If you’re anything like me, your mornings generally begin as a sprint. Bookkeeping followed by a general assessment of business strategy. Several email and phone conversations to make sure any teams or projects you are involved with are in order. Document drafting in order to close some deals either in the bid or proposal stages. If you’re further anything like me, you are probably not a CPA & MBA with a double major in sales and marketing.
While we generally still respect the “renaissance man” image, it’s widely accepted that the “multi-tasker” and the “jack-of-all-trades” are well meaning ways to be highly ineffective. It remains the case, however, that many small business owners and entrepreneurs recognize the title CEO as meaning “wearer of many hats,” and this is particularly true among founders. This is certainly true for me as owner of Blue Fission, a software and technology agency. Whether or not this is a necessity or inevitability, I won’t debate. I simply want to touch on one important but easy to forget point: any number of hats all have to go on the same head.
I’m not saying to write a list of every secondary task you do and hire out for it. There is a true value to staying lean, and a very real cost to scouting, training, and on-boarding. I do, however, believe in the power of starting strategic business partnerships early on in business. This is particularly useful when a vital task in your business can best benefit from a specialist.
This means no one person on my team needs to be a content writing specialist because we’ve formed local alliances that allow us to share resources. These business partnerships prove useful when you have the option to pay for a training seminar to integrate your new invoicing solution to your eCommerce site – or pay a fraction of that to a company like ours to complete the task correctly.
Great strategic partners allow Blue Fission to stay focused on being a great technology agency, not a mediocre anything else. Form these in your business so you can get your head out of those hats and into the game.