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Many of the conveniences in the world that you and I take for granted were intended by people just like us. Most of our old problems are now trivial to solve due to the solutions created by pervious generations of human beings. The downside to all this innovation is that as things get easier, people get lazy. Because we do not have to come up with solutions to daily treats to our existence anymore we do not. And as a result we forget how ingenious humans can be. To start a business, you must tap back into this natural problem solving ability. You need to be smarter than the average entrepreneur.
Many have this idea that when they are trying to build something from scratch they can just get everyone else to do the work. Scale up, grow fast hire help to keep up. That is their motto. But this not the best approach for a number of reasons. A lot of business owners swear by this approach as the fastest route to growing a business. Want more money? Hire more people. That is a nice idea in theory but the reality of getting another person to help you in you in your business in way more complicated.
There are at least two problems with each an approach. First of all, nothing is more expensive than a bad hire. It may be true that hiring can be one of the fastest ways to grow your company that is, when it the right people. But it is also the fastest way to go bankrupts. Second outsourcing every aspect of your business means not knowing that part of the business yourself. What happens when something in your business breaks and you do not know how to fix it? You do not have to build your business from scratch but you should be involved in the process, especially early on.
As an owner your job is to find ways to maximize the resources you have, the most valuable of which is your time. It can be smart to purchase people’s time and other resources and sell them for higher price. You cannot outsource everything at least not at first. This should be done with great care so that you are sure to do it well. Outsourcing everything is quick way to get into trouble in business, because one you give it away, this is to be hard to get back.
No wonder so many small business fail. Hiring is not your only options, nor is just outsourcing. Instead of building a big team or giving all your work to contractors who would not care much as you do, focus on creating automated systems.
Whenever you can use robots or computers to do a better job than a human can, it is worth it. That is not to say, you should not or would not work with humans, it just means you should only hire hem for the jobs they should be doing. If you can easily document a task or process then find a piece of software to atomically do it without question, complaint or asking for a raise. That is the best way to solve that problem.
