Business owner roles and responsibilities: how to focus on the right things

Business owners, you are probably doing too many of the wrong things in your company.

You have certain roles and responsibilities that are the most important areas for you to focus on, but you are probably neglecting them right now.

Let me explain the reason.

In the early stages of a company, a business owner has to wear many hats.

She or he has to take on almost all of the roles including sales, marketing, manager, HR, accounting, and customer deliverables.

And this adds value to the company and fuels its beginning growth.

But, as a business grows and scales, it should be adding more specialists to the mix.

These incredibly talented people can take over almost every role and responsibility that the business owner has been doing, but they can actually accomplish these more effectively because they are specialists in a single area.

And, as you hire them, it’s important to hand over the reins.

However, this transitional period in a company’s growth can feel very challenging to you, the business owner.

It’s often a place where you can get stuck, actually causing a bottleneck in your company.

Each day, you continue to work in your business instead of on your business.

And while keeping busy can make you feel really productive, this is not the highest and best use of your time.

In addition, these mundane activities should not be the key roles and responsibilities of any business owner.

Continuing to focus on low-return takes will not facilitate the scaling of your company, and it won’t allow the employees or contractors that you hired to do what they do best.

Why business owners can cause problems in their own company

Business owner: when you do too much in your company and you don’t let go, here are the other problems you cause:

• You prevent your people from growing into the positions for which you hired them.
• You are limiting your ability to one day exit the company.
• You are training your people to rely on you, instead of helping them to grow in their ability to lead other people, serve your customers, and add value to the organization.
• You are hurting profits because you are one of the highest paid people in the organization. Your company makes more when you give most of that work to others.

It’s a hard pill to swallow but the truth is that most of your current day-to-day responsibilities can be handled by another person.

What’s more, your people can do things better and faster because they won’t be as distracted by as many responsibilities because they aren’t the business owner.

And the less you do yourself, the more you will be able to inspire and empower others in your company.

You’ll remove yourself as a bottleneck that delays forward momentum because your people are waiting on you.

Business owner roles and responsibilities: focused on what really matters

Let’s talk about how you should prioritize the highest and best use of your time.

As the business owner, your roles and responsibilities should be primarily limited to:

• Evangelizing and stewarding the mission, values, and vision of your company.
• Looking over the horizon at both the internal and external competitive landscapes, opportunities for expansion, customers, markets, new industry developments, trends, standards, and so forth.
• Setting and implementing strategic goals and initiatives to move your company forward in a way that aligns with your mission, values, and vision.
• Creating and nurturing relationships with referrers, influencers, and partners who will further the interests of your company’s strategic goals.
• Meeting with your senior leadership to guide their actions and help them manage your people, operations, and offerings.
• Setting and monitoring your key performance indicators (including revenue and profit) to ensure that everything in your company is performing well – and proactively addressing those items that are not.

How to stay at the helm as the owner (and not fall back into the technician role)

No one is more passionate about your business than you.

You are its steward, its nurturer, and its biggest fan. That’s why you are at its helm – so stay there (instead of running into the galley to cook).

Like many of today’s business owners and CEOs, you may currently be mired down with tasks that require amazing amounts of your time and energy – including (but not limited to) production, bookkeeping, writing proposals, delivering services, coding, designing, and any number of other daily duties.

But you don’t have to carry the burden on your own! If you’re ready to shed the weight created by the myriad of daily duties that distract you from your real work as CEO, you have 3 choices to get them off your plate:

Option #1: Delegate your current responsibilities:

You can offload your responsibilities to another person on your team, hire someone to take on the tasks, or outsource the workload. Trust your team and let go.

Option #2: Delay activities:

This isn’t my favorite choice as a solution, but I realize that in a growing company, a business owner must still wear multiple hats.

So, if you haven’t yet hired a person who you can delegate your responsibilities to (yet), then see if you can put them off until you’ve been able to work on your business.

Option #3: Delete unnecessary tasks:

It may surprise you to learn that some of the things you are doing simply do not need to be done.

Consider your list of To-dos. Is there anything you can just drop off it?

Then go ahead and delete it now – you’ll feel so much better.

Shifting your roles and responsibilities won’t happen overnight…

I understand that it may feel challenging for you to let go of your non-CEO duties.

But, to grow your company to achieve your Big Vision, you must work toward further developing your own leadership skills by stepping more fully into the CEO role.

Build your team around you to grow your company. Together, you will accomplish great things.

Creating and implementing this mental framework around your role as a business owner and CEO is a powerful way to transform your business.

Of course, it’s going to take you time, dedication, and intention to shift your focus.

It will also mean bringing in the right team members to take on the jobs that you “fire yourself” from.

Bottom line: This won’t happen overnight.

But it’s the perfect business initiative to take on and stick to this year. The results may just astound you!

Ready to take the next step to scale your business?

If you’re still wanting more, let’s talk! I help my clients scale their businesses to the multi 6-, 7-, and 8-figure levels.

You can also sign up for my FREE Masterclass where I’ll walk you through creating a strategy for raising your rates, getting booked solid with high-end clients, and setting up the systems that allow you to scale your business to 6- and 7-figures.