Have you ever canceled vacations, not attended your kid’s games or recitals? Missed dates, anniversaries? Or have you decided to do away with that side of things altogether since you started your business? A new business needs as much attention as a baby. But if after it’s been up and running for 1-2 years, you still can’t take any time off to have a personal life, then you’re suffering from business imprisonment.
SMEs, in particular, are prone to this vicious disease. You dedicate long hours to keep up with your business’ daily requirements. In the process, you neglect your actual role – that of a leader.
Without you at the helm, steering your company towards long-term visions, your business suffers. What comfort can you take from this – at least your day-to-day tasks are done flawlessly?
Or would you rather delegate responsibilities and focus on your strategic role?
If it’s the latter, then you should break-free from this captivity and learn how to make your business run on its own.
Let’s take a closer look at why you might be afraid to relinquish control and how remote work can help.
What causes business imprisonment and how it affects your business
When you started the business, you may have done everything – from coding to testing to meeting with prospects to taking out the trash. Now, you’re so used to doing everything by yourself that you’re not even sure anyone else can fill in.
When your business is owner-dependent, you become its prisoner due to:
- Technical Prejudice – You invented the product that is the crux of your business. You’re sure that no one else will ever know it better than you. So naturally, the majority of the technical tasks fall on you.
- Poor Delegation – Related to technical bias is the belief that if you want something done, you better do it yourself. And so you burden yourself with menial tasks.
- Busyness Syndrome – Dovetailing into poor delegation is busyness, whereby you keep yourself occupied with tasks that rarely move the company forward.
- Lack of Business Systems – In the beginning, outreach or answering client queries may have been a simple matter of answering emails. After your business has grown, you continue to do things the same way.
- Increasing Business Complexities – Due to a lack of proper business systems, it becomes progressively challenging to manage it. In turn, it makes you busier without much result, and gradually your business’ growth dies off.
- Absence of Leadership – Without you doing your actual job, your business will have no way of getting to the next level. It will suffer at the hands of competitors, and your products will become irrelevant.
Myopic vision, frugality about utilizing the right resources, and not wanting to cease control are enough to drive any business into the ground.
How remote work can set your company on autopilot while you grow it
Growing a business requires hiring the best people, training them, and trusting them to do their jobs, implementing processes that streamline work, and having protocols in place that act as a safety net.
It’s at that point that you should hand over the responsibility of the daily running of your business to your managers, team leads, and trusted employees.
This is where the paths of a self-sufficient business and remote work merge. Not only are both of these factors important in the success of any business today, but they’re also dependent on each other and they prop each other up. Here’s how:
- Finding the best people – If your employees are not capable of doing their jobs well, delegating will become even tougher. Finding the right employees is the biggest challenge for most business owners. Remote work is undoubtedly the best solution. You can have your choice of the best workers from around the globe and have us help you find them.
- Training your employees –If you’re smart enough to hire remotely, you have to craft a failsafe onboarding and training program. That’ll also mean streamlining your training process for all your employees and making them more adept at their work. Best employees + right training = the fundamental of setting your company on autopilot.
- Setting up business systems – From CRM to lead generation to code review – every function that your company executes belongs within a system. These systems are the building blocks that’ll help you run your business effectively. If you map all tasks within your company to web- or cloud-based systems, it’ll not only streamline work but also make them accessible from anywhere in the world your employees, or you are present.
- Using the right management tools – Remote teams use management tools to work in sync with the rest of the company. With the right management tool, you can get a bird’s eye view of your company at any instance or delve into any one of the functions to get more details and still run your business hands-free.
- Outlining employee roles – Remote employee roles are function-driven. That makes them more efficient and much easier to manage. Breaking down your business into functions will force you to define each of your employee’s roles, know if there’s a gap or an overlap, and adjust accordingly.
- Engendering team collaboration – Remote employees work together all through the day, even when they are not located in the same place. They chat online, have video calls, and exchange ideas. That means the team keeps itself accountable. It becomes clear when someone is struggling and when to provide them with the appropriate support. Distributed teams, in many ways, are self-managing, which leaves you a lot of room to focus on your priorities and maybe develop new ideas on your remote business.
- Trusting your teams and your systems – Leadership is a delicate balance of knowing when to get out of the way to let people do their jobs and knowing when to step in. You have to be mindful of everything that’s happening in your company without micromanaging. If you’ve set up your business systems correctly and hired the right people, then trusting your employees to do their job is the next best thing you can do to break free of business imprisonment.
If you have a remote team, chances are you’re already able to step away from the office to meet clients in person, attend events, or even take a break – while you keep tabs on your whole company.
And if you’re not sure whether to delegate a task or not, ask whether it would cost you more to hire someone than to do it yourself. Remember to factor in your opportunity cost in the equation. Such as, would it be worthwhile searching for the best employees from anywhere in the world by yourself, or delegating to experts like DistantJob, who don’t charge you a finder’s fee?
In this case, certainly the latter. So call us and make work-life balance a reality in your life.
