Like a bird leaving the nest, there comes a time to let your business spread its wings and fly.
The early stages of starting a business can feel like you are working on a top-secret project, one you are not yet ready to share with the world. With a lot of time and effort, you feel ready to turn your pipedream into a fully-fledged brand, but what about after that? As your start-up continues to grow and evolve, you might find yourself needing to relinquish control of the business just a little bit. Many budding entrepreneurs find it difficult to delegate, which is why it’s important to build a business that you know can one day run without you in the driver’s seat at all times.
Let’s take a closer look at how you can create separation from your business in order to let it grow.
Does your business revolve around you or do you already delegate?
For a lot of business owners, their brand makes up a large part of their identity. But while this is completely understandable given the amount of work it takes to create a successful company, a thriving business needs to be able to stand on its own.
Ask yourself: are you the only one who can sign off on important decisions? Do staff require your input on everything before being able to move forward? Is there critical business knowledge that only you know?
If yes, your business is likely too founder-centric. For sustainable growth, it’s important to shift towards culture, systems and leadership that don’t require one particular person at the helm. For business continuity alone, having a single person responsible for all decision making is problematic – because if that person becomes ill or has an extended time away then the organisation itself cannot function effectively.
Delegate, delegate, delegate
To move your business away from being founder-centric, you need to master the art of delegation. This requires understanding which tasks are essential to the business but not necessarily to you, such as administrative work, routine customer service enquiries and lower-level sales and marketing decisions. These can typically be trusted to competent team members.
Meanwhile, other tasks might always require your input no matter how much faith you place in your staff. High-level decisions like setting the company’s overall vision, values and strategic direction require founder insight to ensure the brand stays true to what you set out to achieve when you first developed it.
Then there are the tasks that fall into a grey area; the ones that would probably benefit from your direct involvement but can also be trusted to successors, so long as you have robust systems, standard operating procedures, and checkpoints in place. These include crisis management, product development, and financial decisions.
Treating your role as a job
As your business changes and evolves, your job needs to as well. Tasks that once required your constant supervision can (and should) be passed on to competent managers, such as expenditure approval, hiring and client delivery. By clearly defining roles and responsibilities across your organisation, you can empower your team to do their job right. Be there to offer guidance and support when needed, but otherwise, give them space to make decisions and learn from their experiences.
Over time, this will help you to see your role in the business differently. You’re not responsible for doing everything; you’re someone who has a specific job to do – enabling growth and culture. You are not your business; you just have a part to play within it.
Why do this?
You might be thinking, “But I want to be essential to my business!” And that’s understandable. But there are plenty of business benefits to setting up your brand to work well without you, particularly if you aspire to having a good work/life balance or want to be able to sell your business in the future.
Shaping a business to be less dependent on you as a founder gives you the space to look after yourself and make it a more resilient enterprise, which will ultimately benefit your business too.
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