As a Business Owner: Decide and Do the Work

Previously, I wrote when becoming a manager, I stopped “doing” to focus on “deciding”. Letting go of doing work helped the team and I achieve more. They did, I decided.

As a manager in a company: decide OR do - doing both is too much.

I am encountering a situation now where it’s better to decide AND do:

As a founder or owner of a business, deciding AND doing the work is crucial.

There’s great reasons for this:

• There’s so much less resources available that founders / small business owners available to them.
• The owner/founder is still figuring out the business - only by doing both they get the right feel for the business and/or customer.
• Deciding and doing helps prioritize either in the overall scope of the task for the business (i.e. knowing what to deliver) or parts of the task itself (i.e. taking shortcuts in delivering.)

As a founder/owner of the business - you have all the information. What the customer expects. What it takes to deliver to the customer. Deciding and doing plays off each other.

When running/creating a business, there’s other variables you can leverage to achieve your goal. (This is not true as a manager/contributor in a company.)

What about out-sourcing/delegating?

In this situation, I would argue against this. The main reason is that there’s crucial information from both deciding and doing that goes into the feedback loop. When you delegate, you lose a crucial part of the picture. Heck, you might be delegating out the most important piece of the business!

When you’re in a founder/owner role of the business, it’s important to decide AND do the work. You have all the information available and have other levers to use in achieving your goal: creating astronomical value!