Get More Out of Life. Run Your Business The Hassle-Free Way.
January 30th, 2009
Filed in: Leadership, Lifestyle
When you get stuck in the day to day operations of your business, it’s easy to move out of creation mode and into doing mode. That’s when you become the bottleneck.
Maybe you can relate to one of these entrepreneurs who became the bottleneck in their
1. High Quality In High Demand
You provide a much-needed service to your clients. They like you, trust you and rely on you. Now you want to grow and outsource many of the key tasks and roles to your team of subcontractors (or employees) but your clients push back. Nope, they want you! They continue to work directly with you or require you as the lead on the project and you are stuck. You are the bottleneck.
2. The Superstar
You have a passion and/or strength for the service you offer. You mistakenly believe that getting down in the trenches every day is essential to train your team and build the trust of your clients. You personally take every customer service call that comes in– who else can better serve your clients, right? Every sales opportunity you personally handle – who else can sell your services better than you? You do such an excellent job that you generate tons of leads. But you are so “in the trenches” you can’t pull up long enough to handle them. Now you are at a growth impasse – you can’t manage it all if you want to grow.
3. The Fast Paced Visionary
You see exactly where you need to go with your business. You see what needs to happen at every step of the way. When you meet with your team you rattle off ideas, opportunities and tasks faster than a speeding bullet. The problem is… your team can’t keep up. Somehow your ideas get lost in translation. What is so obvious to you isn’t obvious to them. Your great ideas never quite get implemented fast enough, so you feel that you are missing the boat (or they are just slow they couldn’t possibly be right for your team.) You spend countless hours frustrated with the pace at which they are getting things done and at some point you just give up and start doing things yourself.
Any of these sound familiar?
These are all seemingly harmless ways in which we have the illusion we are doing the right thing to grow, but what is really happening is we are stifling good strategies because we don’t know how to execute them properly. The “how to be a mega-empire builder handbook” got lost in the mail and you are just winging it as you try to figure out better ways to grow your business quickly. Yeah, sure, you’ve been following some gurus, buying some self-study materials, reading all the “right books.” Maybe you even went to a seminar or two or participated in a high level mastermind program. But you know it. Something still isn’t working right. I mean look at your results. You still aren’t there and you are working way harder than you want!
Want to know how to move beyond the bottleneck. Stay tuned for my next post when I talk about the most common places entrepreneurs get stuck.
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