Scaling a business of one

You’ve decided to make the big change.

As you trade wearing your multiple hats of being in charge of marketing, accounting, fulfillment, customer support and even sales to wearing a single hat who’s in charge of a specific department that makes use of your skill set, you smile and feel a sense of relief. Finally, your days of being a digital solopreneur are counted.

You’ve finally realized that in order to build a sustainable business that generates consistent profit over time, you need to scale your business of one.
After all, you can’t spell “business” without “u” and “i”, right? Here’s how you can grow your team, scale and improve your business operations while preventing burnout:

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1. Figure out your skills and focus on the business-related activities you enjoy.

The idea of “do what you love and you never have to work another day in your life” seemed to be a lie – when you were starting out in business, you didn’t have the luxury to do only the things you love because you had to do a lot of things, even things you don’t necessarily enjoy doing.

Now that you’re scaling your business, though, you’ll have the joy of sitting down, figuring out what your greatest strengths & enjoyable tasks are, and delegating them to someone else in your team.

Do you want to focus more on sales and spend less time on book keeping? Or spend 80% of your time on product development to build a sustainable business, so you want to delegate your inventory-related tasks to someone else?

Find out what your weaknesses or your least enjoyable tasks are. Then, delegate them to someone who’s more qualified than you are. Your investment on doing proper delegation will be worth it. After all, you’re in it for the long run, right?

2. Hire a part-time assistant to help you with customer service and support.

As an entrepreneur, your mental space is one of your greatest assets. That’s why it’s important that you hire a virtual assistant or a freelancer (even on a part-time basis!) to clear up some of your mental overhead.

This way, you don’t exhaust your mental energy by focusing on these tasks only: you’re still involved with customer support and service, but you’ll have an assistant helping you along the way. Like the captain of a ship, you’ll still be in charge as you supervise your crew as sail through the rough seas.

You get to prevent burnout and improve your customer service at the same time. Talk about hitting two birds with one stone, right?

3. Batch similar tasks as much as possible.

Batching is a productivity hack that encourages you to do similar tasks all at once.

Think of batching as grocery-shopping: you don’t want go to the store every single day to pick up food, right? You’d waste your precious time and energy! Instead, you sit down, take note of your stock, plan your meals, and go to the grocery every week.

Personally, since I release weekly videos for Conversio, I batch my video recordings accordingly. This allows me to maximize my productivity and optimize my mental space to focus on a specific task for a scheduled period of time.

You can batch customer support and product shipping by doing them everyday – but only on specific schedules like doing them for an hour during morning and afternoon, instead of getting stuck on doing them several times in a day.

Additionally, you can also dedicate a specific time to batch a whole week’s social media content once a week. Or even batch your email newsletters by drafting them one month in advance.

There you have it. I hope these tips will help you scale your business successfully, without losing your sanity! As entrepreneurs, we should not be burning out – even the longest candle will burn out if you light it forever. That’s why I’ve made these tips that I hope you find helpful. Let me know what your valuable insights are, and see you again next week!

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash