You’ve been in business for a little while now, you’ve figured out how to make a profit and you’re ready to go to the next level (hellllooo big bucks!)
But, something is going on behind the scenes that you just can’t seem to diagnose. You’re working tons of hours, serving the heck out of your clients, but you don’t quite feel like the CEO. Or maybe you do and CEO stands for Currently Extremely Overwhelmed… I hear you friend and I’m here to help. You may be suffering from being a “grindaholic.”
Do your symptoms include:
- Working hard to no end
- Inability to close the laptop at night
- Wearing all the hats
- Not thinking to hire is realistic for you
- Making consistent revenue but wants more
- Queen of “But they can’t do it as I can”
- Having a full waitlist at all times
If so, then call me WebMD because you’ve officially been diagnosed. “But how Tatiana? How did I get here?” Let’s talk about it.
The Top Reason Why You’re Stuck in Grind Mode And How to Delegate:
You don’t trust a team to help you. You worked hard to build this business from the ground up. You put in the blood, sweat, tears. You put yourself on social media and you have some real traction going. Your audience and clients trust you very much, so why would you bring a stranger (or another one if you already have a team) into the mix?
Trusting a team can feel scary, but a lot of times this fear comes from deeper insecurity. You may feel like you won’t make the best hiring decisions like your backend is a mess, or like you don’t have a true process behind what you do, so it can’t be duplicated. Well, let’s talk about how to work through this fear.
Follow this 8 step process to start gaining trust in a team:
- Get clear on which areas of your business you need the most help in
- Then write a list of things that this person would be helping you with
- What’s the smallest area of an impact someone could come in and help you with first?
- Start with this small area and write out what your definition of a “good job” with this task would be
- Communicate this to the team member. Get some agreements going on whether this is something they can do or not
- Give them the space to do it and have evaluation checkpoints throughout the task or project
- Celebrate wins and discuss lessons
- Repeat with bigger and bigger tasks until you feel comfortable
A lot of our fears of team building can be minimized if we just ease our way into it. Trust is built over time and it’s completely normal to not have full trust immediately. By starting with a small bit of your business at a time, you give your team time to earn your trust.
Once you begin to fully trust and delegate to your team, you’ll unlock a level you never knew existed!
Oftentimes when clients come to me with a team already, they’re trying to figure out why they’re still in grind mode. They thought hiring a team was supposed to be beneficial and huge time savings.
The good news is, they’re not wrong. Sometimes we just didn’t know what we didn’t know, so we may have made an uninformed decision when hiring. Which if I’m being honest, isn’t always a bad thing!
Hiring and team building are some of the most vulnerable tasks you’ll ever do as CEO, so the fact that some people are willing to jump out there is huge! Moving forward, we just need to implement a real strategy around how we determine who we need on our team next. By having a process like this in place, we can avoid making hires that essentially act as a bandaid for a bigger issue and create some momentum with the role we hire.
Follow these steps to figure out which tasks you should be delegating:
- Brain dump all of your day-to-day tasks as CEO
- Decide which of these tasks you need to delegate first
- Group them based on like things
- Create “buckets” that this person will be responsible for
- Looking at these buckets, you should be able to determine what this role will look like. Looking at the trends among this list, which role pops out at you? Social media manager? Video editor? Executive Assistant?
- Begin to follow a strategic hiring process to make sure you select the best possible candidate.
This process can take you a bit of time and, quite frankly, it should. When you start to brain dump all of the tasks you perform daily, you may find the list is way longer than you think.
Pro Tip: Don’t write down general tasks, get specific! Don’t just say “onboarding clients”. What does that entail? Once someone says they want to work with you, what do you do next? Start an Automation using Honeybook client workflow automation software? Manually send an online contract in Honeybook? As you brain dump, you may realize someone else could manage that process!
You’re going to see your business from a bird’s eye view for the first time and the results will shock you! The amount of time we spend out of our zone of genius is insane and when you look at it from far away, you begin to realize that you’ve been doing the job of 10 people!
You owe it to yourself to escape the grind.
Make boss moves now, that will set your business up for sustainability later. Ready to recover from being a grindaholic for good? Apply now for access to my free training! Here I’ll teach you my seven-step RECOVER ™️ framework that my clients and I have used to escape the grind. Visit www.grindaholicsanonymous.com to submit your application.
