What Falls Apart First When You're Doing Everything Yourself
When you realise it has fallen apart, nothing dramatic will have happened. Well, it might have done but it doesn’t all the time, to the majority it has just quietly eroded away at the edges while you're busy in the middle, and you didn’t notice until a client mentioned your contact form has been broken for a while, or your accountant asks about an invoice you're fairly sure you never sent and that's the thing nobody warned you about.
When you're doing everything yourself in your business there's no huge crash, no moment where it all goes wrong and you just have to deal with it. What I can bet my house on though, is that it is never the client's work. Client work has a human attached to it, and humans are the thing that makes you do what needs to be done.. What goes first is everything with nobody waiting at the other end: it will definitely be your own marketing, then the money admin, then the small broken things, then your standards, and eventually you. That order is just a rough guess, but I am pretty sure you will agree.
What falls apart first when you're doing everything yourself?
So as I said in the first paragraph, it will be your own business that is the first casualty. Your client work stays intact because there is someone that is expecting some kind of output, like some writing, a design, or a post for their social media. The collapse starts with the tasks that don’t have a concrete deadline and no one to be disappointed in you. It's never a choice.
It will be a series of Tuesdays where the paid work takes all day, and the thing with no deadline moves to Wednesday, and then to next week, and eventually off the list altogether because you never found the time.
| What goes | How quickly | How you find out |
|---|---|---|
| Your own marketing | First, and fastest | The pipeline goes quiet about three months later, and you can’t work out why |
| Invoicing and chasing payment | Soon after | You can’t say what you’re owed without going and looking |
| The small broken things | Slowly, then all at once | A client tells you. Or worse, they don’t, and they go elsewhere |
| Follow-ups on enquiries and quotes | Constantly | You answer the loud ones and lose the quiet ones |
| The decisions — pricing, what you’ll take on | Later | You say yes to work you’d have turned down two years ago |
| You | Last, and hardest to spot | Evenings. Sunday afternoons. Resenting work you chose on purpose |
That last row is the one we argue with ourselves over and deny it to everybody else, including the partner at home. The business rarely disappears. The person running it, yes you, just starts to slowly stop enjoying it.
Why is your own business always last in the queue?
That’s obvious isn’t it?, it’s because it never chases or mithers you!
A client emails, a deadline lands, an invoice arrives with a date on it. Whereas, your own website copy doesn't do any of that. It just sits there being important and silent, and silence will lose every single time when up against a human being saying "any chance you could just...".
But there is also a second reason. Your own work you can't send an invoice for so you can’t physically see that it makes you any money because when the week’s a bit tight it will be the unbillable hour that you left go, which makes perfect sense right up until 6 months later and you have nothing in your pipeline for the next 6 months.
Why does the money admin slip before anything else?
Why do you think?
Because invoicing feels like just more boring admin rather than work, and chasing people feels awkward and embarrassing, so both these tasks get pushed to a quieter day. It's the most expensive corner people cut. I mean, not sending an invoice for 3 weeks doesn’t just delay getting paid, but it delays the whole process behind it. The tax you should be putting aside, the amount you can budget to spend next month or even if you have enough money to turn down that red flag client you don’t want.
Admin is a bigger piece of your time than most people expect even when they have been working really hard to keep up with it.
The SME Business Barometer from American Express and Small Business Saturday UK, which surveyed 1,000 UK business owners this year, found that most small business owners are spending around 11 hours a week on admin and finance tasks, thats close to double what they spent on growing the business!
What are the early signs, before something actually breaks?
So let’s look at what the early signs of your business breaking can be.
The useful signs aren't dramatic. They're small and they're specific, and I be most of us will be able to recognise them faster than any other list of symptoms:
You are told about problems from your client rather than you noticing them yourself.
You have wasted time building 3 different systems in your business and guess what, none are finished.
You are able to say what your last social media post was but you can’t quite remember when your last invoice was sent.
You could tell me your last social post but not the date of your last invoice.
You have enquires in your inbox unread because you will deal with them when you have time to reply properly but they sit there for a week unanswered.
You have stopped doing the things that used to bring new work in, like networking but you can’t say exactly when you stopped.
You know something is broken and has been for so long that you have just started working around it.
None of the things listed above are emergencies but they are the ones that can cost money quietly, and is why they are the important ones worth catching.
What do you do about it before it costs you too much?
