A Founder's Key Function is to Do the Balancing Act Business success is determined more by smart work rather than hard work
By Roopa Venkat
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Balancing a founder's roles and managing multiple businesses can be exciting and challenging at the same time. Juggling between the functions, prioritizing, and seeing your ideas through to their logical conclusions are both an art and a science. As complex as it may sound, there are many who don many hats and actually enjoy the rush and are rearing to take on more.
So how do serial entrepreneurs do what they do and what drives their success? How do they strike a balance to ensure the best interests of all their companies that they are managing?
"You Are Only As Good As Your Team"
Key to balancing multiple roles and businesses is nurturing a great top team that shares your vision, mission and plan, aligns with the company's day-to-day functioning, has a growth mindset and propels growth. On the contrary a dysfunctional team can be disastrous. Having a reliable Top Team allows you to focus on strategy, planning and promotes business sustainability.
"You Can Do Anything but not Everything"
Delegation is fundamental to running any business smoothly. While managing multiple businesses, it is important to ensure that you delegate tasks that don't need your direct involvement, else it can be an impediment to your workflow and team's functioning. Delegation will actually do your business a world of good by developing and preparing a second line of managers within your business while allowing you time to focus on your multiple businesses.
"If You Want Time, You Must Make it"
Professionals managing multiple businesses should master the art of managing their time efficiently. Despite be pulled into different directions, there has to be a clear focus, organization and prioritizing so that time spent will convert into actions for success.
"We Don't Grow When Things are Easy. We Grow When we Face Challenges"
This statement rings true for every business owner. Challenges will present themselves in different forms in all your businesses irrespective of whether it's an old business or a new one. As daunting as they may seem, problems become more manageable when they are looked at with the right perspective, and broken down to find manageable solutions. Create simple systems and workflows that can be replicated across your businesses. It's usually despite, or because of the challenges that are thrown our way that we achieve great things.
"You Can't do a Good Job if Your Job is All you Do"
As clichéd as it may sound, business success is determined more by smart work rather than hard work. Work-life balance is underrated concept. While running multiple businesses, it is essential to work towards maximizing productivity, efficiency, and innovation. Downtimes are essential to manage multifaceted roles and the pressures of multiple businesses.
So go ahead, explore the inner juggler in you and enjoy the journey.