Why Doing All Administrative Tasks by Yourself Is Not Beneficial Anymore

If you are a founder, you are in charge of the success of the business. That means you instinctively want to take responsibility for everything in the company. But that does not mean you would do all administrative tasks by yourself. Does it?

For many single-handedly taking care of admin tasks, marketing, operations, customer support and everything that can be done is what it means to be a founder. On a surface level it looks intuitive: you know how things are done, you are saving on hiring experts, you are in control, … but that wears you down soon enough.

It is or will be showing on your business health too. Because even if you feel productive handling everything you can, it is actually costing you and your business dearly.

Such an introduction is only viable, when there is a solution to this problem. A solution that won’t tax your resources, but allow you to reach the success and freedom you have always envisioned.

Most of the time founders and entrepreneurs do not notice the hidden costs behind doing everything by themselves, but it goes well beyond financial losses.

When administrative tasks take up your time and concentration you solely miss out on the bigger picture: things to be done to let your business grow. You should have spent most of your time exploring new opportunities, strategizing, and innovating, but you are handling mundane tasks like scheduling meetings, managing emails, documents, and projects.

Opportunities by nature are hard to come by and as you are so focused on other things, it makes getting new chances even more difficult. In business, timing plays a crucial role, if you stay too overwhelmed to even notice, windows would close without you noticing them.

Putting a price on mental and physical well-being is difficult. But you can imagine how a struggling mind and body can impact a business if it is you who is at the crux of the business’s being. Founders often have higher stakes and fewer support systems than any other worker. The constant shift between priorities, roles and responsibilities, creates stress draining your energy.

When you are energy depleted (most probably sleep-deprived too) you are prone to make mistakes, wrong judgements, be unproductive, and feel overwhelmed all the time. Juggling too many tasks, especially the ones that are not your strongest suit, generally leads to exhaustion and slows down your business growth.

Time is your most valuable resource. And administrative tasks are extremely time consuming. A ‘quick chore’ can spiral out of control and become a ‘low-value work’ without your notice. Take responding to emails for example, you thought that you would quickly attend to the inbox and clear it up within 20 minutes. 1 hour later you realize that your plans are thrown out of the window.

These add up and reflect in statistics like this: businesses lose more than 300 hours per year on admin tasks according to a survey. And 44% of employees feel that repetitive administrative tasks, inefficient processes, and so on are slowing down their company, according to a study by Personio. Don’t let your business lose time.

The easiest way to understand how much money you are losing is to take a look at your role in the company. You are paying yourself a CEO’s hourly rate to complete tasks like bookkeeping, calendar management, or data entry. Reread this sentence.

By handling administrative tasks you are essentially hiring someone (yourself) at a premium rate (suppose USD 100 per hour) for low-skill work. That is counterintuitive. If you spend 10 to 15 hours per week doing admin tasks, imagine how it adds up throughout the year.

But you can easily solve this problem by outsourcing day-to-day admin tasks to an administrative virtual assistant who only gets paid for the productive hours. No US minimum wage or overhead expenses apply. Now imagine how much you can save.

Do you know that a large portion of business owners work more than 40 hours per week? That’s not a big deal if you have a choice, but you don’t. When demands of your business makes you go past the normal work hours, sacrifice weekends, and even let go of vacations, your overall well being is negatively impacted.

This forces you to grind constantly without any considerations for taking healthy meals, exercising, and having good quality sleep. As a result of this unbalanced lifestyle, stress levels rise and cause burnout and long-term health problems. Overtime, this vicious cycle makes your hard work meaningless, destroying your health and personal relationships.

Imagine how well you could have managed your time for yourself and your loved ones if you didn’t have to stay involved with administrative tasks (meaning, someone proficient could have taken over these tasks for you…).

That is the solution to all of these problems that stem from doing everything by yourself. With the rise of the global remote workforce opportunities are almost endless when it comes to effective outsourcing solutions.

There are excellent virtual assistant service providers who can take care of your tasks at a fraction of the cost it would take to hire someone in-house. If that’s something you are considering, let’s see how outsourcing admin tasks can help you alter the current situation:

The spark that you used to have day in and day out when you started the business starts to fade when your days are eaten up by invoices, scheduling, spreadsheets, and emails. It’s difficult staying passionate about something if it drains the life out of you.

To gain back your days and love every part of it you have to let go of some of these elements. Offshoring these tasks to administrative VAs is the best plan of action. They will only get paid for the tasks completed, saving you a ton of money and taking stress out of the equation.