How to Use The Power of Leverage in Your Business

What does it mean to use the Power of Leverage in business?

Leverage is such an important concept when it comes to running your business. It’s all about the ability to leverage other people’s resources such as time, effort and money, to really scale your business growth. This is crucial if you are still stuck in the Self-Employed phase of running a business, where you are the solopreneur or one-man show in the business. This solopreneur phase should be a temporary one in your business life cycle, as it isn’t scalable.

So how do you transition from solopreneur to business owner?

1. Outsourcing

Not all work needs to be done by you alone. As a solopreneur, we tend to take up ALL tasks of the business, including the administrative parts like accounting, invoicing, chasing and following up with clients and so on. But as we all have limited time, the best is to focus on the 20% of tasks that actually make you the money –prospecting and sales. As this is the most lucrative income-producing activity, it make sense to concentrate on this. If this is not an option, you can also hire a salesperson, agent or have others bring you the referral leads through some kind of commission structure. Likewise, you can also outsource the actual work itself to freelancers and virtual assistants who will focus on execution for you. This frees up your time and you have the added bonus of hiring SMART people who could possibly do a better job at execution than you. You do not need to know everything or do everything, but act as an orchestator to ensure that the whole process runs smoothly. Of course, if there are certain areas that you enjoy doing, you can continue doing those tasks and outsource the rest. The beauty is that you have the flexibility to leverage others as and where you see fit and this will be different for all businesses.

2. Hiring an in-house team

Another way to leverage other people’s resources is by hiring an in-house team for your business. This means to grow your business from a one-man show to an actual business with headcount. This could be another stage in your business as you incorporate your freelance contractors or find people that you’ve partnered with before to join you. The advantage of hiring an in-house team is that you have greater control and cohesion between the team by building up a great work culture and environment for your growing business. With greater focus, your team will be on the same page when it comes to work. One great example of how having a team can use the power of leverage is through network marketing. Network marketing business owners grow teams of independent business partners who work for themselves but also contribute to overall team growth through duplication of similar tasks throughout the team. Using the same system of prospecting, recruiting and selling, network marketing rewards each business owner through commissions that flow up to the whole team.

3. Scaling through automation:

Another way to find leverage as a solopreneur is to use online tools to automate and drive traffic, so you reach out to one-to-many versus one-to-one. Instead of prospecting or taking one-on-one meetings with each lead, you can use tools like booking calendars, webinars and funnels to automate your sales process and drive more traffic to them. Using a sales funnel can automate your sales message, so that you create it once and it acts as a 24/7 virtual salesperson for your business. You can then drive sustained traffic to it via Search Engine Optimisation, organic prospecting or paid advertising. The more you automate, the more you can start letting go of parts of your work.

The steps to transition:

1. Have a system or process

A business is about having systems or processes in place that are duplicatable, so that anyone who needs to replicate it can do so. Once stable, you can create a workflow process that outlines the tasks and procedures in your business that your team needs to have and document this.

2. Teach and train others

Once you have documentation, you can then train others to take over certain aspects of your work tasks. Be sure to outline all the details, goals and Key Performance Indicators so that your new hire/contractor knows exactly what is expected.

3. Have them duplicate it

After training your staff, you can then start to step away and let them handle the task on hand by themselves. While you may need to monitor them for a little while, they should be competent enough to complete the task correctly if trained well. Of course, it also depends on who you hire, so make sure to be clear about this during the process. Keep repeating this with other tasks in the business and see how much you can step away from your business. Remember, you are in control of your business, so make it easy for yourself and leverage others where you need help with!