Do you ever feel like there are not enough hours in the day to get everything you need to get done? Maybe you decide to hire an assistant, thinking that will solve all of your problems! But now you have a bigger problem. Now you have to give your assistants tasks and feedback and now you have more on your plate. If you have ever found yourself in this position, you have been the bottleneck in your business. Today I’m going to unpack a few ways to untangle this web and help create a more seamless experience for you and your team.

Today’s topic is near and dear to my heart because I have been guilty of being the bottleneck SO many times in my businesses.

For my food blog, I have an in person assistant who comes over to help me on shoot days and we have a running joke about how we always start out on the same page but somewhere during the day one of us gets behind the other. Then we play tag team with me having too many finished dishes to shoot and her having too many ingredients to prep or too many dishes to wash. It happens every single time no matter how much planning we do, and I think this is just the nature of business and this is the nature of having too many things on your plate, and that’s what it means to be a bottleneck.

I actually looked up the definition of a bottle neck, which is a narrow section of road or a junction that impedes traffic flow. So if you think of a glass bottle obviously there’s a part of the bottle that is more narrow than the rest, and that more narrow part is where we often find ourselves as entrepreneurs because our plates are too full or we have too many tasks on our list and delegation can be a challenge for us.

Delegation is a muscle that we really have to build if we want to see our businesses grow, and I truly believe that if you want to do more with your food blog without sacrificing your work-life balance you have to be able to move past being the bottleneck in your business.

When you have an assistant or any team in your business, it’s super important to off load things to them and help them to have their OWN tasks, not always have to be delegating. But there will always be things you as the business owner will have to be an active participant in.

And doing it all yourself isn’t a solution to being the bottleneck. You can still very much be the bottleneck even with a party of 1.

Examples:

• filming reels
• taking photos for blog posts
• reviewing social media captions
• reviewing email copy
• approving website changes
• etc

So how do we prevent ourselves from being the bottleneck?

Give ownership not delegation.

What can your team member own so you don’t always have to be checking it? Takes time, but 100% worth it.

Create systems around your bottlenecks

An example of this for me is email marketing.

If I know when I can expect to have drafts, I can schedule in my time to work on them

Some systems you might develop:

• around communication – Slack, Asana, text, etc.
• deadlines
• SOPs

Rely on task management systems

If you area struggling to maintain a task management system, it may be a good time to consider using a program like Trello, Asana or Notion to help you get organized. The trick is to be consistent with the standard and system around how you assign tasks.

Streamline your plan and goals

It can be really helpful to start streamlining what your goal for this quarter or this year is. If you know where your focus is, it is really going to help you to make sure that your team member or members are set up for success and know what your working towards.

Utilize other team members

This may not work if you have one virtual assistant, but it could be a reason to maybe hire an assistant or somebody else to help oversee things to keep you moving forward and towards achieving your goals.

DO LESS

If you really want to stop being the bottleneck in your business you have to do less in your business. Even with good systems, there is still only so much time in the day, so what are the things that you can cut from your list? Or how can you do less but by giving ownership to your team?

Related episode:

Episode 101: The Standard and Systems Your Food Blog Needs With Jillian Dolberry

Episode 147: How to Create More Content

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