Buzz Buzz Buzz – you busy bee.

I know I’m a d!#k but most of the people I talk to work hard. 

I don’t meet many people lazy tradies. But there’s a growth path for trades businesses that everybody follows and it almost always leads to you being a bottleneck.

It starts when it’s just you doing everything – finding the work, winning it, doing it and then invoicing it and maybe even reconciling it in Xero or whatever. Normal enough.

But then you grow and you hire tradespeople and apprentices and doing it all yourself is more and more difficult. 

You can find yourself working longer hours, still doing a full day on the tools then, paperwork and quoting and site visits after hours.

The answer is obvious, isn’t it?

You need to delegate work away from you to other people – people you hire or external providers (I’m thinking bookkeeper, estimates).

You’ll be feeling resistance to them.

Can you afford it?

Are your margins fat enough to accomodate another wage?

Will they do it properly?

Lots of people struggle to delegate, struggle with control issues. 

(Let’s be honest, controlling things helped you get successful in the first place.)

Lots of people have hired bookkeeper or outsourced bookkeeping to their accountants and been disappointed or not.

People hire admin people, estimators, site managers, team leaders leading hands, office managers.

For some people this goes well and for others it’s frustrating – people don’t do it right, it doesn’t free you up or build either your capacity or the business’s very much (and yet with all that cost).

Maybe you’ve struggled to let go; maybe you’ve not trained well or delegated well or hired well; maybe you weren’t aware of your options.

Good news!

It’s entirely possible and it is the way forward – the way to widen that bottleneck is to hire people.

Technology can help.

You can automate parts of bookkeeping with tools like Dext and Hubdoc (and Xero, of course).

Your Job Management System will make things flow more smoothly if you can use it properly.

But really, you have to get other people to do some of the work you’re doing now.

You should evaluate your options and decide who and what – bookkeeper, estimator, HR person, internal admin person, virtual assistant (there are many types), salesperson, etc.

You should delegate properly – write the system and checklist, train them properly, and hold them accountable for following the system and then you can step away

And you should manage your control issues and your fear they’ll f@!k it up if you’re not there breathing down their neck (which is easier to do if you delegated properly).

It’s doable. You delegate one job at a time and free yourself up a bit at a time.

And you continue this process all the way along your growth journey over and over again as you become a botthleneck again.

Yes, I’ll help you, of course.

Does any of this apply to you?

Do you want to talk about how I can help you?

Book a call – it’s only 10 minutes.