Small business owners who find creative ways to manage their current work while continuing to expand their businesses win out in the end; those who can’t eventually hit a plateau and are usually left feeling trapped by their businesses, and figuring out how to be more resourceful and innovative might be the only way to work through it.

Steering a 70-Ton Train

The first thing you generally have to accept when you find yourself at this point in your business is that it’s going to be hard to maintain complete control. Up to this point, it’s been only you, working at your own pace and your own way, so you’ve likely had a lot of control over your business and its growth. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve experienced many lulls throughout the life of your business. During those times, you had a lot more free time to plan, to market and promote your business, as well as organize your workload to suit your style and preferences.

As your business grows, however, things begin to change. It’s a quiet roar in the distance warning you that something is coming, and then all of a sudden, the 70-ton train is moving. All that marketing and promotion and hard work has started paying off, and you now have the momentum of that big lead generation train behind you. The only problem is that you haven’t built the tracks, and now it’s hard to steer.

You’ll have to get used to keeping things moving in the general direction you want them to go, without having absolute control over every detail. As you find help, you’re going to have to accept different working styles, get used to training and teaching others on your support team, and even adjust to the demands of your new role as manager (or engineer).

Learning to Take Baby Steps

Another thing you might want to prepare for is working in small increments to get things on track. Not everything is going to work immediately or as expected, so it’s going to take a lot more patience and persistence to see your business through the growing pains.

You may have to “try on” several solutions before finding the fit that’s just right for your situation and business, but you have to trust that a solution exists or risk relegating yourself to that plateau forever. Keep searching until you find the right match.

Also, prepare to make adjustments. As you put the support structure in place for your business, it’s unlikely that it will work seamlessly right out of the gate. You’ll need to modify the plan and your support team as you go, so set out to make gradual and steady changes over time so that you’re left with a strong and sturdy foundation to support you.

Being Resourceful and Innovative

The last part of the puzzle is adding support when you’re lacking the time and money necessary to build it. How do you hire help and train someone, for example, when you (a) don’t have the money to pay him or her and (b) don’t have the time to devote to training and figuring out what to delegate?

First (and again), you’ll need to be prepared to take baby steps, but second, you’ll have to figure out ways to be more resourceful and creative when finding support for your business. Some solutions might include:

• Bartering with other business owners who might be in a similar position,
• Starting an internship program or working with local college students, or
• Bootstrapping to incrementally build a budget for a virtual assistant.

Think about everything you have to offer, and find ways to make those resources work to your advantage. Chances are, something you have at your disposal is exactly what someone else needs, and that kind of exchange can get you on your way without taking much in the way of time and money.

Seeing a business through stages of growth and change can be challenging, especially for small and solo business owners who are strapped for resources, but with a little creativity, there might just be a way to push through the plateau and take your business to the next level.

How have you used creativity and resourcefulness to grow your business when limited on time and money?

Photo by Flickr user Chris Denbow, licensed under CC 2.0

And when you get to that tipping/breaking point, what then? Do you:

1. Learn to say “No” with a capital “N.” Say no to all subsequent offers of work, no matter how tempting, no matter how potentially lucrative, until your time frees up.

2. Learn to delegate smaller tasks. I’m talking about the busy-work that keeps you from doing the bigger picture thinking, writing, planning and working that ultimately brings in the bigger bucks.

3. Assemble a virtual team. Build a team made up of people who are strong where you are weak to help handle the load and to structure bigger deals with clients by offering a fuller suite of services.

4. Bring on an employee. Hiring someone as a part-time or full-time employee might defeat the entire purpose of being an independent Web worker so I’m still on the fence about this one.

5. Bring on a business partner. Partner with someone who shares not just the rewards but the risk as well. Someone who can be a business rainmaker and handle the heavy lifting alongside you.

So where am I in this whole process?

I’m getting a lot of work. I’m almost to that point where I am concerned that if I bring on a few more clients, I may not be doing any of them justice. And being the perfectionist that I am, I can’t bear the thought of sub-par work even though my sub-par is probably totally acceptable.

I’m almost at that tipping/breaking point.

What have I done about it?

1. I have said no with a small “n.” For the smaller deals, I’m referring them to trusted colleagues who are happy to get the work. For the mid-sized deals, I’m picking and choosing the ones that won’t interfere with the bigger deals I’m closing. I look at them as fun filler to keep the cash flowing but not to tie me up too much or to take me away from the bigger deals that needs my attention.

2. I’ve hired a personal virtual assistant and am farming out some of the busy work. I’m no longer afraid to delegate (you know the fear – the fear that nobody else will care enough about the job to do as good a job as you can do). I’m still trying to figure out the most efficient, effective way to pull all this process and information out of my head and transferring it in a coherent form to another person.

3. I’ve been working on a virtual team as their “Internet gal,” but someone else is managing the team. I’m worried about assembling my own team because I don’t think I have the brain capacity to manage that team. Ostensibly, we’d all be able to manage ourselves, but I hesitate going into a glorified project manager role. I’d have to have a project manager in the virtual mix. So I’m still contemplating this.

4. No to hiring someone as an employee. I don’t know about you, but I’m still running screaming away from the idea of hiring employees.

5. I’ve been talking preliminarily to some trusted colleagues who are my peers in my industry sector. They get it, they do it, they’re looking for a change from the corporate world. My company of one could actually become a company of two with the right person. But how would that be structured? The business and financial side of this still scares the heck out of me. You could say I’m more than a little gun-shy about having another business partner after past experiences.

Where are you at with your Web work? Are you a company of one, two or more? Are you part of a virtual team on an ongoing or as-needed basis? Do you have enough work to stay busy, pay the rent, and then some? What are your business goals? What are your struggles?

And when is too much work no longer a good thing? Leave it to me to ask the tough questions that even I can’t answer.

[This blog post was inspired by this great post about business models.]

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