Episode Summary

As your business or organization grows, the demands on your time tend to grow right along with it. Without the right boundaries and support in place, it’s easy to become the person everyone turns to for questions, decisions, and day-to-day needs.

In this episode, I’m sharing practical ways to protect your time while still giving your team the support they need.

It starts with getting clear about what truly requires your involvement. Your time is best spent on the strategic decisions, relationships, and leadership responsibilities that only you can handle. Everything else is an opportunity to look at delegation, cross-training, or better systems.

I also talk about creating boundaries around your availability and communication, using tools like Boomerang to manage email interruptions, and establishing decision-making frameworks so your team can move forward without needing your input every step of the way.

The goal isn’t to make yourself unavailable. It’s to build the structure and support that allows you to lead without being pulled into everything.

Key Highlights:

• Get clear about the work that truly requires you.
• Delegate and cross-train your team as the organization grows.
• Create boundaries around your availability and communication.
• Give your team frameworks for making decisions independently.
• Build support systems that reduce interruptions and protect your leadership capacity.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more!

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Hello, my name is Melissa Swink. I'm the founder and CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., which is a virtual assistant services firm that provides administrative, marketing, and operational support to small businesses and nonprofits. We do this in a way that's done for you or done with you on more of a consulting basis if you've already got an established team. Today, I wanna talk to you about protecting your time as a business owner.

I may use the word business owner, but feel free to substitute in their leader or executive director, whatever role makes the most sense for you. These are used interchangeably because I'll tell you that protecting your time is pretty fundamental no matter where you're at in your particular career. So first things first that I wanted to set the tone for this conversation is that growing businesses, growing organizations that you see them just reaching next level to next level.

They don't necessarily have bigger and better strategies than you do with where you're at. The truth is that their founders and their leadership teams have learned how to protect their time and become very, very focused on what are the most important things that they can be doing. What are their highest priorities? And they're leading their teams and they're executing on those things effectively. So if you feel like you are always behind on things that move your business or your organization forward,

We're gonna talk about why that might be, and also more importantly, how to fix it. So let's address the core problem before we dive into a couple of shifts that you can make in order to better protect your time. So as the business or the organization grows, access to you naturally increases, okay? So this comes down to team, right? As you add more people to your team or your organization, the more people that you are essentially, maybe onboarding, training,

mentoring, having one-to-ones with, meeting with, talking with, just having all the communications with, that of course expands. More client communications, maybe today you're working with 25 clients and by the end of the year you want to be working with 50. Of course, the more clients that we have, naturally the more conversations are going to be had around that, whether directly with clients themselves, your team members who are supporting them, and so on.

And just overall, there's more decisions that need to be made when you look at the volume of activities that happen in a larger business or organization versus a smaller one. So access to you, demand on you will increase as the company grows as well. And if we don't have the right structures in place, now I don't want you to think that growing the team or adding more clients and responsibilities to your plate is going to automatically cause you to completely burn out and

be essentially like a drain or a waste of your time. That's not it at all, but we want to have the right structures in place. So, because if we don't have that, the problem is, is that you're going to become the bottleneck. You're going to be seen as the default problem solver. You're going to be the one that everyone goes to for everything, right? Because this is your baby. This is your expertise, right? So, what we want to do is we want to make a couple of shifts in order to protect our time and avoid these things from happening.

or to begin the reverse course if these are already happening to you. So shift number one is to define what only you can do. You've heard me say this, you've heard others say this, I just wanna revisit this more for a moment just as a touchstone because I feel like there are times I know for me personally and so many clients that we work with that we get in these busy seasons where our attention is going in every which direction.

And sometimes we just have to like reground and internalize for a moment and say, okay, what are the most important things that I need to be doing? Because the reality is that not everything deserves your time. You need to be focused as a leader on strategic thinking and also strategic decision making. I'm talking about high level decision making, not like, you know, where should we order more pens from or, you know, who's gonna

you know, run to go get lunch for the event. Those are low level decisions. We're not talking about that. We're talking about this, the higher stakes decisions that go along with that strategic thinking and also relationship building because we know that we do business with people. make connections with people and that can be a major game changer from, you know, where you're at today and reaching your goals tomorrow.

Again, we're not talking about using people, we're talking about genuinely connecting with others and having those relationships. That's super important as your role and your influence continues to grow and expand. So one example of this, with things that don't necessarily deserve your time, and these things are gonna continue to be shed off as you grow and as your role grows, right? So one example that I have is last year, I expanded the work that we were doing with our bookkeeper.

so that she is now processing all of our team's payments. This is something that I held onto for a very long time for various reasons. And it took me probably about a half a day, twice a month to get all the invoices processed and take a look at and compare actual build versus budget build, work through any discrepancies or gaps, and then get all those payments ultimately executed on.

but it was something that I no longer needed to be spending my time on just with all the demands of a growing business. And also from a risk standpoint, this is not something that should only be in my lap because God forbid if anything happened to me where I suddenly wasn't available, I still want my team to get paid, right? So I've cross-trained our bookkeeper on that because the reality is,

is the bottom line with some of these core issues is that if everything is important enough for you to touch, then nothing gets your best energy. We want to save your best energy for the more important conversations and decisions that need to be had. Shift number two is to create boundaries around the access to you. Remember we talked about the larger your team gets, the more clients that you're

serving.

