You're the Boss: Here's What You Shouldn't Be Doing

As the head of a small to medium sized business, you wear a dozen hats and some, well, they just don’t fit. It may seem like a brilliant idea to control all aspects of your enterprise, but it’s simply not possible for you to handle all the tasks of running your company. You need to move things off your desk, whether by giving it to someone within the organization or outsourcing it to a specialist. Or maybe you want to spend all your time on back office chores.

The first hat you’re going to remove is the one that reads Control Freak. There are several areas where delegating will improve your business process at a reasonable cost. If you think about it, your worth per hour is far greater than the cost of hiring someone else who handles one task really well. As the boss, you should only spend time on tasks that you are uniquely qualified to do; someone else can go buy stamps.

Marketing is one of the most important aspects of a growing business, but too often it ends up pushed way down on the to-do list, overshadowed by the day to day tasks of actually running the business. Marketing and sales go hand in hand to grow your company. If you are working on closing sales, you won’t have time to generate leads at the top of the funnel. A lot of marketing tasks are time sensitive, so assign them to someone, either internally or externally, to ensure that they get done in a timely way.

Payroll is not for the weak. Do it wrong and you’ll be getting registered letters from the IRS in about ten minutes. Do you really want to spend your time keeping up with changes in state and federal tax laws? No, you don’t. Outsource your payroll tasks, at least until you’ve grown enough to hire a finance professional. While you’re at it, hire a part time bookkeeper who can make sure the bills are paid and checks are deposited. By the way, if you are adding several 1099ers to your payroll, your bookkeeping is going to get rather more complex.

Operations are an essential part of your enterprise, but are they your job? As the head of a company, you can’t get bogged down in operations. Whether you're running a QSR restaurant or a software development firm, if you spend all your time making the product, you're not working on the strategy. Whenever you can, delegate tasks that are not central to growing your business.

Remember that you can’t expect to be an expert at everything. No one is. If you try, at best you’ll wind up with a massive headache, and at worst you will do everything half-assed and fail completely at all of it. There’s power in delegating some tasks.

You’re the boss, and bosses delegate. It's okay, and it's what you should be doing.