Get Your Team in Place
As a small business owner, you’re likely performing a lot of roles in your business. You may wear several hats – such as customer service representative, secretary, graphic designer, web designer, technical support, bookkeeper, and so forth.
The problem is, this is not a good way to do business if you want to build a business that supports your lifestyle instead of building a business that gives you a job. In a big business or large corporation, they even hire a CEO or chief executive officer whose responsibilities include planning, organizing, and managing the vision of the owner.
That’s the role you should seek to fill as a small business owner with an online business – that of CEO. If the work goes outside the scope of what a CEO does, you should work toward delegating those tasks to people on your team. That’s the only way to get the freedom and peace of mind that you seek. To accomplish this sooner rather than later, you need to put a plan in place to make it happen.
I know we have really just started this business-building process but if you want to have your own business (and not just your own job) then you will need help. Maybe not all of these but you will need some if you truly want a business that works for you and not the other way around.
Once you reach this milestone, where you’re the CEO of your business with a valuable team in place, you can even seek to delegate the CEO position at some point. For now, at least work toward becoming the CEO of your business instead of another worker in your business.
The roles you may want to fill:
Certified Public Accountant or Tax Planner and Preparer Such as an Enrolled Agent
Even though many people do start their businesses without the benefit of such experts, for most people, they find out later it’s not that smart and can be a huge mistake. Many, especially small ones, end up struggling or going out of business because of the taxes they owe or fines they need to pay to do business without a proper setup.
Business Lawyer
Keeping a business lawyer on retainer is a great way to ensure your business follows all the contract laws and any other laws that you need for your particular type of business. When you put someone on retainer, you typically pay something monthly or yearly that does not get refunded but is applied to the cost of your services up to a specific number of hours.
Secretary, Customer Service, or Virtual Administrative Assistant
Having someone else to do these tasks is a no-brainer. Your VA can handle customer service issues, load blog posts, edit, write letters, and a whole host of other things for you that you don’t need to be doing yourself. They can sometimes also act a little bit as project managers if they have the experience, which means you could give them the instructions to pass on to the others – giving you less work even still.
Tech Support
If you’re not especially technical, having people that handle all your technical matters for you is also a no-brainer. The sooner you can offload this to others, the better. Look for people who are experts in the technology that you use. Some tech support specialists also work on a retainer basis.
Web and Internet Design
This is another thing that you should not be doing yourself for your business. Instead of spending all day updating your websites, landing pages, sales pages, and so forth, your expert can do that for you, usually much faster than you.
Marketing Expert
If you plan to use online advertising, funnel systems, and social media marketing, hiring an expert can help you overcome the huge learning curve. Frankly, it’s a waste of money spending money on ads when you don’t even know if you’ve properly targeted your audience. An expert can ensure that everything is designed properly before you spend the money on the ads.
Software Expert
If you are using any particular software that does a lot – like Clickfunnels, Teachable, Office 365, whatever it is that plays a major role in your business – you’ll get a lot more out of it if you hire an expert to help you perfect your systems and processes using that software.
Identify the most important resources that you need to make your work less time consuming and stressful. Put them in order so that you can research and price the services. Once you know how much you need to spend, you can start planning for it.
