Desperate Of Brisbane

I totally sympathise with your predicament.

However I think you could benefit from my personal experience. So thought I may share it with you.

First perspective I have been in my current industry for 28 years, worked in four countries all in the same industry, received overseas training, received one on one training from select individuals. Where was I going to find another me? I wasn’t.

However a few years ago I started to question everything we did as an industry and this by default included everything I did. From this I developed another new service product. This was very successful and I was in danger of being swamped. In looking at the situation I saw no way out but to hire staff, trouble is where was I going to find any?

My process was a long and painful one, but this is what I had to go through.

This confluence of events forced me to examine everything I was doing. I immediately outsourced some of the functions and hired a university student one day a week to look after administration functions. This freed up 8 hours for me a week immediate improvement for matching and paperwork. I still need to spend some time on the more messy stuff sorting it out but this is easily checked and quantifiable, and now twelve months on my uni student is sorting most of this for me. The second thing I did was I hired a bloke to do my (new) service run and showed him how to prepare the jobs for a week, schedule the work and so on. Yes this took time but now 9 months on this has freed up 60% of my time. The next thing I did was hired a new person to look after my old maintenance runs. This has proven to be an excellent move as maintenance has now grown and become actually more reliable as he is less likely to forget things than I was when I was doing everything. The effect of this was to free up 30% of my time. This left me holding construction works only. Construction works have improved (well until the crash anyway), and even now is picking up more jobs.

Now I do not want to create the illusion this was all beer and skittles or is now. It isn’t. However profit has improved, and there are now three people looking for new work not just one. Sure the new staff are only doing part of the job I was doing but they are doing it and they are staff. You can’t honestly expect all staff to have the passion you have for your business. It was hard and continues to throw up the odd gotcha I didn’t expect or plan for, however it is so much better than it was and sometime in the next year I expect that I might finally achieve a little freedom and peace rather than slave to the business constantly.