The seventh of the nine stages to build your business that I teach in Entrepreneurial Leap is learning to stay in your sweet spot. There are certain areas where you excel as an individual. It should be your goal to work in the areas of your business where you thrive, while maintaining continual growth.
When you begin to build your business, you will need to wear many hats. This is normal. Marketing, selling, providing the service, paying the bills, and so on. Where most entrepreneurs get stuck is, they continue to do it all, exceed their capacity, and implode.
As your business grows, you will reach an inflection point where you can’t do everything anymore. Once you reach capacity, you cannot market and sell as much, because you’re busy with other tasks. Growth stops, and you hit the ceiling. Most entrepreneurs become stalled and stagnant for years in misery.
To avoid this common barrier to growth, when you reach capacity, you must learn to hire a person to take over a responsibility you are handling and then delegate it.
You have four fundamental responsibilities when you start your business—marketing, sales, operations, and finance. Once you reach capacity and it is time to hire someone to free you up, always make sure you hire someone for the responsibility you enjoy the least.
The following org chart gives you a simple model to understand what I’m talking about.
Let’s start with finance as an example. If you like finance the least, then your first hire should be for the finance role. As the company continues to grow, once you reach capacity again, it is time to hire someone to handle the responsibility you like second least, let’s say operations. You now hire an operations person. When you reach capacity again, hire the next employee and so on, until someday you have four employees—or maybe a thousand.
The process is quite simple. Your job is to make sure you hire just before you reach capacity so that you do not stop growth. Again, make sure you hire for what you like the least, and someday you will find yourself doing only the things you love and using your talents to their fullest.
If at any point you are at capacity and can’t afford to hire someone, then there’s something wrong with your economic model. Either you aren’t charging enough, you’re being commoditized, you’re overpaying yourself, or your spending is out of control. With all that said, I have never met an entrepreneur who hasn’t struggled to make payroll a few times.
NEXT STEPS
Take a few minutes now to determine which responsibilities in your business you enjoy most, and which you like least and will begin to delegate first.
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