Growing your business isn’t a mystery. More outreach, more follow-ups, more marketing, more training. You probably already know what you should be doing more of.
Even worse, you probably are thinking about paying a lot of money for a consultant to come in for a 1 day workshop to tell you things that you already know. Quoting Good Will Hunting: “You dropped $150,000 on a f***ing education you could have got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library”.
The problem is you’re not doing what you need to.
That’s not a discipline issue. It’s a math problem. You only have so many hours. If you want to do more of one thing, something else has to give. Most people resist that trade-off, so they end up doing everything halfway instead of doing the important things well.
Know What Actually Drives Your Numbers
Before you change how you spend your time, you have to know which activities actually move your business in a positive way – SPECIFICALLY.
For a small business, it might be the number of outbound calls made each week, or your close rate on proposals. For a hospice, it might be how often you’re in contact with your referral sources, or where your average daily census is trending. For a nonprofit, it could be major donor retention or whether your grants are being renewed.
These things show up in your financials. Pull the numbers. If you’re not sure which variables move the needle — that’s the first thing to fix.
Doing More of One Thing Means Something Else Has to Slide
Once you know what matters most, you have to decide what’s going to get less of your time.
If you’re going to spend more time on sales — outreach, follow-ups, building relationships — those hours have to come from somewhere. You can’t create more time. So something is going to get less attention.
Maybe you’re slower to respond to internal emails. Maybe a report that used to go out weekly now goes monthly. Maybe you stop attending a meeting you’ve always attended but never needed to.
That’s okay – and also, a temporary dip in one area is worth real progress in another. You’re not abandoning it. You’re just not doing it right now.
Delegate, Train, and Then Get Out of the Way
If you have people, use them.
Train someone to handle the thing you’re trying to step back from. Document the process. Set the expectations. Then let them do it.
That last part is where most owners fall apart. They train someone and then hover — which defeats the whole point. If you’ve handed something off but you’re still the one holding it, you haven’t handed it off.
They won’t do it exactly the way you would. Probably not at first. But it’ll get done, and that’s what matters while you’re focusing somewhere else. Another quote for this blog post coming from Alex Hermozi: “80% done by someone on your team is 100% awesome”.
What If You Don’t Have Anyone to Hand Off To?
Then you might just have to be okay with doing less in some areas for a while.
The bookkeeping gets done monthly instead of weekly. The newsletter goes out when it goes out. The website doesn’t get touched.
That’s not failure. That’s making a choice.
The mistake is thinking everything has to stay at 100% while you’re also trying to grow. It doesn’t. Circle back to it when the season changes — and it will.
Your Business Goes Through Seasons
What you focus on should change over time. That’s normal.
A hospice that just brought on a new Palliative Care service line is in a completely different place than one that’s been at the same census for three years. A nonprofit that just lost its biggest grant is not in the same season as one that just closed a capital campaign. A business that hired its first employee needs different focus than one that’s been a lean operation for a decade.
The goal isn’t to spread yourself evenly across everything. It’s to know which season you’re in and put your time where it counts.
Three Questions Worth Answering
If you’re not sure where to start:
- What two or three things, if you did more of them, would have the biggest impact on your revenue or mission?
- What’s taking up your time right now that could be delegated, reduced, or temporarily set aside?
- Do you actually know which financial variables move when you do those things — and which ones don’t?
If you can answer those, you have a direction. If you can’t, that’s where to start.
Want to Look at the Numbers Together?
This is the kind of conversation we have with small businesses, hospices, and nonprofits pretty regularly. It usually starts with a look at the financials, a few questions, and then something surfaces that the owner didn’t realize was connected.
No pitch. Just a conversation.