Two of the key focuses of my blog are Financial Literacy/Money and Business/Entrepreneurship. In any business, it’s important to know when you’re making decisions to help your business, or if your decisions are hurting it. What kinds of things can hurt your business? The following contributed post is entitled, Are You Running Your Business Into The Ground?
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There are few things more appealing when it comes to running a business than the idea of getting to be in charge. After all, many of us start our own businesses specifically because we get sick of having to listen to orders from people above us who clearly don’t know what they’re doing. However, becoming too attached to this idea of yourself as a business owner with all of the answers can actually be pretty dangerous for your business as a whole. Here are some things that you can do in order to make sure that you’re running your business properly rather than running it right into the ground.
Learn to outsource
Outsourcing has been the saving grace of so many businesses, big and small. Part of the reason that Apple has been so successful over the last decade is that they outsource almost all of their manufacturing to other companies. This means that they have more in-house resources to use on research and development as well as branding and marketing. From SEO to outsourced IT support, being able to hand different parts of your business over to the experts with the most experience is one of the best things that you can do. Leaving you free to focus your energy on the areas of your business where you have the most skills.
Stop micromanaging
If you want to get the most out of your employees, one of the most important things that you need to do is to trust them. If you spend all of your time staring over their shoulders and nitpicking every little thing they do, they’re going to end up getting extremely frustrated. That’s going to kill their motivation entirely and leave them feeling pretty resentful of your business as a whole and you as an employer in particular. Remember that you hired these people for a reason, let them do their jobs.
Take a break
For some reason, a lot of people seem to entirely forget that a work/life balance is important as soon as they start running their own business. They assume that they need to dedicate all of their time to their business no matter how much of a negative impact it has on their life and their health. The truth is that taking a break can be just as good for your business as it is for you. It means that you’re able to come back to your business with fresh eyes and you’re far less likely to end up getting burnt out.
The idea of letting go of any part of your business can be incredibly stress-inducing. However, one of the most important lessons that you can learn as a business owner is that your ego has no place within your business. You need to make decisions that are right for your business first and foremost. If you’re making decisions based purely on what you want then your business is always going to suffer for it. Make sure that you’re keeping your ego in check and always do what’s right for your business before anything else.
