I had coffee with my friend Denise the other day. She was very excited about her new handmade jewelry line and eager to tell me all about it. She had lots of pictures, too, and wow, everything was beautiful!

Denise thought it would be a good idea to start selling her creations on her website. Uh oh. As soon as I heard that, the early warning system in my head started ringing. Loudly.

Don’t get me wrong; selling things online is fantastic. You reach people all around the world and they can shop with you seven days a week, 24 hours a day, without your needing a physical store or a lot of up-front investment.

But an online store can also create all kinds of problems. Problems that can overwhelm you, take over your life and cost you money, which is the exact opposite of what you’re probably looking for.

The key question to keep in mind is this: “Does it scale?”

In other words, are you building a machine that gets easier to use and more efficient as it grows, or one that gets more complicated to operate, more tiring to maintain and less profitable to own?

Here are three things to consider if you want to make sure that your online business has what it takes when it comes to scalability:

1. Can your products be replicated ?

Denise is a fabulous artist. She can barely walk down the street or sit in a restaurant without someone coming over to compliment her on her creations. But everything she makes is custom and one-of-a-kind, which means that it’s impossible to build a process that streamlines her operation.

Every piece requires its own photo, its own description and its own link to a shopping cart.

On top of that, each time she sells an item it needs to be removed from her site. And quickly, too, before someone else tries to buy it.

2. Can you buy raw materials in bulk and at wholesale prices?

If you sell just a few designs, you can buy the raw materials in bulk quantity and therefore negotiate lower prices with suppliers.

Storage is simpler, too, since you’ll have just a few bins with a lot of similar materials, as opposed to the dozens and dozens that Denise requires in order to make her custom pieces. It’s also more expensive the custom way, since stockpiling a wide variety of raw materials ties up cash.

3. Can you take your hands off the wheel?

Denise has to update her web site in real time to make sure that sold items don’t stay up there. She can’t bring in a lower-skilled helper to prep some of the items because everything is custom made from start to finish. And she can’t create a backlog of completed work (inventory), since no two items are the same.

That means Denise can’t walk away. She can’t take a vacation. She can’t even go to sleep at night for fear that two people will buy the same item while she’s slumbering!

If, on the other hand, Denise standardizes a bit and makes ten copies of a particular item, she then has some breathing room. Whew.

I didn’t want to rain on Denise’s parade too much; I could see how excited she was. But I also know (from personal, grueling experience) that building an un-scalable machine can quickly become more trouble than it’s worth.

So keep these three items in mind before you charge forward with a plan to sell products online!

It was the spring of 1974 and I was an 8th grader in the Barrington (Illinois) Middle School Band. On this particular Saturday night, I was given the honor of acting as conductor.

(Yes, believe it or not, that’s me and my baton on the left.)

Although most world class directors don’t usually work in a school gymnasium, I was giving my best to a Beatles medley that included “Yesterday,” “Eleanor Rigby” and “Michelle.”

As a long time flutist in the band, I had thought that being the conductor would be a lot of fun, and I’d especially looked forward to bossing everyone around!

Oops! Big surprise. Because in the weeks leading up to my debut, I learned that being a good conductor isn’t about bossing people around. You don’t tell the musicians what to do and walk away. In fact, you don’t tell them what to do at all. You work with them to coordinate their individual efforts into one (hopefully) coherent, melodic work of art.

Not only did I have to keep the beat for everyone, but I also needed to persuade a group of individual musicians to interpret music according to my point of view while getting them to behave in a coordinated way.

I then had to be able to track how they were doing in order to get the desired result. Looking back, I realize that this was the first time I began to figure out the complexity of delegating, something I was reminded of during a conversation with my client, Joseph, when he asked for my help managing his staff.

As I explained to Joseph, delegating is not about abdicating responsibility or letting go. Delegating means you don’t actually have to do the work, but you do need to know what’s happening, when it’s happening (or not), and how to keep things going.

Here are four things to think about when delegating:

1.  Decide what you want to delegate.For a small business owner, this is a very difficult task. We tend to think that everything needs our touch when, in fact, it really only needs our oversight.

But doing all the work yourself doesn’t give your business any leverage. So your first task is to find things, even simple things, that you can release hands-on control. For example, you might start with delegating the purchase of printer ink for your office.

2.  Make a clear request.You might say, “Hey John, I’d like you to be in charge of printer ink for the office. Do you have a couple of minutes to talk about it?”

And then the conversation goes like this: “John, there seem to be two problems with printer ink in the office. One is that we’re always running out, and two; we’re spending a ton of money on it. Would you please make a list of all the printers in the office and find the most cost effective way for us to buy ink? Please also order two back-up cartridges for each printer and make sure we always have those extras in stock. If you can think of other ways to organize the ink or additional ways to save money, I’d love to hear them. How does that sound? And do you think you can have that finished by Thursday?” John asks questions and the two of you agree. Cool.

3.  Monitor Progress.This is the biggie. Remember that you’re the owner/manager. And even if you delegated to another manager, you’re still their manager. There are two ways to do this.

One is the “Oh no, we’re out of ink again. What happened?” method, which I don’t recommend.Instead try the proactive follow-up method, which works great every time. On Thursday, when the project has hit a milestone, if you don’t already have a meeting scheduled with John to check in, you might stop by his desk and ask, “John, have you had a chance to make a list of the printers yet? How’s that ink price research going?”

At this moment it’s important to be very clear about whether or not John is on track. If he isn’t, he needs to know what’s not working and, more importantly, why it’s not working and what he can do about it. You’ll want to make it clear to John that the deadline is his deadline, not yours. You’re simply monitoring progress.

4.  Acknowledge Completion.When the job is done well be generous and specific in your praise. “Printer ink is no longer a problem in the office, John. You’ve saved us valuable time by always having it available and you saved us $100 a month by finding a better source to buy from.”

And when it doesn’t go so well, that needs to be talked about too. “We have printer ink for all our printers now, John, but we’re still spending more than I’d like. Let’s talk about ways that we can lower the cost.”

Sometimes it seems faster to do things yourself, and it almost always is in the short term. But as a small business owner, you need to build a team that can grow with the needs of your company and support its expansion. For that to happen you need to take yourself out of the trenches and on to the conductor’s podium.

And by the way, if you run into Paul McCartney, please send him my apologies.