As the owner of a new startup or a fledgling business, you might have what is called a DIY mentality. The default response for most small business owners is to do everything on their own. Unfortunately, this hands-on approach prevents them from delegating tasks to other people, because they feel that no one else knows their business as well as them. They might also be hesitant to automate their systems and choose to do things manually to save on costs.
Unfortunately, trying to micromanage everything and spreading yourself thin can be detrimental to both you and your business. It could lead to burnout, poor quality of performance, and missed deadlines. You might be on a mission to single-handedly take matters into your own hands, but the truth of the matter is that you can’t do everything. In order to successfully grow and scale your business, you don’t need to work harder - you need to work smarter. And smarter work means learning to delegate and automate.
Delegation is the process of assigning responsibility and accountability to another person. It can free up a lot of your time so you can focus on the more pressing areas of the business that needs your attention. It maximises the productivity of your team and gets the job done quicker, especially when deadlines are looming and resources are tight.
It builds trust and improves communication between you and your staff. You get to know their strengths and weaknesses so you can assign the right tasks to the right person. More importantly, you help develop the skills of the people working under you. You enforce accountability as you create an owner for each step of your business processes, until your team members become leaders themselves.
This, in turn, will make them feel appreciated and will make them loyal to you because of the career growth opportunities you have provided. It will increase their job satisfaction and improve their productivity levels. Delays will be lessened because your people will learn to take prompt action instead of having to wait for a decision to come from you. Lastly, you can confidently take time off work knowing that the work will still get done despite your absence.
Automation is making a process or a system operate automatically. It makes use of technology in order to improve productivity when it comes to the manufacture of goods and delivery of services.
If you find yourself constantly bogged down from endless to-do lists, paperwork, emails, phone calls, and deliverables to do, then you need to take a good, long look at your business processes and streamline your systems. All of the complicated things you are going through right now could be due to manual workflow systems. We are humans, after all, and errors can sometimes happen during a manual workflow. Automation ensures that these human mistakes are reduced, productivity is improved, and costs that are incurred due to manual errors and inefficiency are minimized.
By automating your business, all of your business processes are done efficiently and effectively, from initiation to completion. You get to eliminate the redundant, time-wasting, and time-consuming processes and replace them with more effective processes that get the job done and provide you with quicker results.
By implementing delegation and automation, your business will be able to adapt and respond very quickly to the demands and expectations from customers. As a result, your business will be able to deliver better services and improve its bottom line.