CommerceCubes

The Small Business Syndrome - “Do It Yourself”

Most people who start a business of any size want to “conquer the world” on their own.  Its admirable and possibly the most ridiculous stance to have on doing business.  Think about it, if you are in business than your main goal is to generate more sales and how do most people go about getting more sales?  By talking and interacting with more people.  Simple calculation

Talking to more people = more sales

As your business grows and well let’s face it… you want growth, the growth is not always manageable or sustainable.  Why is that?  Well…

• Only so many hours in a day – If you a weekend entrepreneur working on your business in any spare time you have you soon realize that as you start succeeding more, the more your time dries up, evaporating into thin air!  You didn’t plan for it, you simply had a good idea and started working on it and the idea caught fire.  If you aren’t investing your profits or revenues into a system that can track, sell and help you manage your business system, how long to you think you’ll be able to keep up with the demand before you simply cannot deliver?  A month? A year? Who knows but the point is this… if you are going to build any business make sure you are not the system.
• It’s hard to find good help – If you happen to get into delegating tasks and projects off to others you are doing well.  You’ve beaten the DIY stigma that most small business owners cannot seem to get out of but now you’ve got to learn to manage other people.  That’s right, you are now a manager!  All the joy of managing and delivering is still on your shoulders.  Recruitment, hiring and possibly training falls squarely to you.  Again if you learn to delegate you may have someone to do this for you.  Most small business owners don’t normally think about these sorts of things because really when you first start you aren’t sure if the business will even work.
• This is your life calling – Sometimes you can get so wrapped up in the everyday running of your business that you simply forget to take time for yourself or you cannot.  If you are doing it all yourself then its hard to take any time off simply because everything involves you.  From ordering the business cards to redeveloping the website to researching where to get the word out about your business next.

If you can be good at a wide array of things or only great at only a mere few which would you choose?

Sooner or later you have to make this choice if only to save your sanity a bit.  Do you hire a web developer to develop a really great and functional site?  Do you put in an order for those business cards and hire a graphic designer to design the layout of your business card?  Don’t think of it entirely as the money your spending rather think of the time that you are buying and leverage it so that you can focus on what you are really good at and turn more profits down the road.

Lucas

NOT a DIY’er