Successful Entrepreneurs Value Their Time and Delegate
As an entrepreneur business owner, your time is your most valuable asset. If you want your business to be as successful as it can be, you will want to delegate as many non essential day to day tasks to employees so that you can focus on the management, leadership and growth of the business.
Tasks that the successful entrepreneur business owner should focus on include: providing leadership and vision, making strategic decisions, creating alliances, sales, developing human capital, mentoring, and creating repeatable processes and procedures.
Understanding the value of your time requires you to look carefully at how you are spending it and the processes in your business that requires your attention and involvement.
The following are examples of some classic examples of duties and tasks performed by an owner entrepreneur and some solutions to delegate and systematize those tasks to allow you to focus instead on the leadership and management of the business.
Error 1: Staying in the buying process of finding the least expensive vendors for day to day products, supplies and equipment and not empowering someone else to do it for you. Hunting for the best bargains each month for supplies and equipment eats up value time and saves you pennies in exchange for spending dollars.
Remedy: Ask a subordinate to create an equipment and supplies reorder list, have the employee compare prices between 3 vendors on the top 20 most often used and most expensive items. The vendor with the least expensive price on the majority of the items on the list becomes your vendor of choice.
Error 2: Not having a process or procedure in place for reordering supplies and equipment and not empowering an employee with a means to make payment, especially in emergency situations.
Remedy: Create a schedule for ordering supplies and equipment needed on a regular basis. For instance, office supplies are ordered on the 1st of the month, janitorial supplies on the 15th, etc. Assign a credit card with a spending limit, say $5,000 to one of the employees to place all orders for supplies and equipment. And authorize them a maximum dollar amount for emergencies if the system breaks down and run out of something ahead of schedule.
Error 3: Probably the biggest time waster for small business entrepreneurs is going to a wholesale club to shop for a business supplies. Time is your most valuable asset, the hours spent driving to the club, waiting in line, bringing it back and unloading it at your store or place of business again saves pennies but costs you dollars.
Remedy: Call vendors and set up accounts for each of your most needed items such as office supplies, janitorial, etc. find out their minimums and negotiate bulk purchase pricing.
The bottom line is that as a business owner entrepreneur, your time and expertise are too valuable to the success of the business to be performing non managerial tasks that could be systematized and delegated to an employee.
Tags: entrepreneur advice, entrepreneur development, How To, small business consulting, successful entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs
