Women Consultants, Are You Clear On Your Business Role?
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When you first start your consulting business, you wear all the hats. You’re the boss, AND the person delivering your service. You find yourself sitting up late working on your sales and marketing – and trying to do your accounts. You’re probably dealing with IT issues as well.
There is a season where that works fine, but before very long, it becomes a real issue. Things start to slide. Projects take longer to complete. You are running to catch up. And it’s stressful putting this much of yourself into your consulting business every day.
If you are taking on more than it is possible to achieve every day or every week, you will find it impossible. And you will feel like you are failing at life.
But you’re not failing. You just haven’t worked out your parameters.
Once you have a regular flow of work coming in, it’s really important that you make a regular habit of evaluating your role in your business.
List out all the things you’re currently doing. I like to do this on Post-It notes. Then you get a big sheet of paper, divide it into sections, and use the Post-Its to decide what you will be keeping hold of and what needs to be passed to other team members, whether those are people you already have onboard or you need to hire.
Your role in your business can look like whatever you want it to. We can have all kinds of limiting beliefs about what we need to do in our business. You might need to work on your mindset to help you let go of tasks you don’t enjoy or allow yourself to invest in outsourcing and growing a team.
Remember, you’re the boss of your business and you can run it however you choose. It might be that you want to take on a CEO role. Perhaps you want to be the managing consultant and delegate parts of the strategic work to other senior-level roles.
Ask yourself:
● How much control do you want over the business?
● How much delivery do you want to focus on?
● Do you like operations?
● Do you like planning?
● If you have other consultants in your team, do you like managing people?
You can create whatever structure feels right for your business. The key thing is being honest with yourself about who you are as a person and what role you want to have.
Something I hear women say a lot is that they would like to work part-time hours. And that might be because of childcare responsibilities, but equally, some women just want to take life at a slower pace and this is also something that you need to factor in when you’re evaluating your role and designing the blueprint for a team in your business.
How present do you want to be in the business day to day?
How much do you want to work?
Once you have worked out the tasks and responsibilities that you really do need to keep hold of, you can then make a strategic plan for the best way to handle the aspects of your current role that could and should be done by someone else.
It could even be that certain tasks can be automated using the right tools in your business.
This is an area you should reflect on every six months in your business at least, and evaluate whether you’re using your time in the best way possible in terms of what the business needs and what you want your life to be like.
Free Report – The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Consulting Business
I’ve created a free PDF report called The Six Elements of a Seven Figure Business. It’s my most popular free resource and in it I outline the 6 areas of unscaled businesses that need to change in order to move past being ‘booked up and burned out’ and shifting into that higher gear that gets you cruising again.
It’s the framework that helps consultant women like you find their feet and get back to leading the business, rather than being buried in client work and back-end business operations.
Thanks for reading! I’d love to hear your feedback and future topics you’d like me to feature. You may also enjoy The Seven Figure Consultant Podcast, the show that takes you from booked up and burned out in your consulting business to THRIVING as the CEO of your 7 figure enterprise.