the more people will need, want to interact with you. And this is not about being inaccessible or unavailable or even untouchable from an ego standpoint, like I'm too good for these conversations. It's just that sometimes we need to create better structure around the access and the communications around you so that you're not relying on willpower to try and just get through the day and to answer as many questions as possible. So,

Couple of examples around these boundaries could be having designated office hours or question times throughout the day or throughout the week so that you don't just have things kind of coming at you at random throughout the course of a given day. Communication channels. Maybe you don't need to be accessible everywhere. Your email, maybe you have your Teams chat open. You've got your phone and you're getting text messages and WhatsApp messages. You've got Slack.

You've got your project management system where there's communications and comments happening on work that you're doing. There's so many communication channels. Maybe it's a matter of deciding where are we communicating and what are we communicating in those areas. The other thing is, is that maybe it's about creating decision frameworks for your team. Maybe you have low risk, medium risk and high risk decisions and a mapped out and low risk decisions you don't even need to be a part of anymore.

You have people that you can trust to handle those in the best interest of you and the team and your customers. Maybe there are medium risk decisions that you want to be aware of that are happening, but you don't necessarily have to jump in and be deeply involved in. Maybe somebody else has gone through the detailed work of coming up with some solutions and you give final approval, whatever that looks like to you based on your company and your comfort zone. But then,

high risk decisions, these are the things that you need to be involved in. If there's a security breach or if there's an unhappy customer that you guys need to remedy the situation and change the course of action, that's something that you need to be involved in. So having those structures and those frameworks for your team could be very helpful with eliminating some of those, being inundated with those questions and those decisions on a day-to-day basis. I wanted to share one tool

that I use in order to help kind of structure and streamline some of the communications that I have with my team and clients is that I use boomerang for my email. If you've been listening or watching for any period of time, I've mentioned this before, but my executive assistant goes into my email every morning, files, deletes, sorts through, responds to whatever she can handle. And then when I go in, there's a few things left for me that maybe I need to take another look at.

Once I'm done with that, I can pause my email so that no new emails come in and distract me, because I'll tell you, email is the most distracting place on earth. Something pops up and you're like, what is that? What is that about? You could be playing ping pong in your email all day long if you really wanted to. I say wanted to kind of in a humorous way. Nobody wants to do that, but it's so easy to fall into that trap. So boomerang is a great tool to kind of hold those emails. Then at the end of the day, when I'm doing my final checks,

I can click unpause and then they all come in. So you don't necessarily have to be more or less available to those around you than you are right now. You just need to be more intentional about it. Okay, shift number three is to build support that reduces interruptions. So the goal of support at the end of the day, we're talking about your executive assistant, your virtual assistant, your team, is not just people to help you with task completion.

Because when you're focused on task completion, you are still managing all of that work, whether it be from a logistical standpoint or even just carrying like that mental load of seeing the work getting done. We don't want task completion. The goal of true support is to have filtering. So the team is figuring out what do you need to be doing? What can they take off their plate?

prioritizing just in that same way as being clear on an organizational level, what are your responsibilities? What are their responsibilities? And reducing interruptions and decision fatigue. We've talked about, we've hinted at this, I should say, in all of these other steps, but that is the goal of true support. So a couple of examples here. Having somebody manage your inbox, your calendars, your processes and workflows for the...

recurring tasks that your company or organization does. Having somebody take full ownership and getting those things done. This means a team that can own things, not just execute on things. Because the best support, the bottom line, is that it doesn't take work off your plate. It protects your time before it gets taken. So we want these things happening without your initiation or your involvement at all.

or only as needed. We don't want you having to babysit the entire process. So, couple things to recap as we close. You wanna protect your time by getting clear on what only you can do and what your highest priorities are. Again, this is something you're gonna have to go back to repeatedly, especially as your role in your company grow and evolve and change. And it can get really distracting when you feel like there are shiny objects everywhere.

We need to get back and round ourselves there first. Then we want to create the structure around the access that people have to you. And you want to build the right support around you so that you are not just getting help with execution. You have people who are taking full ownership and responsibility for the things that need to get done on a day-to-day basis. So all of that being said, even just taking a few of these small shifts,

can completely change the way that it feels to run your business or organization. So if you're feeling like your time and attention are just constantly getting pulled in different directions, I want you to know that this is something that we help our clients with every single day, whether it be that they hire our team to support them and their company and do, you know, they take ownership.

and not just execute. I would say execute on tasks, absolutely, but taking that full ownership and being that thought partner and getting work done on a regular basis. Or it also could involve us coming in and just helping identify ways that you and your team can work smarter, not harder, and really streamline communications and again, build up the support around you so that your time is more protective. We do that for you or with you and your existing team.

If you'd like to learn more, send me an email, hello at melissaswink.com or visit our website to learn more. Thank you so much for watching today and I hope you have a wonderful day. We'll be back more with tips and tools and strategies to grow your business and organization beyond you in future videos. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.