What do you do? It’s a business you started and in many cases you started it by personally cleaning homes or offices. You grew slowly and added people to help you. At first it was one person, then another and then several. Until now, you have a business with employees and records to keep and marketing to do and policies to set. Yet, you just can’t let go of the day to day cleaning because you like to do it and because you feel not one can do it as well as you can. Sound familiar?
It happens day after day in small businesses across the country. The Entrepreneur has difficulty overtaking the Technician spirit in her/him. In other words, owners who grew their businesses by actually doing the work find themselves in a real dilemma. They feel on one hand that no one can do the work as well as they can and their customers will be disappointed. . And secondly, they are pushed into a realm of business management that for many is a foreign experience. They often don’t have experience with financials, business development, advertising and marketing, employee management and frankly, they aren’t comfortable in that role. So what to do and how to handle this change in mindset in order to be successful?
The first order of business is to make decisions on exactly your vision for your company. Do you want to clean and be in the technician role forever; for 2 years, for 5 years or are you ready to give up that role but struggle with it? Know and understand that the more time you spend “cleaning” instead of managing, the less growth and financial reward you will see.
After you have decided that you want to work on growing your business and be the company leader …not necessarily the technician…your commitment to that vision can’t waiver. It has to be your focus in daily activities. Every decision you make and every procedure you implement has to take you one step closer to that bigger vision otherwise it is a waste of time to do it. I suggest putting a large poster or sign over your monitor that clearly spells out what you want and a time line. “By October of this year, I will have added 2 more crews and achieved volume of $XXXX.” or “to hit $1 Million I must produce $83,333 a month in revenue” Or “to hit $500K in revenue I must produce $41,666 a month and this is how many people it will take to produce that.” Keep your goals in front of you at all times.
When you have a clear picture of your goals and vision for your company, and have put together a road map of how to get there..it changes your thinking from ” Letting go and delegating are hard – nobody can clean as well as I can” to “I can’t wait to turn these tasks over to someone else so I can get more customers and more employees and hit my mark.” It becomes all about realizing your vision and less about “it won’t be perfect if I don’t do it”.
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