You know the scariest part of owning your own business? It is not having enough money to pay bills, or customer service or whether or not you'll get new clients. No, the scariest part of owning your own company is...... growth.

When you start your own business, you do everything yourself. Finance, cold calls, customer service, the actual work... you do it all. Then, if you work hard and you are consistent in treating your business like a business (a whole other topic, by the way), soon you'll find you are growing and you will need to bring in help. And that means you need to delegate.

I'm here to tell you that after doing so much for so long and as a solo, it can be quite intimidating to 'let go'. Yes, I know there is a wildly popular song about 'letting it go', but still, in practice it is HARD.

Here are the thoughts that will keep you up at night:

1. Can I trust someone to do this like I would?
2. How do we maintain the same high level of customer service?
3. How big do we want the company to get?

Yeah. Scary, huh? Well, let me share with you some words of wisdom:

In response to Question 1, they don't have to do things exactly like you would do them. I always say there are 10,000 ways to skin a cat and as long as the cat is naked at the end, do we REALLY care how he got that way? No we do not.

Trust is a huge component of all relationships and you can't grow your company unless you can trust others to do the tasks we are used to doing, which brings us to Question 2:

The way to maintain the same high level of customer service and/or quality of any sort is to create policies and procedures that document how you want tasks performed. That way at least you can train someone to operate the way you've been running the company all this time and your expectations are clearly communicated. As an added bonus, there is a clear and concise reference for employees to review.

Also, by creating policies and procedures, you will quickly find out where you have holes in the process. I can't tell you how many times an employee has questioned a procedure or offered a different approach that resulted in our updating procedures for the better.

So you've learned to trust and you've ensured the quality of your customer service, but then Question 3 poses a real conundrum as it is purely both subjective and based on the individual entrepreneur's desire to grow. On the one hand, most entrepreneurs start companies because they have a passion for something or they want to be their own boss (or both). They rarely give thought to where they want the business to go -- they are just focused on making sure it doesn't fail in the short term.

But the truth is you need to give growth serious consideration right from the beginning. How big is big enough? How much revenue do you want/need to generate? How many employees do you want? How able are you to allow others to make mistakes? How much pain are you willing to endure?

Pain is a natural component of the growth process. More clients mean more demands, potentially more complaints and more opportunities for failure. Some entrepreneurs find they are quite content to deal with the aspect of 'more'. Others hire or promote a person into a managerial position to shield themselves from conflict and still others simply decide they don't want to get any bigger than they are right now.

Often as entrepreneurs we don't know what we don't know. How can one ask questions to help ourselves or grow our business, if we don't even know what to ask?!? Sometimes we think we have one issue only to find out it is actually a something else. Not a day goes by that I don't learn something new or find out about something about which I had nary a clue.