When Is It Time to Stop Doing It Yourself?

There is a sentence that gets a lot of business owners into trouble: “It’s just easier if I do it myself.” 

And, to be fair, sometimes it is. When you’re just starting a business, you don’t have much choice. You answer the phone, send the invoices, make the sales calls, deal with the vendors, fix the problem, clean up the mess and, at some point, probably figure out why the printer has decided that today is the day it will finally win. 

That’s part of building a business. You do what needs to be done because somebody has to do it, and that somebody is usually you. 

The problem comes when the business grows, but the owner’s job doesn’t change.   

You keep doing the same things you did when you had five customers, even though you now have fifty. You keep approving every little decision. You keep answering every question. You keep jumping in whenever something goes wrong. You tell yourself that you’re just staying involved, when in reality, you may have become the person standing in the middle of the hallway that everybody has to walk around. 

Eventually, you become the bottleneck. And that’s when “I’ll just do it myself” stops being a productivity strategy and starts becoming a growth problem. 

BUT this isn’t only about an owner mindset.  This “we are the bottleneck” issue can also apply to your whole business.  Recently, we were talking to a customer who was reflecting on their experience before we showed up.  They recalled trying to solve every IT problem themselves, and only realizing afterwards that: 

• They didn’t know what they didn’t know (in this case, about IT and cybersecurity) 

• They constantly chased the chaos down, distracting their focus from their own operations 

• Once they got out of the “we do it ourselves,” they reduced their business risk and re-focused that stolen attention back on their own customers 

The Problem With Doing Everything

Business owners are often very good at what they do. That’s probably one of the reasons they became business owners in the first place. You know the customers. You know the business. You know how the work should be done. You know which vendors to call and which ones to avoid. You can probably do many things faster than anyone else on your team. 

But there is a difference between being able to do something and being the person who has to do it. If every customer question comes to you, you’re the customer service department. If every estimate has to be approved by you, you’re the sales department. If every employee question comes to you, you’re the HR department. If every technology problem comes to you, congratulations, you’ve apparently been promoted to IT director. 

And if every important decision has to wait for you, you’re not just running the business. You are the business’s bottleneck. 

OR, again, the business itself becomes its own bottleneck as it tries to internally handle bookkeeping, payroll, legal/contracts, marketing, etc. Now, to be clear, you also have to consider the cost of outsourcing those efforts.  Maybe it’s genuinely not worth delegating or paying someone else right now for some of those tasks.  Maybe it’s not ever worth it in other cases.  But if you can get rid of non-essential tasks or pay someone else to do them more efficiently, you’ve busted up one of your business bottlenecks. 

“But Nobody Can Do It Like I/We Can”

This is where things get uncomfortable. 

Sometimes you’re right. Someone you hire probably won’t do something exactly the way you do it, at least not at first. They may take longer. They may make a mistake. They may ask a question that you answered three weeks ago and are absolutely certain you remember answering. 

If your response is to take the work back every time that happens, however, you’ve taught that employee an important lesson: Don’t make decisions. Just wait for the owner. 

That isn’t delegation. That’s outsourcing the work while keeping all of the responsibility. Real delegation requires something more difficult: giving someone enough authority to actually own the task. 

That doesn’t mean abandoning quality control. It means establishing what “good” looks like, giving someone the tools and information they need, and allowing them to make reasonable decisions without running every little thing back up the ladder. 

In other words, you don’t just delegate the task. You delegate responsibility for the outcome. 

Start With the Routine Things

One useful exercise is to pay attention to the little questions you get during a normal week, OR to those routine tasks that consume much of your time. Again, not the big questions but the little questions and routine tasks. 

If you are answering the same questions over and over, or doing the same routine duties over and over, you have found something worth fixing. 

Maybe the answer needs to be documented. Maybe someone needs to be trained. Maybe a decision needs to be assigned to someone else. Maybe the process itself needs to change.  Maybe you need to hire a third party who can handle these tasks more efficiently than your team.   

And sometimes the answer really does need to remain with you. Not every decision should be delegated. Some decisions require the owner’s judgment, relationships or authority.   

The point isn’t to get yourself out of every decision. It’s to figure out which decisions actually need you. 

So, When Is It Time to Stop Doing It Yourself?

There isn’t a magic number of employees or customers that tells you when to delegate. Instead, look for the symptoms. 

It may be time when: 

• You are routinely spending time on tasks someone else (on your own team or an outside party) could reasonably and efficiently handle. 

• Employees constantly wait for you before making decisions. 

• You are turning down profitable work because you don’t have the capacity. 

• You are distracted from your own “What We Do” by duties someone else is expert in and could be paid to do for you. 

• Important business development keeps getting pushed aside by day-to-day problems. 

• You are the only person who knows how important processes work. 

• Customers increasingly need you personally to solve routine issues. 

• You can’t take a vacation without your phone becoming the company’s emergency hotline. 

The Goal Isn’t to Do Everything Yourself

There is nothing wrong with doing things yourself. In fact, that willingness to roll up your sleeves is probably part of what helped you build the business in the first place. The problem is when doing it yourself becomes the default answer, even after the business has changed. 

As your business grows, your time, your employees’ time, and your attention become valuable resources. Spending those resources on things that someone else can do more efficiently (whether that is another employee, a specialized partner, a piece of technology, or simply a better process) can keep your business from doing the things it actually needs to do. 

The goal isn’t to outsource everything or make yourself unnecessary. It’s to periodically step back and ask a pretty simple question: “Is this really something we need to be doing ourselves?” 

Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes the answer will be no. And sometimes the answer will be, “Why in the world are we still doing this?” 

Those are all useful answers. The important thing is to keep asking the question, because sometimes the biggest thing standing between your business and its next level of growth is the business itself.