Why business owners need to concentrate on the '£1,000 per hour' jobs: Phil Fraser

When you start a business you pretty much have to do everything yourself; from being the bottle washer to Financial Director… and everything in between.

But as your business grows, and you recruit staff, some of those roles get ‘sliced off’ you and passed on to others.

But what often happens is, as a business owner, you get left with the tasks you haven’t passed on or you can’t find anyone to do, in addition to the key tasks you should be doing as a chief executive officer or managing director.

The simple way to look at this is to ask yourself, whether you are doing ‘£10/hr’ jobs, ‘£100/hr’ jobs or ‘£1,000/hr’ jobs.

Or in reverse, would I pay someone my salary to do that job?

In many cases you wouldn’t.

It wasn’t until late in my business career that I stopped sending out the invoices and chasing payments.

Why on earth was I doing that when I could get a book-keeper in on a fraction of my salary to do the same task (and be much better than me at it).

But more importantly, also freeing up my time to do the ‘£1000/hr’ tasks that really added to the bottom line.

Many business owners will say that they ‘can’t afford’ to take on the salary of someone to do the ‘£10/hr’ tasks, without seeing the bigger picture of their lost opportunity cost of them doing the more important tasks that they should be doing.

So what’s the answer?

The best, and simplest, solution to this all-too-common problem is to write yourself a business owner’s ‘roles & responsibilities’ document.

You have them for your team, but why not you?

As a Business Owner, you should do this for three key reasons. To ensure;

1) You are doing what you should be doing.

2) You aren’t doing what you shouldn’t be doing.

3) You aren’t stepping on your team’s toes and doing what they should be doing.

Once you’ve written this, the problem is ensuring that you stick to it.

From my own experiences, my clients’ experiences and the entrepreneurial nature of all business owners, we simply can’t help ourselves…. getting involved in stuff we shouldn’t!

So what’s the solution to that?

You either need to pro-actively regularly check on yourself that you’re doing only your roles. In reality, it is difficult to be objective and reliable with this.

Or you can get an ‘Accountability Partner’, either internally or externally, to monitor you to make sure you are doing what you should be doing and only what you should be doing and not doing the things that you shouldn’t.

So, hand on heart, as a business owner are you doing the right things?

Phil Fraser runs The Business Sounding Board, which helps SME Business Owners focus on their role and helps them to 'not' be lonely at the top.