If you are a business owner, you know things won’t get done properly until you do it yourself. It’s not that the people around you or the ones you hire aren’t smart, they simply just don’t know enough about your business. It’s your blood, sweat, and tears and, moreover, it’s your money on the line. Why would you let someone who merely comes in for a paycheck, diminish what you have been building for years?
Photo by Stanislav Kondratiev on Unsplash
You Can’t Clone Yourself (Yet)
If the previous paragraph sounds familiar, you might want to take a moment to reconsider. On all the points above, you are right. You are most invested in your company, and whereas some people just come to visit, it’s your business, and you live and breathe it. No one wants to take that away. And perhaps you have tried to hire someone externally, but had a terrible experience. That still counts, but don’t let one bad apple spoil the batch. Because if you look at things with some realistic perspective, you know there are only so many hours in a day, so many days in a week and so many weeks in a year.
If your company is growing (which you worked so hard on) you can’t expect to be dealing with all the aspects of yourself. Until the day we can magically clone ourselves or have perfect AI robots, you are left with one choice and one choice only: get help.
From Start-up to Scale-up
This is actually a very common conundrum, it’s called going from a start-up to a scale-up. One of the issues that has been written about a lot is the role entrepreneurs have at the start of a company and how that changes when the company grows. The hustle and get-it-done, no matter what attitude that has given life to the company no longer is suitable when the company expands. The challenge for business owners and entrepreneurs is to know when to adapt their approach.
In our example, that means that the business owner needs to figure out if there’s a personal blind spot that is resulting in being trapped in our own bubble and therefore unable to make the right decisions.
Don’t be too Comfortable
One of the best way through this is to hire just outside the comfort zone. If you’re too comfortable hiring someone, it could be because they are just alike, maybe even with that entrepreneurial mindset that is not needed at the moment. In some cases, people just hire family members, because they feel they can exert control that way. Both are not the right thing to do. Hire someone who you think has all the skills (you admire them), but they also scare you a bit because they represent a break with how you have been doing things. For example, don’t hire that behemoth of a company for which you will just be a number, try hiring someone who will have some skin in the game or who values and needs commitment and trust to do their work, such as MNE Accounting.
So, don’t fall into the trap of your own making and know when it’s time to get help. Hire wisely, and try to avoid staying in the comfort zone, go outside, even a little bit. And find connections with people who are professionals and will treat you with respect and appreciation.
- This post has been written by an outside source – Please see disclosure policy
