I’ll open up today’s thoughts with an example. I have a project that requires some custom coding. It will be a little tricky to implement, and is outside of my current skill-set. My team is already busy with other things, and I don’t want to burden them with this additional task.
It’s also already behind schedule, yet quite important. It needs to get done soon.
I figured I would just handle it myself! So I spent probably over an hour messing around with it. To finish the whole thing, I started realizing would take many hours.
And then I realized… Why am I doing this? Am I really utilizing my time most effectively?
No. I wasn’t.
So what did I do?
I realized that I could just outsource this to my go-to contractor for code-heavy tasks. He’s usually fast and can work with anything. All I needed to do was spend 10 minutes putting together specific requirements and sending him the passwords and documentation, and I was done.
It will probably take him fewer hours than it would have taken me, plus now I am free to work on other things.
I need to always be thinking about how I can free up more time, and I need to have an aggressive mindset of avoiding work that others could be doing. It’s not that I can’t do those things or even that I don’t want to. It may even be on the contrary! It’s that the only way to grow is to focus all of my energy on running the business and making the operations as self-sufficient as I can.
Every time I’m bogged down working on actual client work, it’s completely unscalable and I’m hurting my future success.
If I can keep that in mind always, and constantly be looking at how I can improve that, I will me more profitable and will have fewer headaches in the business.
I need to be honest and fair with myself as well, however. I can’t change everything overnight. To be honest, one day I’d like to not only avoid doing sales myself, but also focus all of my time on the direction of the company and none of it interacting with clients.
But that can’t happen overnight. Hiring a salesperson is a very difficult thing to be able to do. And currently, I handle most of the client interactions, which is how it needs to stay (with the exception of having developers interact with clients during projects, which can and should be happening as much as possible.)
So I can’t beat myself up at the moment when things come up that I need to deal with. The goal is constant improvement in these areas, not overnight changes.
But overall I just want to re-state my focus so I can continue to improve.