Why you can’t do everything yourself

Once your new venture starts to take off, you might find yourself busy with day to day tasks. It’s important to free up yourself from daily routine as soon as possible, and the only way to do it right is to hand off your responsibilities to someone else. Even if you don’t have a huge budget, you need to make your first hire as soon as possible. Not only it will free up your time to focus on essential things, but it will allow you to build several crucial skills for every entrepreneur — delegation, hiring, and management. These skills have to be built over time, so I highly encourage you to use any opportunity for that.

You don’t need a lot of budgets to delegate these days as there are various options. You can hire a remote virtual assistant to help you with customer service, order processing, and research. You can delegate shop maintenance tasks to outsourcing company or a freelancer. You need to delegate delivery, even if you’re delivering products in the local area.

Learn from my mistakes

I learned this the hard way, and I’d be happy if you learn from my mistakes rather than making them yourself. In the first year of my e-commerce business, I was the one who was answering the phone, doing occasional local deliveries and interacting with the post office. All that in addition to online shop maintenance, fulfillment management, and many other things. Of course, it was just the beginning, and the revenue was quite low, so I decided to keep it for myself and do all of the work until I get enough money to hire an assistant.

But that never happened. I was so busy working on day to day tasks that I didn’t have time to work on growth strategy and implementing even simple steps to increase sales. It took me a year to realize this, and I decided to get a job and invest earned money into my business. It probably sounds weird, but working 9-to-5 helped me a lot. I was able to hire a full-time virtual assistant and a delivery boy, and I had plenty of time left to work on improving the business. I used to work for 14 hours a day on average trying to do everything myself. After the transition, I was working 8 hours a day on my day job, and I had six more hours left, almost another work day.

I know, it probably doesn’t sound like a good example, but nobody told that running e-commerce business would be easy. Especially for those like me who are young and lack both money and experience. If you do have money to invest in the store and you don’t have to have a day job, then you’ll have even more time! Just don’t get caught up with daily routine too much.

Focus on the innovation and improvement

When deciding on delegation, I was concerned about what exactly what to do. It turned out that there were so many things that had to be researched and tried, I just had to start thinking about growth. Within few months I grep revenue 50% by working on new sales channels (found several influencers to advertise with) and also found a promising new partnership opportunity. I had time to visit my suppliers and learn about their upcoming products, and used that to create content.

When I stopped doing customer service myself, I was able to focus on the efficiency of the process. I’ve found weak spots in my shop design and reduced number of customer service requests. I was selling action sports goods and accessories, and there were a lot of questions regarding sizing and various attributes of products. By adding proper descriptions addressing those questions, I was able to reduce the number of customer support requests significantly.

This is exactly the type of things you need to work on. It’s nearly impossible to think about improvement when you do everything yourself. I think it’s something like tunnel vision. You need to be outside of the process to analyze it and find weak spots. You also need free time to research and create a strategic growth plan.

Delegate and get out of the way

I’m sure you probably don’t want to delegate. You might think that you need to do everything yourself to do it right and if you hire someone, she won’t have the knowledge and experience you have. And you’re right about it! But business is a long-term game and delegating gives you long-term win. After spending a month or two on training your assistant, you’ll be able to free up your time and only occasionally help with unusual questions and situations. After a year of working together, you’ll be able to offload daily routine and focus on what’s essential entirely.

But this reward comes at a price. You need to get out of the way and let people make their own mistakes. The worst thing you can do is micromanage. Just make sure you give right directions and make yourself available for questions. People need to feel the responsibility and make decisions. Of course, there are situations when your new hire is doing everything wrong, and your guidance doesn’t make any difference. This happens, and all you have to do is to find somebody else. You will learn to recognize those who won’t be a good fit early on, and the sooner you’ll have this skill the better

Things you should never delegate

There are certain things you should do yourself. Firing and hiring is something you need to do until your business is mature enough. You can have a list of candidates prepared for you, but you need to do the screening because it’s you who’ve built the vision, values, and culture of the company.

You also need to set company’s strategic vision and goals as there no one else who can do that for you. I’ve tried delegating this to numerous consultants, but they never have a working recipe, just a set of things that might work or might not. It’s always up to you to prioritize next steps and make decisions