What to do when there's no one to delegate to

In the July 2024 edition:

• Conventional business advice says delegate, delegate, delegate. Here’s what to do if you’re a solo owner with no one to delegate to 🙃 

• If the phrase “cash flow management” makes your eyes glaze over, scroll down for a must-listen podcast episode 🎧️ 

• Tour the world’s museums, galleries, and landmarks without leaving your chair with this massive online arts & culture library (I love this and I’m so excited to share it with you!) 🎨 

SOMETHING USEFUL

What to do when there’s no one to delegate to

Solo business owners have no time to waste. Whether you’re solo by choice or by necessity, the way a one-person business operates is different than the way a business with several employees does.

When your success is dependent on your limited time and attention, you need to be sure you’re using them effectively. There’s very little space for shiny objects or rabbit holes that lead to nowhere. If this is your situation and it’s stressing you out, read on for tips on how to make solo ownership work better for you.

Double down on the fundamentals

The good news? It’s 100% possible to run a fabulously successful business by focusing most of your time on a small set of core fundamentals: Finances, strategy, visibility, and customer service. Every single business, no matter the size or industry, must excel in these four areas to succeed.

Let’s break them down a bit:

Finances. For a business to be sustainable, it must be profitable. Not in a greedy, exploitative way (we’ll leave that to the Metas and Amazons of the world) but if a business isn’t earning more than it’s spending, it won’t be around for long.

Solid financial management makes everything else easier, and it doesn’t have to be complicated. This should be a top priority, even (especially!) if you feel like it’s not your strong suit. Help is available if you need it.

Strategy. Having a strategy means you know two things: what you want to accomplish, and how you’re going to accomplish it. That’s it. Simple, but not easy.

Running a business without setting a strategy makes everything slower and more difficult. If owning a business feels SO HARD to you some days, a lack of clear, comprehensive strategy may be the reason.

Visibility. Do the people who want to buy from you know that you exist? If they find you, are you presenting yourself and your business in a way that gives them the confidence to spend their money with you? Are you focusing your marketing to reach these people, or are you just talking to whoever’s out there on Instagram or TikTok?

Customer service. A sustainable business doesn’t just attract customers, it retains them. When a customer interacts with you and your product or service, they should come away with a sense that you are competent, professional, and trustworthy.

Great customer service is built on a foundation of clear communication, consistent internal processes, and excellent delivery of whatever it is that you do.

Are you spending most of your working time on all four of these fundamental areas? If you’re focused on other things and feeling spread thin, or ignoring one of these areas because it’s out of your comfort zone, it’s time to reassess your priorities.

Be effective, not productive

There’s no shortage of productivity advice, but I suggest moving away from trying to be productive and moving toward trying to be effective.

Being productive means you’re getting things done, sure. But being effective means you’re getting the RIGHT things done. It requires a deeper knowledge of what your goals are and how to use your time to get closer to those goals. You’re shifting your focus from doing more work, to getting more results. A huge difference!

Maximizing productivity will leave you exhausted. Focusing on effectiveness will empower you to drop unnecessary tasks and only spend time on what really matters.

So…what really matters? Start with the four fundamentals we’ve already discussed.

For you and your business—what do you need to do to improve your financial management skills and create a clear strategy? For your prospects and customers—what do you need to do to become visible to them, and provide a high level of service to them?

Shifting from productivity to effectiveness can be uncomfortable because it feels like doing less in a society that pushes us to do more. But solo business owners don’t have the bandwidth to think like that (and it’s not true anyway.)

When you let go of unnecessary tasks, you’re not dropping the ball—you’re being smart enough to know which balls are made of glass, which are made of rubber, and which are just crumpled-up pieces of paper that need to be thrown into the bin.

Wondering how to figure out which of the millions of things on your plate are truly important? Try using a tool called the Eisenhower Matrix:

Look at all your tasks and decide which are urgent (AKA time-sensitive), not urgent, important, and not important. Anything that is neither urgent or important gets dropped—bye bye! Anything both urgent and important should be a top priority.

If it’s important, but not urgent? Make a plan to work on it over time (this is exactly what my strategic planning service does.)

Urgent, but not important?* Create a daily or weekly time block on your calendar to deal with these tasks. There shouldn’t be a ton of them, and over time you may find they’re not necessary at all. Sometimes urgency is only in our own heads.

