It sounds like bollocks, doesn’t it? 

The business coach promising you can – maybe coming in once a week to count the money or something. 

Anyway, that’s not what I mean.

Most people who come to me (and buy my thing) want to work less and have a business that’s less dependent on them. That’s what I want to unpack now.

They want more money, of course, but usually some more, not global domination. They usually want to grow but they feel like growth means more work (and more stress) so that’s unappealing.

So how can you work less?

There are a few ways:

• You can hire or engage other people (or businesses) to do some of the work you’re currently doing.
• You can be more effective and efficient so you get more done in less time (yes you can, you know, you can)
• You can just work less (fewer hours) (I sometimes talk about putting boundaries around work – stopping and going home at a certain time, for example.) You can do this but the consequences might be that stuff doesn’t get done and bad things happen → People do this – they grow, get busy and decide they don’t like it and shrink again.

Let me unpack this quickly. 

If you’ve grown your business, your first instinct is to work harder and do more of the work on the tools PLUS the quoting and invoicing and ordering and hire tradespeople and apprentices as you grow and maybe someone to help in the office or with the bookkeeping or both.

But here’s the thing – you tend to hold onto the difficult bits and believe you’re the only one capable of doing them and you let your people only do basic stuff under your supervision (unless, it’s something you don’t understand, like bookkeeping, in which case you probably ignore it completely.)

So what happens is this busyness sticks around. 

Hiring people can feel like MORE work and you struggle to fit managing them into your busy schedule, so they don’t perform as well as you’d like – which perpetuates that feeling that you need to hold onto the difficult or important stuff.

So you’re busy, working harder than you’d like, you feel like you’ve got to be there or near-to-hand, in case something happens that you ‘need’ to handle, and you feel like you can’t easily grow.

You do grow but as you grow you only hire the bare minimum so that feeling I just described, stays.

So how do you work less, then? 

(I can hear you asking)

Well, back to those options – get more effective so you get through more work – sure(!) but that’s like a temporary fix, isn’t it?

You’ll be out of capacity again in no time and there’s a limit to how efficient and effective you can be.

This really only leaves hiring people or working less and letting bad things happen (whatever they are).

So, if you want to work less, you’re probably talking about growing your team. 

You can hire tradies, trades assistants, labourers, site managers, admin people, receptionists, and bookkeepers. 

You can hire virtual assistants (I’m a fan, as you may know).

You can work with agencies for VAs, bookkeeping, marketing, almost anything.

Whoever you ‘hire’ you can’t just hire them and tell them what to do and leave them to it. Remember what I said a minute ago about that and poor performance?

You need to ‘hire’ whoever it is and then delegate a responsibility PROPERLY. 

You need to write the system, teach the system, give them a checklist and hold them accountable (for following the system) until they’re doing it right, consistently.

Only then, can you back away and free up your time to do less work. 

Delegate properly and things go much better.

I’ve written the 4 steps into a guide to Successful Delegating so grab that 

And, in my program, there’s a full training on the delegation process and on how to write a system so if you want that – buy my thing.
Book a call and we’ll talk about it.