Running a small business means wearing a lot of hats.
Some you choose to wear. Others seem to find their way onto your head without you really noticing.
Answering customer questions, checking invoices, ordering supplies, preparing reports and making decisions that nobody else is quite sure they're allowed to make. Individually, these things might not take very long, but together they can take up a surprising amount of your time and attention.
And after a while, nobody quite remembers why they all need to be done by you.
Owning the outcome doesn't mean doing all the work
When you're building a business, it's natural to take on almost everything yourself. You know how things work, you understand your customers and you've probably learned a few expensive lessons along the way. Often, doing something yourself feels quicker and easier than explaining it to someone else or setting up a different way of working.
But there's a useful distinction I've often drawn on in my leadership experience: the difference between accountability and responsibility.
Accountability is about owning the outcome. Responsibility is about doing the work.
As a business owner, there are plenty of things you'll want to remain accountable for, whether that's customer satisfaction, managing costs or maintaining quality. But that doesn't necessarily mean you need to personally perform every task involved.
And even if you work alone, it's worth questioning how much of that work genuinely requires your attention, rather than something simpler you could put in place.
The opportunity isn't necessarily to hand over an entire job. It's to keep ownership of what matters while reducing how much of the everyday doing depends on you.
Take something as simple as ordering supplies
Imagine you run a small café. Every week, you check what's running low, work out what needs ordering, contact your suppliers and make sure everything arrives. You've always done it, you know what the café needs and you don't want to risk running out of something important.
That's perfectly reasonable, but it's also worth asking whether every part of that process still needs your involvement.
You might discover that you're regularly ordering products that hardly get used, or spending time checking stock levels that rarely change. Perhaps a simple reorder list would save you from working everything out from scratch each week, or your existing supplier already offers repeat ordering that you've never had reason to explore.
If you have someone helping in the business, they might be able to prepare routine orders while you continue to review anything unusual or expensive. If you're working alone, those same small changes can still reduce the amount of time you spend on the task.
You still own the outcome: having the right supplies available, at the right cost, when they're needed. But that doesn't mean you personally need to check every shelf, prepare every order or repeat the same decisions every week.
And importantly, you haven't had to introduce an expensive new system or completely redesign how the business operates.
Your 10-minute One Less Hat Challenge
This week, try identifying one recurring task that you've become accustomed to handling yourself. It doesn't need to be the biggest problem in your business, just something that comes around regularly and takes a little more of your time or attention than you'd like.
Take ten minutes to consider four questions:
What keeps coming back to me? Pick one specific task or responsibility rather than an entire area of your business.
Does all of it genuinely need doing? Think about whether any steps could be removed or simplified.
What do I need to remain accountable for, and what could happen without me doing it personally? Think about the outcome you need to protect and where your involvement genuinely adds value.
What's one small change I could test next time? It might be a checklist, a clearer decision rule, a saved response or simply making better use of something you already have.
If you're working on your own, reducing the doing might mean eliminating unnecessary steps, simplifying decisions or using existing tools more effectively rather than handing work to someone else.
The aim isn't to solve everything in ten minutes. It's to identify one manageable change that you can try the next time the task comes around, then see whether it genuinely makes things easier.
One less hat, one small step
Some responsibilities will always need your involvement, and making a change can initially take longer than carrying on with the familiar approach. But if a little effort now makes something easier the next ten or twenty times you do it, that's worth considering.
The next time something lands back on your desk, ask yourself: does this really need to be me?
You might be surprised how often the answer is no.
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Published from Sydney, Australia by Rob Edgar, trading as eliminAIt Process Partners. Questions or feedback? Reply to this email or contact [email protected].
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