If you’re a business owner, you know the struggle. You want to continue building your business, but the nitty-gritty and daily tasks always get in the way. Payroll, marketing, client tracking – these things are all vital parts of your business, but they take away time that you could spend building relationships and growing your business. Not to mention, when you spend as much time as you do working IN your business, it can be challenging to see it from a different perspective. Here are some signs that you should start outsourcing tasks in your business.

1.) You’re heading towards burnout.

You know the feeling. You’re run down; actually, it’s more than that. You’re exhausted. You used to be so excited to get to work in the morning. Now the idea of looking at your to-do list makes you want to hide in bed.

You snap at your dog for asking to go outside because you’re trying to muster up the spirit to get ready.

You skip breakfast because your stomach is so anxious the idea of eating makes you nauseated.

Don’t let it get there. If your business is ruling your life so that it is getting in the way of your mental and physical health, you need help to take action. It may be hard at first when that seems like just one more thing you have to do, but learning how to streamline, delegate appropriately, and outsource will help you regain control of your life and make you a better business owner in the long-run.

2.) You know things aren’t going smoothly, but you don’t know how to fix them.

When you spend as much time as you do working inside your business, it can be hard to take a step back and see what is working and what is not. Often, business owners put together shortcuts and quick-fixes to get things done “until they can hire someone else to figure it out,” and those add up quickly. 

By the time your business has taken off, those quick fixes quickly become bottlenecks and systemic annoyances.

Hiring someone to take a look at your systems, processes, and even marketing with a fresh pair of eyes can help flesh out what is clogging the pipeline and where you are missing the mark. Then, you can take action to repair those blockages and help your processes flow more smoothly.

3.) Things are falling through the cracks.

You ever run across that email from six months ago where a customer asked how much your services cost? And then see you never responded?

It happens to everyone. But if you find things like that are happening more and more frequently in your business, it is time to start implementing some checks and balances to make sure things are getting done.

Not only will this help your customers have more trust in you and your business, but it will also help with that nagging voice in the back of your head telling you that you must have forgotten something.

4.) Your Clients or Customers are getting frustrated.

The top two common reasons I run across frustrated customers when helping small businesses:

Reason 1: Your customer service is lacking. Whether those questions/complaints are falling through the cracks (reread reason #3), or your customers do not hear from you enough to maintain a relationship – you need to improve your customer experience. You should have a plan for every step that a customer goes through in your business. This plan, with actionable follow-through, will keep you from missing out on opportunities to love on your customers more.

Reason 2: You aren’t listening. This reason gets a little deeper into your customer’s psychology and what they actually need or expect from your brand. If you aren’t listening and are just guessing what they need from you, you may deliver messaging or services that don’t fit your dream customers’ pain points. When that happens, nobody wins.

5.) You don’t have time to do the part of the business that made you want to start it.

Think back to the moment, day, year, whatever that you decided to start your business. Do you know what planted the seed that made you start thinking, “hmm, maybe I should do ______” or maybe “I want to help _____.”

I’ll use a garden analogy. You decide one day that you want to plant some carrots because you want horses throughout the world never to have to go without carrots again. 

You believe in this idea so strongly that you go to the store, research every single thing you can about carrots and how to grow them, heck, maybe you even go to a particular school to learn how to grow carrots! Finally, you go to the store and buy the seeds. You build a beautiful garden bed, fill it with the perfect soil with a carefully calculated composition. You plant your carrot seeds and wait.

Suddenly, you start to see weeds pop up. You being frustratingly pulling each weed by hand. No way are they going to interfere with your beautiful carrots.

Then the pests come. One by one, you are pulling weeds and killing pests. You start researching all the different pests attracted to carrots and concocting special poisons and barriers to get rid of them.

But the weeds keep popping up, the pests keep swarming, and now the soil is becoming nutrient-depleted. You spend hours researching and adding unique blends of nutrients to keep your carrots thriving.

Day by day, you are doing everything you can to protect your precious carrots until one day, you take a step back and notice they have died.

You stopped watering them. You were so busy trying to protect them all by yourself that you forgot to give the carrots the most crucial thing they needed to survive.

Don’t get so bogged down in the day-to-day that you stop doing the thing that you loved. You have more support, hands, and resources available to you than ever before. So reach out, delegate, outsource. Protect your business by realizing you don’t have to do it all alone.