3.4 Build Revenue Through Business Partnerships

A business owner should be involved in as few low level tasks as possible and in chapters 1.3 and 2.3 we looked at ways of identifying and outsourcing these.  In this chapter we look more closely at some of the higher level tasks that should be outsourced and how to do it.

Many business owners are ‘Technicians with an Entrepreneurial seizure’ as Michael Gerber described in his book the E Myth.  Most of us have not learnt to be managers and do many of the high level activities a business requires and yet, when starting off we really have to learn these.  In many cases we don’t enjoy them and will never be an expert and so it is wise to work out ways of cost effectively getting this done.

In Chapter 1.3 we did an entrepreneurial personality profile evaluation and identified some of the business and personal strengths and this will help in determining the high level office tasks that we can do and more importantly the ones that we should not be doing.

My own dominant personality type was creator and my weakness was getting things finished before being excited with the next new idea I had.  Being a creator is great, however if you never finish anything it is a bit useless.   As the business owner you may be the one to hold yourself accountable and that can be quite a challenge.  There are a couple of options here, one is to find someone who has different and complementary strengths who needs your strengths as much as you need theirs or get a general manager.  I couldn’t afford a full time general manager so I engaged one part time and it was one of the best things I did.  He wasn’t a yes man and called things as he saw them and held me accountable for results.  At the same time he oversaw delivery of all the other high level tasks that I was not great at.  This left me with more time to do things that I was better at.  This was another great time saver.  I often marvelled at the work he could do in 30 minutes that would take me hours of agonising to get done.

We also engaged other high level staff such as in our marketing and creative media area and had them working with our outsourced back office team and that was a great result for us.

• Financial Services
• Leasing
• Financial Advice
• Marketing
• HR
• Business Strategy

Again, this was just another level of relinquishing some control to create more freedom.