Are you wearing too many hats in your organization?
There was a company I worked with years ago – a small business in Ohio offering technology services. It was a great family-run business that did terrific work for their customers. But every day was a struggle within the organization. The founder and CEO was a brilliant, experienced, and charismatic IT professional. He was dogged in his determination to solve his customer’s IT issues. He had technicians to support him but every large project, like a network installation, would require him to be onsite leading the work.
And that would have been fine, except… and tell me if this resonates with you… when he wasn’t in the field, this owner was in his office working on payroll, or handling accounting, or some HR issue, or taking a sales call, or building a marketing campaign. And as if that wasn’t enough, he was also custodian, plumber, electrician, painter, carpenter, mechanic and more for the business. Whatever needed done, odds are, it was on him to make it happen.
Which of course led to long nights and weekends spent working in the business rather than on the business.
If you’re a lean startup, there’s often little choice in the matter – it’s on us to do whatever needs to be done to build the business. But at a certain point, as business owners we need to recognize that all of these things we’re doing are actually detracting from helping the business grow. We’re wearing too many hats and our time and energy are too diluted to be of real value.
Instead, business owners and executives must be focused on setting the vision and objectives for the business. The day to day tasks within the business must be delegated to others who can and should be specialists in those tasks. This frees you to concentrate all of your attention on the challenges to overcome and the decisions to be made which will take your business to the next level.
If one of those hats is marketing, that’s definitely an area that you need to hand over to someone who is better positioned to build a winning strategy for your business. Let someone else keep up with today’s trends and tactics and lead a marketing team for you. If that’s you, we need to talk.
I hope you got something from today’s Marketing Minutes with Mike. But whether you did or didn’t, leave a comment and let me know. Just please be nice, my mom reads these too. Cheers!
