When You Have to Wear a Lot (ALL) of the Hats!

When you’re an entrepreneur the question of who we spend our time with and who we delegate tasks to is crucial. We have all experienced working with a challenging or negative coworker, employee, or vendor. It makes the experience pretty miserable and a LOT harder than it needs to be. If you’re an entrepreneur, carefully choosing with whom you work and collaborate becomes even more crucial — there isn’t “extra” people to create a buffer zone because you’re wearing a LOT (all?!) of the business hats.

As entrepreneurs, we generally start out wearing a whole lotta hats because most of us begin with budgets too small to hire out all the marketing- and systems-building help we need. We juggle a LOT of roles: we start with what’s absolutely necessary, prioritize the rest, and tackle that list as we can.

As we begin to look at creating our immediate and extended entrepreneurial support team members, it behooves us to do so consciously. You’ve defined your ideal client, now you need to define what it means to be the right vendor of accounting, writing, marketing, design, systems creation, etc. Not everyone will be the right one to work with you.

Deciding Who Belongs On Your Entrepreneurial Support Team

Start by asking yourself some questions:

• What do I need most from this writer, designer, accountant, etc.?
• Does this vendor understand my business and my unique take on it?
• How do I like to work with support people and businesses? Does this particular vendor provide a way that is compatible with my preference?
• Does the vendor have a history of delivering high-value and quality service to happy customers/clients?
• Does the vendor have clients with comparable business needs to mine?

These questions can get you started as you begin to search for those support people. Referrals from colleagues and friends are a great way to begin to identify possible business collaborators. Make sure you have a good conversation and outline clear expectations before agreeing to anything. And, of course, getting it all in writing is a great idea!

Your Support Team is Your Community

When you build the right entrepreneurial support team, you’re building a community. And this is a community you want to spend quality time developing. You also must accept that it might take a couple tries to find the right person. If you find people who support you, challenge you to greater things, and with whom you find working FUN, you’ll enjoy your business more. Because at the end of the day, the business that engages you and has you waking up excited to get to work has a lot more chance of being successful.

I’d love to hear your experiences in finding and building your supportive team and community! And as always, I’m here as a resource for YOU! If you have questions about getting some marketing support for your business, use my online calendar and let’s schedule some time to talk!

Cheers,
Deb