Entrepreneurs, Have You Fallen In the “I Can Do It All Trap”?
If you are reading this you are probably an entrepreneur like me and you consider yourself pretty smart. Not necessarily a genus but certainly above average. I have always placed a high value on learning, research and knowledge. They say that your best qualities can very often become your downfall and I must agree. This love I have for learning has lead me to spend many sleepless nights hovering over my computer screen as I explored some new idea.
It all begins innocently enough, you are online to compare prices of two similar products and the next thing you know it in 2:00AM and you need to get up at 6:00AM for an early meeting. How did it happen? While researching A you stumbled on B and that lead to C…you get the idea. Darn, you say! Off you go to bed promising never to let it happen again.
Here is another example that happened to me just this fall and the consequences were a lot more important than a few hours of lost sleep. I needed a Logo for my new business. I checked around and found the price to be between $250.00 – $350.00 for a simple two color design. Hmm I thought, I still have the Adobe Photoshop program I bought on sale from EBay last winter for $250.00 (an outdated version). Why don’t I just figure this out and do it myself. I have always been creative on top of being smart. How hard can this be?
As it turns out it’s much harder than I thought it would be. I am a pretty fast learner but this was sort of involved. Because I only wanted to do a logo, I tried to skip lots of the preliminary learning steps but then ended up having to go back to the beginning. I spent more time on forums and calls to some friends. You get the idea. I’ll bet you have even done the same thing yourself.
Pretty soon I had wasted most of a week and I was no closer to my goal. Along with that, I was behind schedule with some much more important work. Work that would facilitate the opening of my business. Sadly another one of my good/bad traits is determination. It took another week before I called it quits. It was very hard for me to come to terms with the fact that, when you are in business for yourself, learning a new skill is not always an appropriate strategy. Now it is different if this was a service a wanted to offer my clients. In business it is usually more cost effective to pay the experts to do what they do best while you concentrate on your strengths.
One of the most important strategies a successful entrepreneur can learn to use is outsourcing. There are three things to focus on if you are self employed. The first is of course is on income generating tasks. The second is marketing yourself and the third is continuing education. I have heard many different opinions on the percentages for each but I think 40%, 40% and 20% is a good split.
The most important point I am trying to get across here is that self employed does not mean doing it all yourself. You need to outsource and automate for more clients, more profits and more time to spend doing the things you love.
