Last week I met with my Mastermind group and made the decision to offload even more of the responsibilities that I currently shoulder to run my business. With the launch of three major new initiatives my time is getting stretched and I need help.
After carefully looking at my options I chose someone who has been actively involved with my site for the past few months. I offered him a revenue share for one of my projects and his first day on the job was today.
His main responsibilities will be creating the marketing campaign for our project, attracting visitors, recruiting sponsors, and creating the roadmap for new features to add to the project. He will be bouncing ideas off of me but I would like to give him a lot of control to make decisions and run it like his business.
As we were leaving the office at the end of the day he asked me what I did in my business and it got me thinking. Some of the work I do is strategic such as managing the people who work for me and working with partners, advertisers, important clients, and other stakeholders. A lot of the work I do is still operational in nature. I do some of the graphic work and most of the technical work myself (except for the major projects that are over my head). My staff handles the administrative work and other tasks that I do not particularly enjoy.
I do a lot of the technical work myself for two reasons: 1) it is difficult for me to give up control of this area as it is the lifeblood of my business (in case anything goes wrong) and 2) it is too much fun to give up!
My favorite time of day is when I first arrive in the morning and spend the first hour and a half working on a technical project for my site. I have never been formally training in Dreamweaver of programming and have learned everything myself online through different Q&A’s.
Every successful entrepreneur I have spoken with and profiled encourage others to do what you love and you will be successful. I could spend more time on strategic work and remove myself completely from the operations but that would not be as much fun! I suspect that as I continue to grow I will need to bring on more technical people and offload some of those responsibilities but I always see myself doing some tinkering on the site to test out and implement new ideas.
What part of your business do you enjoy the most?
Evan Carmichael
We are a small firm and everyone ends up dealing with every part of running the business. My favorite part of the business now is creating and writing our new blog http://www.corporateretriever.com, but I am sure something new and interesting will replace that in the future.
We have just founded a startup selling fresh,packed fruits in bite-size portions. The main drive of our firm is probably the product innovation. This is the part that for now has to be under my control. But basically, i just roll out the ideas and have someone else to do the work for me.