Take yourself out of your services business and grow it

If you’re running a law firm, an accounting firm, a consultancy or virtually any other type of service business, you will know the importance of time management.

In most services business – particularly start-ups – everyone wants to deal with the head of the company. After all, you’re the expert and the reason they want to do business with you and not the other company down the road.

But the problem with this model is time – there are only so many hours in the day and therefore your growth can be retarded.

The key then is to find ways to take yourself out of the business – that is, put systems, processes and most importantly products in place to ensure that even if you are not at every client meeting personally, your service levels don’t change and you can get on with the task of growing.

There are number of ways to do this, including:

• Bring in a partner who is also an expert and can share the load with clients.
• Hire great staff who can deal with clients, although it may take some time for you and your clients to get used to this.
• Turn some services into products. Can anything you do be sold as a kit, template or educational product? If so, you can commoditise your expertise.
• If your brand name and business model strong enough that it could be franchised or licensed?

These are a few quick ideas but the key is that you need to give yourself time to work on the business, not just in it.

Get it done – today!