When you sit down to consider how to grow your business in this economic environment the overriding thought must be “carefully”. We´re still very much in delicate commercial times and rash decisions of any kind have the potential to turn a prosperous organisation into the latest victim of this tumultuous era. But one thing that remains constant, no matter what the financial climate of the country, is that a growing business must systemise to survive.

To systemise is to define and document every task within an organisation so that they can be recruited for, learned and carried out by absolutely anyone, assuming they have the required skill set. Once completed you can confidently delegate to others, secure in the knowledge that they will know exactly how you would like each task to be executed.

When it comes to the stresses and strains of any growing venture, business owners broadly fall into two camps: those who attempt to do it all themselves and those who share their responsibilities with others to allow their company to grow to its true potential.

1. How to grow your business … the wrong way

With a steady increase in sales your balance sheet is beginning to look quite healthy but, with the lack of sleep and mounting paperwork on your desk, your bloodshot eyes tell a very different story.

Many business owners find it difficult to let go of control, to allow others to shoulder some of the burden so they can get on with running the company. Nobody can survive for long with mounting pressure, slipping deadlines and no relief on the way. Taking on too much yourself or failing to delegate effectively is how to grow your business the wrong way.

2. How to grow your business … the right way

While some will fear the act of delegation, recruitment and expansion, as it symbolises a loss of control to them, the rest will rejoice in the opportunity to expand their businesses and celebrate the crossing of the corporate threshold that takes them from business to employer.

But before you can delegate a task to anyone, you´ll need to systemise that task, and this is how to grow your business the right way.

What tasks can you delegate?

The first step to systemising your processes is to decide which tasks you wish to delegate. Pretty much anything that restricts your (and when I say “your”, I´m referring to anyone within your organisation) productivity is fair game. If there´s a mundane, time-consuming or energy sapping task you perform that keeps you from doing something that could benefit your organisation, maybe it´s time to determine whether it should be delegated to someone else.

Who should you delegate to?

This is a big question, and one that is often hotly debated, because who will be the most reliable, affordable and responsible person for any task you wish to delegate is of course dependent on your company, your sector and the role itself. However, essentially you´ll have in-house staff, outsourced expertise or recruitment to select from.

All have their advantages and disadvantages. For instance, some would consider using in-house staff as more of an efficiency drive than an expansion plan, whereas that may be exactly what others are looking for; some would consider outsourced expertise to be a flexible way of finding additional help, whereas others would worry about a lack of control; and some might consider recruiting new staff to be a huge responsibility, whereas others will see it as the only way to ensure the commitment required for the role. However, the likelihood is that only one of these options will suit your expansion plans.

Planning how to grow your business

Once you have identified a task to be systemised, and where you´ll be sourcing the human resources from, you need to create a procedure manual for that task. That will involve defining the skills needed to carry out the task, the step-by-step method for completing the task the way you would like it to be done, and possibly the reason for the task being done that way or the role of that task in the bigger picture of the entire company process. Often the roles that you are creating systems for are entirely new, having just been split from someone else´s responsibility or through combining tasks performed by several others into a single role, so clarity is essential here. The documentation needs to be written in a tone and language that someone qualified for the role will find easy to follow.

So when you consider how to grow your business, the first thing that should cross your mind is “what tasks can I delegate today?”