Delegate!

No one person can do it all. While it may be difficult to turn over some of your business tasks to others, it may be necessary in order to maintain and retain your customer base. The good news is that you can still maintain full control while you let others do some of the tasks you don’t have time for. You may need to make an assessment of all the responsibilities involved in the running of your business and then go from there to decide which ones to delegate to others. Delegation is a smart time management skill that successful marketers use every day.

How to Decide Which Tasks to Delegate

Which tasks you should delegate to others and which ones you should handle yourself will depend on a number of factors. Unless you already have someone you trust implicitly, you may want to handle the finances yourself or you could find someone to do that; just be very careful. You don’t want to hand over credit card or PayPal information to just anyone.

Still, there are many tasks you could pay others to do that would leave you more time for growing your business. For example, if you buy content to use in your business, you could hire someone to do that for you. That person could hire the writers and graphic designers to produce the content you need and then send you the billing information so that all you would have to do is pay the content producers. You may want to take care of everything yourself in the beginning but remember effective time management means that you are able to let go of some of the issues so that you can handle the most important ones.

Hiring Someone for Customer Service

If your business depends heavily on customer service, you may find it worthwhile to hire someone to handle that for you so that you can spend more time on product development, marketing, and advertising. If you accept phone orders, you could hire someone to answer your phone or if your customers need answers via email, you could hire someone to take care of that for you.

What if You can’t Afford to Hire Someone Else?

Bartering is still alive, both online and offline. If you can’t afford to hire anyone to help you, you can still use your time wisely and efficiently by delegating some tasks to others through bartering. For example, if you are a graphic designer and need articles written, you might be able to barter your services with a writer who may be looking for someone to do graphic design work. The Internet is full of marketers and artists who are looking to team up with someone to trade services.

When you use your time management skills to their fullest, you may come up with other ideas of your own to manage your time wisely, thereby concentrating your efforts on the area of your business that needs your attention the most.