How to grow a business is a question I hear all the time. When I first started working as a consultant with business owners, I encountered the same problem repeatedly: businesses that were growing, billing, and even hiring—but hitting a saturation point where the owner could no longer keep up.
When you start a business, it is natural that you are the one who does everything, because you are just starting out, you may have few resources, but if you want to grow or growth starts knocking on your door, you need to delegate.
I remember a client who managed a small chain of hardware stores. He said to me, “Karen, I’m exhausted. If I’m not in business every day, nothing works the way it should.” And I understood him perfectly, because I had seen it dozens of times before. His problem was not a lack of ideas, talent or money, but the absence of clear operating procedures. That’s where the real work began.
Auditing the actual processes.
The first step was to sit down together and analyze everything he did every day. He was present for everything: from opening the hardware store to supervising employees to solving problems with suppliers. This may sound admirable, but it’s a recipe for burnout.
I asked him to make a list of all the tasks he performed. And then we started to rank them:
- Tasks that generated direct revenue: In her case, negotiating with suppliers to reduce costs or creating strategies to increase product sales.
- tive or repetitive tasks: Checking inventories, answering emails or making employee schedules.
When he saw that list on paper, he realized something important: there were tasks that only he could do and others that could be delegated without much trouble. That was our starting point (our, AJÁ MOMENT).
Classify tasks by impact and urgency
Here’s the interesting part. I asked him to look at that list and categorize each task based on its impact on the business and its urgency. The ranking went like this:
- High importance, high urgency: For example, solve a critical problem with the billing system.
- High importance, low urgency: Design a customer loyalty plan.
- Low importance, high urgency: Addressing frequently asked questions from employees.
- Low importance, low urgency: Answering generic emails that could wait or be delegated.
Each step was documented with screenshots and clear examples, so that anyone on your team could take control of that task without consulting you.
How to Grow a Business
The first step is delegate:
To take the leap and start delegating, we chose a simple but recurring task: managing employee schedules. We created an operational manual that detailed every step of the process, from collecting schedule requests to creating the calendar and publishing it. With this manual, he was able to train one of his supervisors to handle this task autonomously.
What surprised my client the most was how a task that used to take him hours each week was solved WITHOUT HIM. And that was just the beginning. Little by little, we repeated this process with other areas of his business.
The result?
An automated business, a client who was able to hire a virtual assistant for operational tasks, employees with a more organized system that allows them to be more productive, and a business owner with more time to devote to growing his business, resting and having family time.
Are you stuck in a job you created yourself?
Identifying and prioritizing key processes is a critical step in scaling any business. If it’s all up to you, you’re not running a business; you’re stuck in a job you created.
If you want to start automating your processes and scale your business, then our Business Consulting is a good route to start. Contact us and let’s analyze what to optimize in your business to scale it.