Can 'Do It Yourself' Sink a Business?

'By Amanda Weathersby, Partner, The Profitable Idea

Today small business owners are all powerful!  For their companies they can create videos and post them around the world, self-publish an e-book, design ads, set up websites, fashion an invoice and payment processing system online, develop personalize training programs, establish a payroll processing structure, produce a revenue and expense tracking system to make reporting and taxes easier, devise a prospect and customer communications system to stay in front of their market, recruit and hire new staff online, and so much more!  And the business owner can do all that in their free time.  After they brew beer, bake bread, provide customers with IT services, redesign client’s websites, or grow specialty produce.  
 
None of us wants to lose the ability to 'do it yourself' to save money.  But we need to remember that doing so much of it ourselves takes up more than half our time, time we cannot spend creating and selling our products or providing our billable services to clients.  Ultimately one of the causes of so many small businesses not being profitable and a third of business owners not earning an income is overdoing ‘do it yourself.'     
 
Are there strategies to reduce the amount of time we must spend on automation that supports running a business so we can spend more time on the business itself?  Yes!

1. Simplify.  Do you need all the automation bells and whistles?  You might think, “do it right the first time and you don’t have to do it again when you expand.”   Nonsense!  You’ll definitely do things over again as you grow, because online services change and new ones are created, and what works for you today probably won’t be ideal tomorrow.  For now, keep it simple, and you won’t have to take 20 steps to create an invoice, but just 5.  Think what a time saver that could be for you!  Besides, later you might be able to afford someone to do it for you.
2. Compare Before You Leap.  Before you pick an online service, study it carefully to make sure it meets your basic needs at the right price.  Don’t take everyone else’s word for it.  What’s good for a coach is not necessarily good for a barber, and a $100,000 restaurant doesn’t need the same bells and whistles as a $1 million restaurant. 
3. Stick With It.  To many small business owners, automation is like a shiny object.  We get distracted.  Someone tells us about the great new prospect data base and CRM system they use, and we get automation envy.  But we just went through great pains to set up the last shiny object a year ago.  It took weeks to get it right, remember?  Many small business owners want to update their websites every year, but do they need to?  What if you committed yourself to a website or a payroll system for three years to make sure the time you spent to incorporate in your business is paid off in full before you change it? 
4. Focus.  Instead of using every online platform in the beginning of your business, perhaps you could focus on one.  Do it really well. The mama coach who became an Instagram star in just a year isn’t building a following on Facebook or TikTok.  The nail salon owner who focusses on responding to every review in Yelp isn’t there either. 
5. Plan Your Relief Valve.  Depending on your skill sets, plan on the day when you’re going to hire someone else to do some of this hard work for you!  Maybe you hire an accountant in the beginning because you don’t have those skills.  Maybe you hire someone to create your website because that doesn’t play to your strengths.  Eventually, perhaps you’ll have the resources to get help across functions and you won’t have to do it all yourself anymore! Then you can focus on what you do best. Produce and sell your products and services.

 
All the best!
 
Amanda