A profitable business is an easy endeavor to some, but to others, it’s a hurdle. Some entrepreneurs struggle with anxiety, depression, and stress because they try to scale up their firm.
But as the saying goes, “it’s not how hard you work but how smart you work on the right things.” And sometimes, figuring out the right things requires some mentorship or coaching from an expert. You need someone who’s been through the journey of entrepreneurship and has mastered simple and profitable ways to scale a business.
These three steps are the keys to a simplified and profitable business.
#1. Defining Your Company’s Queen Bee Role: The best analogy to explain the queen bee role is to look at the actual queen bee in the bee colony. The queen bee in the colony only serves the purpose of laying eggs or procreation. This task is detrimental to the survival of the colony.
The queen bee concept requires you to delegate most of your tasks to remain with the one crucial task that’s important for the survival of your firm.
How do you determine your queen bee role? You determine it by listing down all the tasks that you do in your business. If you have written ten tasks, then delegate 9 of the tasks to remain with the one task you love doing and are good at. Personal QB is different from a company QB. In the former, you consider what you do with your time and free up space. The ‘queen bee’ role requires you to develop a proper work and life balance in which you spend 80% of your time on tasks that are crucial to you.
#2. Identify the needle movers in your business / the time sucks:
A needle mover refers to those tasks that will significantly boost your enterprise. This strategy is crucial for a simplified and profitable business as it requires you to identify the most valuable activities you can take to grow your enterprise. These are activities that are proven, actionable, and convert to high ROI.
Needle movers are different from time sucks activities. The latter is self-explanatory as it refers to activities that take up too much of your time and lead to little benefit.
According to George Bryant “When we look at all the most successful things in our life… they all come from simplicity. We find a problem; We create a simple solution for that problem. Someone can commit because it’s simple, and they solve that problem; then, they go market our solution for us.”
You define the needle movers from the time-suck activities by timing yourself while you work using a 4D matrix approach. This is a strategy in which you note down the actions that you have undertaken so far and the results of those actions. This approach is slightly different from goals because it calls you to break down the results and convert them into actions.
#3. DDD (decide, delegate, delete)
Decide to delegate tasks to other members of the team so that you can free yourself from obstacles. This decision is often a challenge as most of us treat our business like our child. As such, we feel the urge to handle everything and assign the tasks we feel are minor to the other team members. But this decision makes it hard for more entrepreneurs to turn their business into a profitable venture.
You should decide which tasks to keep, delegate, or delete and you do this by purposely making a plan that maps out the roles and tasks that you will delegate to your team. You put this plan in your schedule, and you do it. Ideally, you can use Free Up/Fancy Hands to get assistants who will work on other tasks as you protect your queen bee position.
Get yourself out of the doing in your business by identifying your queen bee position. Don’t be reactive but rather, assess, document, DDD, and prioritize quality assurance. In every way, do your best to simplify, simplify, and simplify strategically.