Start with whatever costs money when it doesn't get done
It might not be the biggest job or the most annoying one but it should be the one with money involved.. Quite often that's invoicing, chasing payments, and following up on quotes that were sent out last week (or even last month) and it's normally only 20mins of work that you have been procrastinating about for weeks.
Do that one first, and you will notice that the rest of the mess gets noticeably less scary.
Hand over the repeatable stuff, not the hard stuff
People often make the mistake of trying to delegate the tasks they hate most, which is generally also the tasks that are tangled up in their own head and which will take an hour to explain to somebody else. So, start with something you do the same way every single time or that you have a SOP (Standard operating procedure) for: scheduling, formatting blogs, uploading content, chasing clients, sorting the email inbox and getting rid of the 50,000 newsletters you have.
Repeatable, easy to describe tasks. You then get hours back very quickly.
Record it while you're doing it, not afterwards
The reason many people don't hand things over is that writing down the instructions feels like more work than doing the job itself, and to be honest sometimes it is. So the obvious thing to me is don't write them down.
Next time you do the task you want to hand over, record your screen and talk yourself through it. Five minutes of you rambling over a screen recording is worth more than an hour of writing a process you'll never finish and will just sit in your google or one drive. I advise all my clients to do this as then I can understand exactly what they need and what they would like.
This is what some of my work at BizzyBee is because when you strip the job title away it is not the exciting bits. It's the repeatable, unglamorous, quietly expensive bits that a solo trader or small business will drop first.
Put the silent work somewhere visible
Remember the jobs with no deadline will need you to invent one. That might be a standing hour in the diary, a monthly session with someone, or just telling another human that you'll have it done by Friday. It's a small thing and it works much better than it should, mostly because we'll all do for someone else what we won't do for ourselves.
What getting help doesn't fix
Remember, handing work over can cost you time, before it saves any!
The first few weeks will be slower, because you are having to explain things you've never had to explain out loud before, and if you're expecting instant relief you'll be disappointed somewhere around week two and want to jack it all in. It's worth knowing that before you start..
And getting support won't fix everything. Problems like not charging enough and getting someone to take work off your plate just means you will do more underpriced work. Or if you haven't finished deciding what your business is actually for, then no amount of support will help you decide it for you.
I can help by taking a great deal off your shoulders but I can't want your business to work more than you do, and I can't make the decisions that you need to make..
The breakdown won’t announce itself, and it won’t stop on its own either. It's usually still going on the day you realise you are burnout and have not been doing what you should have been, like that invoice you should have sent last month.
If you want to read more, I've written about it in the delegation mistakes I see freelancers make over and over
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the first thing most people hand over?
The full inbox or the scheduling. Both are repeatable, both slow down a large chunk of the day, and neither task will need much explaining. Social media scheduling is another common starting point for creative businesses, because the work already exists, it's the posting that never happens because of time or confidence.
I can't afford help yet. What do I do in the meantime?
Pick the one job that costs you money when you don’t complete it and make it a regular priority. Fifteen minutes every Friday for invoices and chasing will do more for your business than a whole productivity system.
Isn't it faster to just do it myself?
I hear this a lot!
For the one task, yes but that’s the trap you get stuck in. It would be faster for you to do it the first time you delegate, which is how you end up doing the same forty-minute job every week for three years. If it's a one-off, do it yourself. If it's something you'll do fifty more times, the time you spend explaining it, you will get back many times over.
How few hours can I start with?
I do have a couple of options. A Power Hour is ÂŁ99 for a 60-minute call where we sort out one specific thing, and
hours where I work behind the scenes for you is ÂŁ32 an hour. Monthly packages start at ÂŁ160.
How long before it starts to feel like it's helping?
A few weeks for the day-to-day relief, longer for the bigger stuff. The first thing people notice is that a specific recurring dread has gone as well as that Sunday inbox, the invoicing, and the posting. The bigger picture stuff, where your pipeline picks up because your own marketing is actually getting done, will take a couple of months probably, because that's how long it took to fall apart in the first place.
Does getting help mean I've failed at running my business?
Blooming heck, NO! I know you may feel like that and let me tell you, many other business owners feel like that too at first, none of you will think about other people like that, which should tell you something. Running a business alone means doing possibly eight jobs, most of which you were never trained for and several of which you really bloody hate. That is why you delegate!
