Does this sound like you? You're an entrepreneur with a small business that is chugging along and growing nicely, with $50,000 to $150,000 in annual sales but with the potential to do a lot more. You're doing most of the operations of the business yourself, (sales, marketing, accounts receivable) even if you have one or two people as full- or part-time staff. You have a lot of ideas on where to take the business next, and you act on lots of your ideas -- before completing the last initiative you began.

Frustrating, isn't it?

Fabienne Fredrickson has some sound advice for you. Fredrickson, a small business coach, is head of Client Atttraction LLC, which helps small business owners who are struggling with different stages of growth. Fredrickson calls people in the $50,000-$150,000 sales bucket "Leveraged Lucys (or Larrys)."

As a Leveraged Lucy/Larry, Fredrickson advises, there are four things you need to do to get out from under:

1. Create an operations manual for absolutely everything. You need to document all activities of the business with an operations manual or even a checklist, so that the opportunity exists to transfer responsibility to another person for certain operations. How do you convert marketing prospects? Handle customer service? Ship products? Invoice and collect? You need a good operations document for each. Doing so is the first step in letting go of responsibilities that are ripe for delegation.
2. Get your team in place: You are not going to scale the business by yourself, so you need a well-functioning team. You can use part-timers while you figure out what type of human resources you need for each aspect of the business. Fredrickson says you want people who are great at follow through, even if they aren't big-picture people. "Entrepreneurs often are not good at finishing things. They need people whose forte is completing. They don't have to be idea people."

1. You need a SELF business model: The acronym stands Scalable, Easy, Lucractive and Fun. Is the way you go to market filled with drudgery? If so, you're not going to be motivated to execute well and your business won't scale.
2. Get rid of your Inner Control Freak (ICF): You have to let go of wanting to control everything. That's not easy. Fredrickson notes that you had to have a strong ICF to get the business off the ground. But at the leveraged growth stage, "entrepreneurs are white knuckling, each finger has to be pried open" as you train others to do tasks that can be delegated. With proper documentation (step 1) you'll be more comfortable letting go of the throttle.

Entrepreneurs start businesses because they are really good at one thing, what Fredrickson calls their "core brilliance." They are going to make 80% of their money from that brilliance. So avoiding the danger-zone of low-value work is the key success factor for entrepreneurs to get to the next stage of business growth, the $150,000-$500,000 sales level that Fredrickson calls "Visionary Vince (or Vicky)."