I’ve never been particularly good at asking for help. At the outset of a project my ego often takes over and yells, “I got this!” So I proceed at once to try and figure it out on my own. What ends up happening is I get overwhelmed, procrastinate, agonize, and then eventually, in a mad dash of “if I don’t finish this I will die,” the project gets finished. It’s very stressful and it takes a lot out of me. In truth, I probably just have a crazy brain, but I wonder if some of you do this too.
Maybe you decide to create the best startup event series anybody has ever seen in Charlotte, NC, all by your lonesome. Or maybe you just think you can run your space all by yourself due to superhuman sleep depravation tolerances and binge watching Lynda.com courses.
What ends up happening when we try to do it all is we get overworked, overwhelmed, and then the sheer size of it all makes us panic. We start cutting corners, not necessarily out of laziness, but just because our brain can’t process more information. We think about quitting (and sometimes we do quit). We do everything we can to not think about our work (which usually means avoiding the work). We put the ball in other people’s courts (e.g. our partners, our investors, our members) so we don’t have to take initiative. When that person drops the ball, we think, “oh well, I guess they just didn’t want to work with us,” when in fact we set the whole thing up to fail in the first place by not having the emotional or mental capacity to to lead the initiative ourselves. In short, we end up doing the opposite of doing it all. We end up spinning our wheels and accomplishing very little.
Truthfully, it’s understandable why we don’t ask for help. It’s scary, it costs money most of the time, and we need to think about what exactly the person will do. This means we become a manager, a leader, for many of us for the first time. It’s scary. After all, if the help we bring on isn’t performing, is it our fault or theirs? Will it be more work to manage somebody than the work was in the first place?
When it comes down to it, if you’re the founder, you have to bring on help eventually in order to scale your business. This is obvious, but when you should do it?
My recommendation is to do it earlier than you think you need. No, don’t hire a full-time events manager when you’re only doing one event per week. That’s just a waste of money. But even if you’re doing one event per month, it can make sense to pay somebody as a contractor to handle even just a portion of the work for you and then grow it from there.
Start by outsourcing your lower-end tasks. For example, I don’t outsource much of the writing on Coworking Insights, at least not to most people. But I have begun outsourcing things like social media, distribution, some technical writing and preliminary research. Those things don’t need my input very much, and I’m not great at all of them. What’s more, I don’t really enjoy them.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s tremendous value in doing things yourself, in order to better understand how a thing works, but that doesn’t mean you need to keep doing it or that you need to do all of it. At the end of the day the more things you remove from or keep off your plate, the more you can focus on the work you love and the work that grows the business and brand.
