Entrepreneur Starting-Over Tip #1 – Don’t Do Any Work

One of the hardest lessons I’ve had to learn in the 10 years I’ve been running my business, and perhaps the most critical one, has been that I shouldn’t be doing any work. That is, I for sure shouldn’t be doing any production work, and I should constantly be trying to figure out how to not do any of the other work either, while still providing for the company to be successful, of course. It wouldn’t make much sense to leave that last part off now, would it?

When I started my business at the tail end of 1999, I thought the glory of entrepreneurship involved 80-90 hour weeks, sleeping on the floor in my office, going 72 hours with no sleep, not getting a paycheck, taking one for the team, etc. No, that’s all just stupid and childish. Here’s what smart and mature–get to bed at 9 p.m. every night, wake up at 5 a.m., pay all your employees on time and above what’s normal for their services, plus give them perks and bonuses, pay yourself $50K per month, and work 4 hours per month. Doesn’t that sound like a better idea? What idiot would prefer the former to the latter? I just wish someone had put this to me 10-years ago, before I made a fool of myself for the better part of a decade.

In a lot of ways, my ability to design a website and do the SEO work to drive traffic to it was what kept me working long hours and not getting paid. Now, my wife would, at least at first, disagree with me, because exactly the opposite would appear to be the case if you knew all the details behind the scenes. It’s true that the business and my personal financial situation were at their worst when I had the most employees doing work for me, and when I closed my office and let all my employees go and started doing 90% of the work myself was when I started getting paid, paying off debt, and my clients got happier with the results too. But that only worked for a time, and that time has come to an end.

The problem? Too much work. By myself I could take care of a certain number of clients, but I’ve been wearing myself thin, and I had no time at all to dedicate to bringing in new clients, not to mention a total lack of motivation. Why would I want to bring on new clients if I couldn’t handle what I had? So I started bringing employees back into the mix, slowly at first. A year ago I was doing 90% of the design work, but now I’m doing 10% of it, if that. A year ago I was doing all the SEO and PPC management, but now a small group of people are handling that. Luckily I never did any of the back-end programming, having never gotten good enough at it to call myself a programmer.

The transition has not been without hiccups. A single project underestimated by yours truly, and suddenly I’m skipping paychecks again because the entire cost of the project is going to programming. A few clients pay late one month, and I don’t have enough to pay all my bills at the end of the month. It’d be a lot smoother if I had a $50K cushion in the bank…maybe.

But the point is this–if I tried to keep doing all the work myself, I couldn’t keep all my clients happy, so half of them would leave. I’d work too hard, get burned out, and die. Well, something like that. But I could certainly never make it to the point of working 4 hours per month and pulling in $50K per month. That means hiring the right people to do the work better than I could do it myself, along with other people to manage the client relationships, and figuring out a system that makes it all work smoothly. If you’re always doing work yourself, you don’t have time for things like that. At the moment I think I’m about 10% of the way there. Hopefully I can make the other 90% come together by this time next year. You’ll be able to track my progress based on the number of blog posts, because the less I work, the more I’ll be blogging.