Don’t be a bottleneck in your solo business

You’re a solopreneur, so you’re in charge of everything. You set your own hours, choose your clients, and decide how your business runs. Nobody needs to approve your decisions.

The worst part of solopreneurship is also that you’re in charge. Every decision, every approval, every process runs through one person: you. And when you stall, so does everything else.

The same control that makes solo work so appealing can also become the thing that holds your business back. If your business can’t function without your hands on every single detail, you’ll hold yourself back. At some point, you have to figure out how some aspects of your business can run without you.

Where solopreneurs get stuck

Bottlenecks don’t usually feel like bottlenecks. They feel like “just how things are.” You’re a solopreneur, so you’re supposed to do everything yourself . . . right?

You’ve hit a bottleneck when you have no more time to give to your business. And as a result, you can’t grow or dedicate your energy to high-value work. 

A few scenarios are common in solo businesses. 

You have overly manual processes. You’re copying data between apps, setting up new projects from scratch, or holding your to-do list in your head. Mundane, menial tasks eat up hours of your time.

You hold on to tasks you’ve outgrown. Solopreneurs often keep doing work they could hand off—bookkeeping, scheduling social posts, organizing documents—because they believe no one else will do it well enough. These tasks are necessary, but that doesn’t mean they’re the best use of your time.

You are the decision bottleneck. When you’re the only person who can approve, review, or sign off on something, work stalls whenever you’re busy or indecisive. This gets especially expensive if you work with contractors, a social media manager, or a virtual assistant. If they can’t move forward without your input, their waiting time becomes a cost to your business.

How to clear the way

Once you’ve identified where things have slowed down, you can start to make changes. Here are some fixes to try.

Automate the repetitive stuff. If a task follows the same steps every time, you might be able to automate it. I use automation tools to automate roughly 1,500 tasks per month in my business. Even at a conservative estimate of 10 seconds per task, that’s four to five hours of my time saved. When you automate tasks in the apps you use, you don’t get “stuck” when you have a heavy workload.

Delegate with clear guardrails. If you bring on a project manager, assistant, or contractor, you need to take one of two approaches so you don’t become the bottleneck. You either need to give them really repetitive work that doesn’t require decision-making, or you need to empower the person to make decisions—and then get out of their way. Either way, you set up the work so the other person can move forward without waiting on you.

Build in decision deadlines for yourself. Solopreneurs don’t have managers pushing them to decide. If you tend to sit on decisions (whether to acquire a new tool, make a pricing change, or take on a client), give yourself a deadline. Indecision can cost you opportunities, so force yourself to move forward one way or the other.

Your solutions have to be practical

For one week, pay attention to the tasks that require you specifically. If someone or something else (a tool or an automation) could handle it, that task is a candidate for removal from your plate.

Sometimes removing bottlenecks comes with a hard cost. You have to pay for a tool or pay for someone to help you. The solution has to fit within your budget.

But there’s another approach that’s free. Let stuff go. You can’t do everything. When you audit your week, figure out whether anything can be safely removed altogether. Not automated or passed off to another person. Just completely dropped. Sometimes the most effective fix for bottlenecks is realizing that a task wasn’t necessary in the first place.

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