Ross Cameron

Every business owner is faced with the same problem – getting too involved for their own good.

There’s no escape

In my research I find that working out how involved to be in your business is a big challenge for many business owners:

“Being able to step back a bit would be great. It would be nice to be in a position to be able to employ qualified staff.” (20-50 employees, Melbourne).

“There’s no weekend for me. It’s seven days a week. The other night I cooked a beautiful dinner, fish on the barbie, all of that. And then I get a call at 6.00pm on the Sunday night – and I had to go into work – I had a problem.” (20-50 employees, Melbourne).

“It would be nice to go on a holiday without worrying about what’s going on. It’s the ability to be able to stand back and have a system that works, so that you can just work on getting strategy right. You can get too involved.” (50-100 employees, Melbourne).

The last of the comments from the three business owners sums it up – it is too easy to get too involved.

In fact, very few business owners are able to stop themselves from getting too involved – which actually inhibits the organisation’s growth.

As business owners we tend to spend too much time “doing the work”, and not enough on developing systems so that there is more structure to producing outputs.

How much time do you invest on developing systems rather than actively “doing the work”?

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