I own a small B2B business. Over the years I have delegated a lot of tasks which used to be my job to other people working for the business. This has reduced my workload, but unfortunately it was the easier and routine tasks which I was able to delegate, leaving me with a high concentration of stressful and unpleasant tasks.

For example I am no longer involved with regular routine communication with our clients, but any time there is a problem or an unhappy client my team dumps it on me. So now every time I communicate with a client it’s an unhappy one.

And since we hired an accountant I no longer am involved with simple bookkeeping tasks. But if there is a problem like a chargeback or an accounting error then it gets escalated to me. So now every time I do accounting related tasks it is the stressful problematic kind.

Most of these fires that I have to put out are the sort of thing that only happen once or twice a year and with no warning. So it’s not really feasible to train someone else to handle them without me.

Is there anything I can do to make my job less stressful? If not I’m afraid I’ll be burnt out in a couple years and won’t be able to continue.