As an entrepreneur you will encounter all different stages with your company, but more important also your own. As your company grows you will find yourself with more work and less time at the same moment. That’s not a bad thing, just something you have to cope with and reorganize within your own work process.

The next step you take is usually getting the tools to work faster, know more and be efficient. Your employees register their own hours and are highly self-employed with work as they become more experienced within their jobs as well. Being an engineer scholar I entrusted my people with all operational tasks and project work, restricting myself to being an entrepreneur, project manager and salesperson.

When all operational work is off your desk you will have time to think again. That’s when you notice you’re doing a lot of stuff you’re not supposed to: administration, telephone calls, putting stamps on the invoices and ordering stuff. Next to this - but you don’t miss it when you don’t have it - is accounting, legal and debtors management. Slowly you’re spending more and more time learning about this and - as this is not what you’ve been trained for - getting mediocre stuff off the shelve. This is the time to get yourself a good accountant and legal advisor (doesn’t have to be a lawyer at first).

Fast forward to my situation today, still left with the office work, project management and sales. Now this has become a too big of a job for one person alone. You still try to be smart, manage things differently, try to automate, but all what’s left is human work. Well, better get the ‘dirty work’ off my shoulders now and get an office manager / secretary. This should offload the unstructured phonecalls, arrangement of meetings and putting the stamps on the invoices.

Every step along the way there’s should be a cost/benefit analysis of your situation. There are no predefined steps as each improvement should fit the company, entrepreneur and situation at the same time - you might need a secretary from the start - but there are always ways to increase your playtime and offload you with less important stuff.

There’s always one major factor that can accellerate or limit your company’s growth more than anything else; and that factor is YOU. So when time is up take a break to think straight again… and reorganize.