adjust as necessary.

Free Up Your Time

Now that you have your vision clear, and your major strategic moves for the year planned out, you need to start to implement.

But to do this, you need to free up your time.

The only way to effectively free up your time is either to just stop doing something, or delegate it.

During your normal workday, if you find you're doing something that is repetitive or easy (for you at least), the first thing you should ask yourself is, does this need to be done? If the answer is no, then stop doing it. If the answer is yes, then you want to delegate it.

Effective Delegation

As an entrepreneur, one of the most crucial skills to develop is effective delegation. You can't do everything yourself, but you need to be able to get things done.

For any task that needs to be done, especially if it's a recurring task, you should start by documenting the process. Step by step how the task should be done and what the expected results are, and by when. It's often also really helpful to elaborate on WHY something needs to be done.

Once you've done this, you can delegate it to someone on your team, or outsource it. You should also have a briefing session to talk through and explain the task and expectations in detail to whoever you are delegating the task to.

Inspect until you trust

Something I heard from Valuetainement a while back, and have found very useful with my own team is this: delegate the task, then inspect how the task is being done until you are satisfied and can fully trust that it just gets done. This allows you to step away from this task completely, having full trust that it's going to be done to your level of expectations.

Rinse and repeat. If you keep doing this, you'll build your team and free up your time to focus on more valuable tasks.

Focus on Strategy

Freeing up your time by delegating allows you to focus on your highest-value tasks, and also transfers your skills and knowledge to others on your team. This allows you to grow the team and business while focusing on the things where you add the most value to the business. A major part of this will be working on the strategy, constantly moving the business forward, closer and closer to the vision you created.

Fix the Problem

Ok so there's a caveat here - there are some issues or problems that you really should be giving your full attention to. If there's a crisis in the business, you need to be involved. If there are key issues, you should jump in and deal with it before it becomes a crisis.

But think strategically here too - if you can empower your team to deal with the smaller things, you can slowly grow the level of authority and empowerment your team has to solve problems, further freeing up your time. Think about some parameters you could set for your team or team managers. This can empower them to make decisions within the scope of those parameters, and only escalate to you if outside of those parameters.

I learned this from Tim Ferris in his book The 4-Hour Work Week - he explained how he'd given the customer service team a budget to say if they could solve the client's problem for less than $100, then do so. And he'd review the queries each week, slowly raising that threshold, until the customer service team was basically just solving all queries without him needing to get involved.

I did the same thing with our team - if we had an issue that could be resolved for $100 or less, the team could just run with it, without needing to involve me. This translated to faster customer service, a more empowered team, and less on my plate to deal with.

Regularly check where you can apply this type of thinking. This will make your team more and more empowered to handle things without you.

What's Next?

If you follow the above and keep iterating, you'll have consistent strategic development of your business. It's unbelievable how fast you grow your business if you keep doing this.

By keeping this constant focus on strategy, and constantly working to effectively delegate and grow the team, I've helped to more than double our revenue and grow our revenue to almost 8-figures and still growing strong.

Keep focusing on strategy, and learn to delegate better. It's so worth it!