Are You Running Your Business or Leading It?

August 25th 2026

All business owners run their own businesses, but sometimes it can feel like your company is running you. You wake up, get to work, cross 25 things off your to-do list, attend several meetings, crank out emails in response to questions you received, deliver products and services, and yet by evening you’re feeling like you didn’t get nearly enough done.

You were busy from sun up to sun down, but did your business progress? Did you move your company forward in terms of new business, profits, or opportunities?

Running a business and leading it are two very different roles, and most entrepreneurs get stuck in the first. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to pull yourself out of the daily grind so that you can spend more time making strategic decisions that lead to long-term growth and sustained profitability.

The Difference Between Running and Leading

In the early days of your business, you may be the only employee. You run the business. That means you’re the only person who can answer emails, prepare proposals, fulfill orders, schedule meetings, address customer service issues, post on social media, manage the finances, and everything else that needs to be done. Tasks are never-ending, and until you have some cash flow, you can’t outsource them. So, you do them yourself.

Running a business can keep you mired in the endless daily to-dos.

Leading a business is more strategic. It involves deciding on potential new services, when to announce a price increase, building systems that automate parts of your process that don’t require you, and lining up capital, for example.

If you’ve read Michael Gerber’s E-Myth: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It, you’ve probably heard the famous quote about working on your business versus working in it. This is what he’s talking about.

Running a business involves working in your business, completing daily tasks, while leading it requires that you take a step back and work on how to make the business even more successful. In a nutshell, it’s small versus big-picture thinking. Big-picture thinking is where your focus needs to be for your business to grow and thrive.

But it’s hard to break out of the trap of feeling like handling daily challenges is the most important thing you can be doing at the moment. You feel productive as you clear your email inbox, ship out orders, or follow up on prospect inquiries. This is hands-on work that gets results, right?

Yes, it can get results, but you’ll also limit your capacity and long-term potential if you don’t start to lead. It’s hard to put aside those phone calls you need to make or the social media posts you need to schedule in order to ponder the long-term health of your business, but if you continue to put off the big-picture thinking and the growth plans, they will never happen. You’ll stay right where you are.

Why This Is a Bigger Problem for Women Entrepreneurs

Many women launch their businesses solo, without a big team or support system, which means they have to do it themselves, or it doesn’t get done. That work quickly adds up. A survey conducted by the virtual assistant company Time Etc. found that entrepreneurs (men and women) spend 36% of their week on administrative tasks like invoicing, data entry, and scheduling. That’s more than one-third of their working hours.

Women have also been socialized to go the extra mile, to pitch in, to make it happen. That is why they may become overwhelmed trying to get everything done—thinking it’s their responsibility—rather than considering that some of these tasks could be handed off. So, they put their heads down and do the work. Asking someone else to do the work would be like admitting they’re not capable of doing it themselves, and some women don’t want to do that.

Some research shows that women entrepreneurs feel less confident than their male counterparts, which can impede their willingness to consider delegating. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2024/2025 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report found that women rated their perceptions of their own entrepreneurial capabilities lower than men—not that they have lower capabilities, but that they perceive them to be weaker. Men reported being 72.4% confident in their company’s potential for success, and women came in at 65.3%. Not a huge variation, but lower confidence might suggest that women aren’t sure they are worthy of handing tasks off. They may feel that they should continue completing them until they’ve mastered them.

How Do You Spend Your Time?

The best way to evaluate whether you’re running or leading your business is to start by assessing how you currently spend your time. Yes, I’m talking about a time audit.

If you can spend one full week taking note of what you did in 15- or 30-minute blocks, either manually or through a time-tracking tool like Toggl or Clockify, you’ll get a clearer picture of how much of your time is spent on admin tasks and what percentage is spent on leadership. You’ll want to describe your activity and then identify it as operational (running) or strategic (leading).

Once you’ve done that, the next step is trying to identify what could be assigned to someone else. This could be an employee, a contractor, a consultant, or an intern, for example. Ask yourself:

• Am I the only person who can do this work?
• Does this really have to be done?
• Does this have to be done right now?

Any tasks that merit a “no” in response are strong candidates to be delegated elsewhere, eliminated altogether, or put aside to be dealt with at another time.

Take a Step Toward Leading

It’s unrealistic and impractical to suggest that you immediately delegate everything you’ve realized others can do. You may not have the financial resources to pay someone or the time to train them right now, but do what you can when you can.

One thing you can do is block off time each week in your schedule for more strategic thinking. You might call it a planning block, where you’re going to put aside the administrative and operational tasks and, instead, start to imagine the best path forward for your business. The key is to choose a day and time when you’ll do this and then protect it like you would protect an important meeting with your best client.

Once you have that time set aside in your calendar, then choose one task you currently manage that you could delegate. This could be bookkeeping, which you could give to a part-time bookkeeper. It could be email follow-ups, or even management of your email inbox, which you could hand off to a virtual assistant or an AI tool. If you find social media posting time-consuming, perhaps you could find a local college student who would work for college credit and take that on as their responsibility.

It matters much less who you hand these tasks off to and much more that you get in the habit of asking yourself, “Do I need to be the one to do this?” And if the answer is “no,” find someone else who can.

Your goal should be to get to the end of a day or a week and feel more in control of where your business is headed. Sure, you’ll still be busy, maybe even overwhelmed some weeks, but you should have a better perception of how you’re moving the business forward, rather than just treading water.