Just Don’t Do It!
This will shock many proud, hard working business owners: Your business should not depend upon your presence, personality, problem solving and perspiration for its daily survival. If so, your business does not work, you work for the business!
Your ultimate goal as a business owner should be to become the least important person to the daily operation of your business. That’s right, you need to be the least important part of the daily operation of your business. That doesn’t mean you are not important to the business. Quite the contrary, your ability to create a vision, develop and implement a strategy and mange your team effectively is critical to the ultimate success of the business. However, many business owners and manager find that all the major and minor daily decisions have to flow through them. They have allowed their business to evolve into a form that requires their non-stop attention to all details small and large.
If everything in your business flows through you and is dependent upon you, then you are restricting dramatically the growth and profits of your company. There are natural limits to the amount of work, transactions, problems and decisions that can flow effectively through you in a given day.
Stop being a bottleneck; you’re restricting the potential of your employees and business and ensure your persistent exhaustion. Stop missing out on greater personal freedom, money and happiness. Say “no” to low-value tasks.
When you are faced with tasks that seem urgent but not important, ask yourself this simple question: Does this task generate revenue, save money, please my customers or create system to better run my business? If the answer is “no,” DROP it. Just don’t do it.
Business owners are great list makers. They carry around lists of things to do, things to think about, and list of projects that need to get completed someday, somehow. I propose that you create a list that will have greater impact on your bottom line than a laundry list of tasks to be completed. I suggest you create a DO NOT DO list.