‘Help, I’m at capacity!‘
Good problem or bad problem ??
When we start our businesses, we’re often the one who does everything. We’re the service provider, the admin and operations coordinators, the finance person, the marketer and the visionary.
If things go well, we get busy. Too busy. Success in business is often unfortunately overwhelming, because we don’t have the right structure in place.
It’s like this outside of business too – in life.
Too many women are busy doing all the things. Trying to be a good mumma, a good wife, a good business woman, a good employee, a good housekeeper, a good cook, a good friend … and in the search for goodness, there’s too much on the plate.
Too much on the plate means overwhelm. Too much on the plate means that you have to hurry to get everything done, and it’s still not done. So we feel like a failure. We feel scattered, inadequate, useless, chaotic and miserable.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be good at all those things, and to strive for excellence. But excellence is in the quality, not the quantity.
We don’t need to do more. We need to do less. We need to do the important things. And we need to do them in the right order.
But it’s hard to get off the merry-go-round long enough to realise this for ourselves. Let alone know what steps we need to take to unravel the complex web we’ve created for ourselves, in our business and in our lives.
And then we have to be able to look objectively at our lives to be able to identify what we can leverage and how we should structure everything to flow how we want it to.
No spoiler alert – it’s not going to ever flow 100% the way you want it to. We live in a broken world and life can be hard. It’s going to be up and down, but throughout it all, we choose our actions and we choose our attitudes. That’s why if you’re not working with a coach or a mentor or you don’t have a tough love friend who is going to strategise with you and keep you accountable and kick you in the bum when you need it – strongly consider finding a coach.
So let’s dig back into what we started with, which was that when we start our business, we are the be all and end all.
We think we have to make the money before we get a team. When really, getting a team brings in the money.
If you’re a small business owner and you haven’t read the eMyth by Michael E Gerber, get on it.
The book talks about the 3 roles within the business. The technician, the manager and the entrepreneur. At the start, we’re all of them. It;s like 3 split personalities, all of them are us, and all of them want what they want. Making for a very demanding, unrealistic boss.
The technician role
This is how most of us start off, we do the work.
We do our thing. The thing we used to get paid for in a job, or the side hustle thing that lights us up. You’re the photographer or the graphic designer or the cake baker or the seamstress or the marketer .. you get the point.
In the technician role, jobs are directed by the manager and follow the company’s rules to get the work done. The focus is on what’s in front of you right now, and performing the hands on work of the business.
In terms of time, the technician wants to make as much as possible happen right now. The more produced means the more money made. Money is earnings for work performed, so they want to do it better and faster to make more money. The focus is on tactics.
The manager role
The manager is still focussed on tactics, like the technician, but also includes some strategy. The manager is focussed on what’s happening now. They are the planner who turns the vision into action, and achieve their results through others. realise that time is linked to money and attempt to use every moment for production. The focus is on managing costs and increasing profits. They change tactics based on this data to meet the overall strategy provided to them.
The entrepreneur role
The entrepreneur is future focussed and strategic. Their role is to cast the vision, and ensure the company stays on track to achieve it. Equity is the most important metric. The greater the equity, the higher the sale price, the better the exit strategy.
As you can see – the roles are very different.
Often we play the technician role because that’s what we know.
We’re awesome at our thing, but if we stay doing it the way we always have, we don;t have a business, we have just bought ourselves a job. Usually, if we live in the technician role, it ties time to money too closely and makes it very very hard to achieve the time and money freedom we started our business to achieve.
I’m not telling you that you can’t do the thing that you love and started your business to do for yourself. WIthout a bit of each of them, nothing would get done. And that’s the point.
That said, if you don’t want to do the thing, and you want to step into the CEO role, that’s awesome too. But obviously you’ll need to hire someone to take your place.
I wanted to talk about this today as I see it so often with women that I speak to. They’ve stifled their potential growth by living in the technician phase and not wanting to leave it. Or they’ve expanded before, had everything implode because they didn’t know how to manage people or a business, and then scaled back down again, because it’s ‘easier’.
This is a core reason as to why so many women throw in the towel and get that part time job or go back to corporate. But it’s sad. It doesn;t have to be hard, but you don;t know what you don;t know. And often we’re just too deep in forrest to see the trees.
We all need someone to guide us. We can be the hero of our story, but every great hero has a guide.
If you’d like some support, let’s chat. I’m not taking a limited number of free 20 minute consults each week.
In the consult, we’ll identify what’s holding you back, and what to do about it, so you can live the dream and combine ambition and motherhood, well.
You want your business to support and flow with your life, and it totally can. And it doesn’t mean you have to do more work.
When you’re building your business, build the base first.
Start with the end in mind. What’s the dream?
A million dollar business? A staff of 5 people?
Make decisions based on that.
That way, when you want to scale, you’re ready. You’re ready for the leads, and the follow up, and the work. And you’ll do an awesome job. And you’ll build your business well. On a solid foundation. The way it should be.
That’s it from me this week.
Have a great one mummas xx