“The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know… ”
I bet a parent or grown up said that to you at some point, when you were a kid!
And I hate to say it, but they were right.
When you’re a busy entrepreneur, trying to keep a million different balls in the air, it’s easy to feel like your business is all about you. You’re the brand. You’re the face. It’s YOU that people want to message or get on calls and speak to.
And much as it’s nice for the ego to feel important and successful and in demand – if you get caught up in a cycle where you feel that everything is about you and has to be you, it can become totally and utterly exhausting.
Maybe you’ve been there or are there right now, where you just feel like everyone wants a piece of you and there’s never enough time!
I think it’s a cycle that 99% of business owners go through. It’s not easy and it’s definitely hard when you have to start loosening the reins, allowing other people to take stuff off your plate and the sense of losing control that can come with that.
But as you grow and your business grows, we each have to think about delegating things, and actually bringing in other people to support you in the areas of your life and business that just aren’t your area of expertise or where your time is most profitably spent (both financially and in terms of the tasks that you don’t really want to be doing).
In your personal life, it’d be like getting a cleaner. It might mean paying someone to do your ironing, because you’d much rather spend £20 a week than spend hours slaving over your ironing board, only to end up making the creases look even worse than they did before you started.
It might be that you pay a personal trainer because you know you’re never going to go to the gym on your own and that exercise bike in the spare room has just got the aforementioned ironing pile dangled over it.
In your business, it’s important to do the same thing – which can feel way harder – because it’s your business! It’s your face people see popping up on their social media; your blogs and emails they’re reading; your podcast they’re listening to. And after all, people want YOU!
I went to a training day in London recently, where this jumped out at me in really quite a surprising way – because I love working one-to-one with my clients. I feel like they have a much better experience and more impactful results than anything they can do that is self-study, because they’ve got the support and accountability to move forward.
Maybe you feel the same way in your business.
But the caveat that really hit me on that training day is that even though they need to work together one-to-one, and even within the financial tasks they need to get sorted… the one-to-one doesn’t always need to be me.
Now to some extent, I’ve done this already.
Like in the Asset Accelerator® – my 9-month one-to-one hybrid programme, designed for busy business owners who want to turn the money that they are already making into lasting wealth and grow a pot of assets to £500k (or more) in the next 3 to 5 years by creating a flexible plan.
How’s that for a mission statement?!
And as a key part of that 9-month experience, I’ve brought in other experts to support my clients.
There’s my amazing accountant Nicole. Nicole has been my accountant for about three years now and she has revolutionised how I look at my business and my numbers, because even as a Financial Advisor it can be difficult knowing which business metrics you need to be looking at! We all know about sales and we all know about profit, but there are so many other things it’s crucial to get your head around and an amazing accountant is the best person to explain that.
Could I learn what Nicole knows, so that I could pass it on to my clients? Sure.
Is it going to be as good as somebody who’s been doing it for 20-odd years and is a total expert at what they do, because they do it and know it inside out? Of course not!
So Nicole comes into our Asset Accelerator® group and does brilliant deep-dive training sessions. In fact, in August, she’s doing a training on Xero (the accounting software) because although I use it, she’s the expert and she knows exactly what she’s doing.
I’ve also brought in a lovely lady called Abi who’s a money mindset expert, because all business owners have got issues with money mindset, whether they admit it or not. And the challenges you have as a business owner who’s been in business for 3 or 4 years are very different from someone who’s just starting out. There’s a difference again as you hit the 6-figure mark and beyond, but the deep underlying money mindset stuff is still there.
So by bringing a real money mindset expert into my programme, it means everyone has the chance to do some seriously good training that’s 100% relevant and impactful for them, to ask questions and actually move forward.
But I’ve decided it’s time to bring some other experts into my business too!
It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Some of the tasks I do at the moment would be better done by somebody who’s more specialised, can do them faster and maybe better, and get even greater outcomes for my clients (which is the thing that really matters here).
This is not about you or me dumping our responsibility elsewhere. I refuse to be one of those coaches charging £10k+ for a programme where the participants get one 45 minute call with me and the rest is farmed out to ‘support coaches’ and support staff.
And this is not about you or me putting our hands up and saying we can’t manage.
It’s about using your time so that you’re focusing on what you’re REALLY good at and the parts of the business you really enjoy (which more often than not, are the same thing). For me, that means focusing my time on coming up with the strategy, crunching the numbers and working out what is going to work. And then explaining it in a way that my clients have those lightbulb moments, where they realise their whole life can change.
For the other things, I’ve got a team and that is absolutely amazing.
Sally is my Client Care Manager, for example – and bringing her into my business 7 years ago catapulted the financial planning part of my business on to the next level. Suddenly I could focus on my BEST tasks and let her take care of the others.
So I want to leave you with a question today:
When was the last time you looked at your business and objectively asked do ‘I’ need to do this… me personally… or is there another expert that could free me up to do what I do best?
And here’s where you can find out more about the Asset Accelerator®, which will really help you leverage the expertise of others to catapult your business and financial success to the next level too!
Until next time,
Claire
