WAKEshine

What have you done for your business in the most recent hour that you put into it?  In the last eight hours of work?  In the last 40 hours?

Let’s get more specific.  Look at the last 10 hours you’ve put into your business.  If somebody else had done that for you, how much would you pay them for the results they produced?  Is it worth $1,000 to you?  $500?  $100?

Divide that number by 10 and you have your hourly rate.

How well are you performing at that rate?

If you are not doing the best job that can be done, it’s time to fire yourself.  Bring in somebody else who can do better.  Yes, you want to learn new skills.  Yes, you don’t have a huge operating budget.

But your time is valuable.  And your business does rely on excellence.  Once you’ve modularized your company, you will find many roles that you perform that you dislike, many that you are not particularly good at, and of course many will fall into both categories.

Fire yourself.  Get somebody more qualified to do that stuff, whatever it is.  If you think about hiring somebody else to do it, and you think that maybe it’s not that important after all, then you’ve discovered something valuable.

I used to spend hours working on a clever menu system, or a Wordpress plugin to do some arcane thing, or coding PHP to do something that could be accomplished by a plugin, or writing things that I could get others to write for me.

Let’s say you hate doing SEO, but you do it anyway because it’s obviously valuable to your site.  Look, there are people out there who love SEO.  They live it, eat it, breathe it.  When they wake up in the morning, they are thinking about SEO, and when they’re at the slow part of a movie, their mind is on SEO.

Are you going to spend hours every week struggling with what they can do quicker and better?

Can’t afford it?  Hire yourself out to do what you do best, and use that money to pay them.  By doing that, you’ll increase your networking, develop your best skills, and keep your happiness level up.

But if you keep firing yourself from other roles in the company, where does that leave you?  What will you do?

It doesn’t "leave" you anywhere…it keeps you in the driver seat.  You are the holder of the vision.  It’s up to you to keep the project consistent and effective.