*This is a modified version of the matrix—the original advises delegating the urgent but not important items. But we don’t have that option, so I’ve swapped in my advice for how to handle these tasks.

Preserve your time and attention

The world will waste all of your time if you let it.

The attention economy is a major force, enticing us to watch and read and scroll for hours every day while tech and media companies monetize our time. And we participate in it too, creating and posting content even when the return on that time investment is hard to track.

But our time and attention spans are limited, so we need to make a conscious effort to use them well. I often suggest a simple time audit exercise to my solo owner clients, so they can see where their time goes and decide if they want to make changes.

Try it for yourself and let me know how it goes:

Time audit exercise:

1. Grab a physical notebook—it’s less susceptible to distraction than a digital notes app—and put today’s date at the top of the page.

2. List each hour you plan to work on the left side, leaving a few lines in between for your notes (e.g., 9am, 10am, 11am, etc.)

3. When you begin to do a task, write it down next to the current hour. If you switch to something different, even just picking up your phone to look at Instagram, write it down.

4. A sample hour could look like this: Emails, Instagram scrolling, bookkeeping, Instagram scrolling, newsletter writing, emails, Instagram scrolling. Now you can ask yourself if you want to be spending that much time on Instagram—and if not, how can you stop? (I use Android’s Focus Mode, or Focus if you have an iPhone, when I’m struggling with this.)

5. Do this for 3-5 days, until you feel like you have insight into how you’re spending your time. Create a list of the changes you want to make, and why those changes would help you (don’t skip this part—knowing why you want to make a change will motivate you more.)

Don’t try to overhaul your daily schedule all at once. Instead, find a few opportunities to make changes over time. A little less time scrolling, or starting your work day 15 minutes earlier, or taking a 10 minute walk after lunch—these simple tweaks add up over time and build momentum towards using your time effectively and intentionally.

Solo business ownership isn’t easy (huge understatement 😅) but there are steps we can take to make it sustainable. Focusing on the fundamentals, aiming for effectiveness instead of productivity, and protecting your time and attention will allow you to build a sustainable, successful business—all on your own.

SOMETHING NEAT

Two things are true about business operations:

1. Getting your business’s operations right is the key to success. Ops is THE thing to focus on if you want to be profitable, keep your customers happy, and have a sustainable lifestyle as a business owner.

2. The term “business operations” is boring as hell. It doesn’t capture the imagination the same way that “$10k months” or the possibilities of AI do. The online biz coaches trying to make a quick buck off your attention don’t talk much about ops. And that creates an information gap that hurts business owners.

So I’m always happy to come across an entertaining, but substantive, discussion of important business ops topics—and are more critical than cash flow management (yawn! I know! Stick with me 😄)

In this episode of her brilliant podcast What Works, Tara McMullin dives into what cash flow is, why it benefits your business to track it, and how cash flow management can help you build a sustainable business, live out your values, and support your community—without stressing about money.

A LITTLE TREAT

When I worked at Google, we’d have these huge employee conferences every year. I didn’t love them (introvert here 👋) but one year the Google Arts & Culture team did an incredible presentation and I’ve never forgotten it.

Did you know Google hosts a huge collection of museum tours, gallery walkthroughs, and cultural deep-dives? All free, all easily accessible. From famous artists and their works, to fashion icons, to international architecture—no matter what you’re interested in, you’ll find it here.

Take a break, grab a coffee, and check out massive amounts of art and artifacts from all over the world using Google’s search and machine learning technology—a very worthy use case for AI, in my opinion.

WORK WITH ME

This newsletter is for everyone, but a one-on-one consulting engagement is tailored to you and your business so you get results fast. Here’s how I can support you:

• Business Planning—For solo business owners with a lot to do, and never enough time. We’ll refine, prioritize, and organize your goals, and I’ll create a road map for you to get them done. (My most popular service.)

• Operations Analysis—Is your business built on a strong, long-lasting foundation? An operational deep dive will reveal any issues, and tell you exactly how to fix them.

• General Consulting—Get expert support with business challenges like workload sustainability, financial fundamentals, pricing, client communication, and more.

When you’re ready, schedule a free 30 minute intro call with me.

Thanks for reading—see you next month. If you have a business owner friend who would find this newsletter useful, please share it with them!