From winning new clients and romancing existing ones to dealing withgovernment red tape and buying the coffee, being an owner-manager is exhausting. There are never enough hours in the day and life is often interrupted by phone calls as you’re the one that the client wants to contact; Stress, family pressure and in some cases poor decisions or even ill-health follow. You need to spend more time working on the business and less time working in it; otherwise your business has become a job.

So how do you get the elusive work / life balance?

 

Five useful tips to get you started

There are literally hundreds of things that you can do to make your business less dependant on you but here are a few to get you started:

1. Make your office paperless or at least "less paper".
   This can be done by scanning documents and saving them in a file structure that is easy for your team to find. This will mean that there will be less calls to you about trivial issues
2. Set everyone up in your office with dual screens on their computers.
   This will make it easier for them to do their job and is an essential part of going paperless
3. Get all your business contacts on a database
   ...so that everyone in the office can find numbers for people they might need to speak to rather than keep asking you
4. Set up standard letters for correspondence
   ...that occurs regularly so that even junior members of your team can produce technical but well written letters or emails
5. Train everyone that answers the phone
   ...on what they should say and on how to interrogate callers (politely). This will save every call being put through to you!