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Are You The Bottleneck In Your Business?

Article Overview: Is your business growth being held back by you? It's hard to admit that the main cause of your poor business performance may be your failure to share the reins with your employees.

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Are You The Bottleneck In Your Business?

Running a business is hard work, and it is easy to blame failure on a number of factors. You might be upset with your staff, or you feel as if the customer base does not fully understand you. However, you have likely not fully examined your own role in this situation. You might be the one thing that is holding your results back. In many cases, it is the owner that is the barrier between the business running smoothly and effectively and failure.

How do you know if you are causing the downfall of your company? You need to evaluate the things that can impact your business and see if you are guilty of any of the owner related problems that regularly occur.

Not having any documented goals
Not managing your time effectively
Not delegating operational tasks to your employees

Define Your Goals

First you need to evaluate if you are goal oriented and disciplined. If not, you will end up hurting your efforts a great deal. In order to be goal oriented, you must:

Define your goals
Map out a way to reach those goals
Have milestones along the way
Take action each day to achieve your goals

Do not set goals that are too high to be achieved, make sure to set them high enough to create a challenge for you. Part of setting goals is allocating enough time to map out success. Don't be so buried in work that you forget to set aside time to decide how you are going to be a success. Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of thinking they will be successful as long as they work constantly. They need to come up for air occasionally so they can think and plan. While hard work is important, so is planning to ensure all that hard work is effective.

Use Your Time Effectively

Managing your time isn't just about having a "to do" list. If you are focused on the myriad urgent operational tasks and issues that crop up daily there will be no time left for the big important issues - like strategy and planning. Remember the 80/20 rule. 20 percent of what you do gives you 80 percent of your results.

So with a bit of analysis and reflection you will be able to identify the high value activities that you, as the business owner, need to do. The low value tasks may be delegated.

Delegate to Liberate

Next, ask yourself if you are empowering your staff to make decisions. Are you so afraid of failure that you have stifled your staff? Your staff can be your most powerful asset if you allow them to be. Empower them to make decisions, freeing you up to concentrate on the prize of business success.

If, for example, you have 10 employees and you delegate only 30 minutes of "busy" work to each one, this will deliver 5 hours of time per week for you to work on long term strategy.

When you trust in your employees to make decisions, you can also trust in them to share the burden of the workload. You have to delegate if you are going to be a success.

Many business owners have made the mistake of building the business entirely around themselves. That might work initially, but it will not lead to long term success. If all of the responsibilities lie with you, not only are you increasing the risk in your business you are actually holding your business back.

Remember, if you are truly going to be a success in the business world, you need to:

Have goals
Set aside time to map out the goals
Manage your precious time (direct your energies for the best payback)
Ensure your employees are trained and developed to think for themselves
Trust your employees to make decisions
Delegate the work

If you can do these things, you will be on your way to success. In many cases, a business will be successful if the owner learns how to loosen their grip - just a little. As much as you want to be a part of every aspect of your business, you need to know when to let go and when to take action.

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Article Tags: bottleneck, business growth, business performance, identifying business bottlenecks

About the Author: brian bijdeveldt
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Brian is a Melbourne based Business Coach and Consultant specializing in Marketing (both online and offline) for the small business entrepreneur. Using proven and practical strategies and techniques Brian empowers business owners to increase their sales, profits and cash.

Visit Brian's Melbourne Business Coaching site or his Business Blog for free business tools and downloads.