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25 Jan 2019

Are You Undervaluing Yourself? Stop Being a Technician.

At The Growth Coach, our coaches have worked with thousands of small business owners over the years. One of the most common challenges those business owners face is that, in addition to being the business owner, they are the lead technician. For example, if they own a cookies and cake shop, they are the one in the back icing cupcakes (sometimes in addition to everything else). They might have hired someone to run the counter or even help make the cupcakes, but they haven’t trained and entrusted anyone to control the technical side of the business.

They are working IN the business instead of ON the business.

Now that we’re in the New Year, we want to challenge the small business owners out there to value their time, train staff members they can trust and start focusing on improving the business – not just making cupcakes. If the business hinges on you being there, then how can you ever take a vacation without closing up shop? What do you do if there’s a family emergency? How about when it comes time to retire – do you just shut down and walk away? Is your business worth anything if the whole thing hinges on you?

So take a minute and consider this: if you were to place a value on your own time, what would it cost? $50 an hour? $100 an hour? $200 an hour? Whatever the answer is, would you pay someone that much to do the technical aspect of your job? Is it worth it financially to have someone who should be making $200 an hour icing cakes or making cookies? And, if you did hire and train someone else, what could you be spending time doing? Marketing? Networking? Selling? Working on systems? Improving your products? And how could those efforts help you grow the business?

The first steps in this direction are to build systems, hire and train staff, delegate and expand your thinking. It’s hard to hand over that icing bag, but there are only so many hours in the day and, if you’re making those cupcakes, you are costing the company money.

Check out this blog we posted in June of 2018 for details on those steps: https://growthcoachblog.com/2018/06/15/celebrate-your-own-freedom-this-independence-day/.

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