The idea of entrepreneurship or a freelance lifestyle is attractive to many marketing professionals. After all, what could be better than setting one’s own schedule, answering to zero bosses, and finding fulfillment in work?
Working solo has a long list of perks and benefits, but this lifestyle is far from easy. It requires a lot of self-sufficiency, self-motivation; a lot of reliance on one’s self, if we’re being honest. But success as a freelance marketing professional or as a “one-person show” can be found with the right amount of dedication and strategy.
However, it’s easy to get a bit overwhelmed with the intricacies that come with working on your own. Where before, a freelancer may have had the resources of a full-scale agency or marketing team at their fingertips, now those resources are gone and all tasks are relegated to one person’s to-do list: yours.
How does a solo worker better optimize their performance, when all responsibilities fall to them? It’s of paramount importance to streamline the work process and have the ability to delegate tasks appropriately so that the quality of client work does not suffer.
How does a solo worker delegate? Let’s dive into this idea and more on how a freelancer or a solo professional can best maximize their work performance.
Delegation is the key to success in most work environments. Some individuals find it difficult to let go of work, out of fear of the work either being done poorly by others or that the work won’t actually be completed at all.
But how does a solo worker delegate tasks? Delegation doesn’t have to mean giving work to other people. In some situations, this may not be possible. Of course, if a freelancer or solopreneur can afford it, hiring another freelancer to help with the workload can often be helpful. Outsourcing things such as bookkeeping, graphic or web design, and even social media scheduling can clear up time on the calendar.
However, delegation can also simply mean streamlining when certain tasks get done, and what sort of priority they receive. Delegating tasks can mean putting them into a different part of the schedule for the day.
For example, let’s say that a solo marketing professional needs to organize client contracts, create client content, and write some personal blogs for their own personal brand website. These are all fairly high-value pieces of work, but they can’t all be done at once. Instead of feeling overwhelmed and unsure of where to start, combat that feeling by organizing a time and place to complete each task.
Perhaps the client contracts need to be done right away so that they can be done and filed away. The client content creation and blog posts may take a bit more time, so setting aside a few hours or a whole day for each one will help pull the focus in so that deep high-quality work can be done on each task.
Managing distractions and delegating, even with just one worker, is crucial to find a workflow that fits your business. It’s important to recognize the importance of each task that comes across your desk, as it’s also easy to get caught up spending too much time on low-value work and not enough on high-value work.
Maximizing performance as a “one-person show” when it comes to marketing can be more of a balancing act than anything else. But with some dedication and organizational skills, finding ways to optimize the work and complete high-quality tasks can bring success to anyone willing to put in the time.
Ronn Torossian is CEO of NYC based 5WPR, a leading PR agency.