Still getting up early. Making progress. Hiding in my van and crying during the day, and picking the podcasts that are both useful and motivational. Yeah, it’s time to grieve – but it’s also time to live.

I heard something yesterday evening – something like “eagle eyes, mouse feet.” Keep your eyes on the goals and adjust as necessary, but keep taking tiny steps forward. And that’s exactly it – one teeny thing at a time.

Today it was flow charts. I’ve been looking at different formats for communicating the info I’ll present in my videos in PDF form, and what I initially came up with was a long, ridiculously boring list.

And Oh Happy Plants doesn’t do boring.

I knew I needed something more fun – informative but interactive, kind of, despite being a printable guide. So this morning I went looking for easy ways to make flow charts – then this afternoon I made a note to myself that this is one of the tasks that will be easy to farm out to a VA, and eventually an employee. Sure, it’ll take my expertise to scribble down the exact things that need to be on the chart, but do I need to be building every flow chart? Big ol’ NOPE.

Here’s another key step in building a business: as a ‘solo-preneur,’ you’re starting things by yourself and will be doing them solo for a while, most likely. This is a great place to be – mobile in your decision-making, very hands-on, and you can build the business exactly the way you want it.

Keep in mind that unless you want to be shackled to your business, consumed by it, you need to build processes that can be handed to others. Sometimes you’re going to have an end product that requires you as a part of it (coaching, painting, etc). That doesn’t matter. What things does a coach or painter do that can be handed off?

• Billing
• Cultivating an email list
• Website work
• Copywriting (sometimes)
• Taxes

That’s a VERY partial list. You’ve got a ton of admin stuff that’s completely unnecessary for you to do. If you’re a coach with a base rate of $300/hr, ask yourself this: would you pay a mediocre CPA $300/hr to do your taxes? Would you pay a mediocre tech support person $300/hr to mess with your website?

HELL NO.

Today’s mission, should you choose to accept: Go through your business and list out all of the tasks you do more than once. For me, this ranges from creating documents based on a common design/theme to taxes to video editing (another thing on my list for a VA!).

The next part of this is your hokey-coachy mindset nonsense, but I’m really serious about this: Get your brain on straight. Are you intentionally avoiding putting any task on that list because you’re attached to “the way I do it” or “I just can’t trust anyone else to…”

GET OVER YOURSELF.

This sort of attitude will keep you small. It will hold you back. You will continue on this ego-filled path to martyrdom because you can’t let go of some little nonsense that keeps you away from really seeing your vision for the future.

It’s time to let go and put that thing on your list.

Next! Something to keep in mind at this point is how you’ll present this to your future VA or employee. For my charts, I’ll just give them one along with access to the program I’m using, and then send along my notes as necessary. For some things it might be necessary to do the task once and create a video screen capture of the process, with you talking the person through it as you go. For others, you may need to actively coach them in your copywriting voice – give them a ton of your stuff to go through, then edit things so they’re in your voice. Make sure to make notes about why you did the edits and exactly what you’re going for. The more work you do upfront, the larger the payoff will be.

That’s all for now; I should be asleep. Enjoy building your future freedom!