Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Learning to Give Responsibilities to Others

Being a (very) small business owner, I’ve experienced a trend over and over again that never seems to get easier: giving up responsibilities, duties, and decision making to employees.

When we started eReplacementParts.com every responsibility fell directly on the owner’s shoulders. We were in charge of building the site, writing all the content, taking all the orders, and shipping all the tool parts. Just from talking to other small business owners I know, it seems that lots of companies start this way. Perhaps yours did as well. Maybe it still operates that way.

For us right now, growth is our focus. We work hard to sell as many parts as we can and not be content with simply maintaining sales levels. As we grow, we need more people to make the company work and that means I have to give some, and then eventually most, of my responsibilities to others. To be honest, it’s tough to let go. Now we have entire departments dedicated to shipping our packages, taking customer phone calls, and building the website. When I walk through our building, I pass many people and their jobs used to be my job. I took a lot of pride in doing those jobs and it’s hard to really let go and trust that my employees will handle things as well as I did. And while they’re not clones of me, they’re able to handle their individual responsibilities just as well as I can and they’re far more specialized.

I think giving up responsibility is a tough thing for any business owner. For some small companies, the goal is to maintain size and perhaps the owner prefers to retain a large share of the load. That’s fine, but I believe that a small business will remain a small business as long as the owner is the primary worker. Potential is limited. If the goal is to grow, a business owner must give up some responsibilities to employees so that he/she can focus more on the company itself.

Posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:51 am and is filed under Uncategorized, eReplacement Parts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.