5 Steps To Grow Your Self-Employed Business Beyond You

Contrary to popular beliefs, the first step towards growing your self-employed business beyond yourself is not to hire people.

It may seem logical, but growing your self-employment goes beyond just posting a job advert and conducting a few interviews to select the perfect people.

It takes a lot more.

But no worries, this article will guide you through everything you need to grow your self-employed business beyond you.

1. Understand How You’re Spending Time

To effectively grow your self-employed business beyond yourself, one of the first things you should do is evaluate how you are currently spending your time.

Many self-employed people focus most of their work hours on implementing deliverables for clients.

For instance, a graphic design freelancer might find out that most of her time is spent creating logos or designing other graphic assets for clients. And less time on other tasks that are critical to growing the business.

Hence, the best way to grow your self-employment beyond you is to understand how you’re spending your time and then identify the gaps and skills your business needs to grow beyond you.

2. Document Your Processes

Business process documentation is one of the boring tasks self-employed people have to carry out they mostly ignore alongside recording their transactions, etc.

If you desire for your venture to no longer depend on you 100%, then you have to start keeping records and documenting your business process.

And it’s important because by documenting your processes, you make it easier for someone else to replicate other than yourself with high accuracy.

This essentially means that that individual would need less of your supervision or constant approval to do a superb job.

Think of business process documentation like having a recipe that details the exact ingredients and steps anyone needs to prepare a delicacy.

The chef that created that recipe might be ill, on a holiday in a remote village somewhere or even dead, but a stranger would still be able to replicate that same meal without him.

3. Build a business plan

For a business to grow beyond you, you have to place structures in place that supports it. Unfortunately, many self-employed businesses lack such structure – the only structure available is the self-employed owner, which often leads to stress, frustration and burn-out.

To avoid all that, you need to run your business properly – so it does not revolve around you.

One helpful tool to do this is a business plan.

A business plan is essential because it helps you think about other aspects that are required for the business to run smoothly without you.

It helps you plan, identify the various skills that are needed to achieve your business’s mission, and goals.

Apart from the fact that it is a tool that can be used to raise money from investors, a business plan is an essential internal guide that measures how well your business is doing and helps you be deliberate about developing strategies to foster growth.

4. Create Systems

A business system can be as simple as a checklist that you give to an employee as a standard way of performing a specific task.

A system is a set of principles, practices and procedures that are applied to specific activities to achieve a particular goal.

As we mentioned above, to create systems or standard operating procedures, you must leverage your process documentation to connect all the intricate parts, tools, and steps required to complete business tasks.

To grow your self-employed business beyond you, you need to create a couple of systems, no matter how simple.

You could, for instance, create a sales system for your business that itemizes the tools or software your salespeople would use, sales scripts and checklists for converting prospects to customers, etc.

5. Hire The Right People

All these previous steps make it easy to hire the right people for your self-employed business.

At this point, you should already understand your strengths and weaknesses, as well as the skill gaps you need to fill to grow and scale your business.

All you have to do is look for the right people. But this is not so easy – you have to understand where you can find them and create an advert that would is attractive to them, you also have to develop a way to sieve through the tons of applications you will likely receive and set the right person not just based on skill-fit but cultural and vision fit.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth the effort.

What are you doing to grow your self-employed business?

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