Owning your own small business isn’t just a normal job, its 15 jobs or more all at once. You have to be your own PR specialist, marketing manager, bookkeeper, and receptionist in addition to the overseeing the primary product or service of your business – be it website design, marketing consulting, or pottery production.
It is highly likely that you work 16 hours a day and only have time for the bare necessities. Maybe you even miss dinner every other day and hardly have time for your family.
Does owning your own business really have to be this way? The answer is no, but you need to learn how to better manage your time. If you don’t start valuing your time, who will? Your customers sure won’t. They only see and care about the final product, not what goes on behind the scenes.
Time management is vital to your work-life balance, but it can also lead to higher operating efficiencies for your business.
A very important step in better managing your time is delegation. You need to learn to let go of some of the tasks you are currently in charge of and allow other people to take care of them for you. Many small business owners refuse to delegate their tasks, their reasoning being that other people won’t do as good a job or that it would waste too much time showing another person how to do the job right.
These are normally just excuses because the truth is, most of them are afraid to lose control over the tasks. They fail to realise that no matter who is actually doing the job, they still have the final say over it.
You may also be hesitant to delegate because you’re concerned that the costs associated with it will be too high. That may or may not be the case depending on how you approach it. If you spend enough time researching who the best and most cost efficient provider is, chances are you will not incur the high costs you fear.
Also, remember that delegating would allow you to concentrate and spend more time on the jobs that you are better and more efficient in. Finally, delegating doesn’t have to mean that the quality of your tasks will suffer. Sometimes, if the provider you choose is a specialist in the job, he or she may be able to do an even better job than you could ever have done.
For more information on how to better manage your business have a look at my article Leverage your Time and Use it More Productively or go to to take control of your life.