Attention Entrepreneurs: Where are you getting stuck?

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January 31st, 2009
Filed in: Business Leverage, CEO Mindset, Lifestyle

Yesterday I talked about the different types of entrepreneurs who create limits to their own growth. Today I’m encouraging YOU to tell the truth about where you may be getting in your own way.

I’ve put this checklist together of typical bottlenecks that most entrepreneurs get stuck in.

Let’s see if one (or many) of these situations is occurring in your business:

You are the “main show”. You are the brand, the main coach/consultant/ speaker/etc and the only one who can “make things happen.” This becomes a huge problem when you are the only one that the client wants to work with. It limits how many consulting/coaching clients you can take on.

You are the only one who can do the marketing and oversee implementation for new ideas. You hear of a great idea but because you have to plan it and manage the team to make it happen (or even worse, do it yourself ) then you are limited to how many opportunities you can say yes to. Or it never gets started in the first place.

Your ideas and visions are huge and the team, being better at implementation, can’t keep up. As the leader you are typically good at moving fast but bad at details and getting things completed. If you’ve hired the right team, then they are good at getting things done but really bad at moving fast. You are frustrated with how long it takes to get things done. Or you are working with contractors who have multiple clients to serve so they can never move as quickly as you need them to.

When breakdowns occur you step in to solve or fix the problem. William Oncken & Kenneth Blanchard call this “monkey management.” When problems occur you have the illusion that its more effective to just fix it than train the person on how to solve the problem in the future. This is a huge waste of time and a black hole
energy vortex but you do it because you don’t want to fail or look bad to your clients.

You are experiencing lightening fast growth but don’t have the proper infrastructure to sustain the growth. All your effective marketing is generating leads which are resulting in sales. But you don’t have the right team, systems and processes in place to handle this influx and are losing those clients and possibly tarnishing your reputation in the process.

Attempts to delegate are not effective. You know you have limited delegation success because many of the tasks you delegate end up back on your plate to get done on time or correctly. Or you are repeatedly disappointed with the quality of how the task gets completed – if they even get done on time.

You need more people to keep up with everything but you don’t want to spend more money. You are in SHORT term thinking at the expense of long term growth. You are hyper-focused on what has to happen today to keep cash flow in the door which takes away time and resources to focus on the long term. At a certain point, you just can’t grow any bigger/faster without the right people in the right positions getting the right tasks done.

You put your need for independence first. You created your own business so you didn’t have to answer to anyone else. The idea of having a team of people dependent on you is the equivalent of having a root canal without Novocain. You hate having meetings, having to answer your teams’ questions or even having to train people to take over key tasks and roles. But your team is floundering without your direction and they make many ineffective decisions due to limited access to you – and it shows in their results.

You have the habit of learning things FIRST then delegating them. You always have to learn it first before you hand a task off to someone else. You are afraid they will do it wrong or you won’t know how much time something should really take. Somehow it doesn’t matter that it’s not getting done in the first place…you need to be in control.

Decisions have to be made by you. You require your team to come to you for approval before marketing materials, client deliverables or routine purchases are made. Rather than training others how to think and make decisions like you, or just trusting them to do what they do best, you must have final say.

If you are like most entrepreneurs, you were not trained to run a business. You were trained to do what you do best. And you’ve been figuring out everything else along the way. This means, left to your own devices, you will typically build your business the hard way. By trying to save money and/or keep your hands in the middle of everything you have become the bottleneck and are crippling your growth.

How do I know? Because I was doing the exact same thing just a few short years ago. That’s why I would like to share with you what I went through – events that enabled me to morph from the stressed out, too-busy person that I was to the successful, 7-digit earner that I am today. To find out how to put more time, freedom, meaning and money into your business, please go to http://www.theceofactormanifesto.com/.