One of the most important skills that you need to master as a growing business owner is delegation.
The reality is that there’s only so much work you can do in 24 hours. As your business grows, and you get more clients, start to sell more products and have more customers to interact with, you’re going to run out of time eventually.
Not to mention all of the other things that need to happen to keep your business running: like keeping an eye on the bookkeeping, legal requirements, and often creating content.
It’s easy to fall intro the trap of the bottleneck entrepreneur. In today’s video we are going to discuss what you should hire out or delegate to other members of your team.
How to Delegate
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Where should you start with delegating?
There are different schools of thought when it comes to what things you should do as the business owner. One of the first things you should hire out is your bookkeeping, and most people agree with that.
Some schools of thought say that the only thing that you should do as the business owner is set the vision or the course for the company, and then make sure that it happens. Personally, I’m not quite there yet. However, I think it’s a great place to aspire to, as our businesses continue to grow.
Another way of looking at delegation is the only thing that you should be focused on is bringing money in the door, while other people on your team focus on everything else.
For example: you could be the one having sales conversations with people, putting together marketing campaigns to get people to buy your products. Then your team would be putting together the different pieces, keeping the ship running, and maybe even delivering on the products or services in some instances.
But even in this case, as your company grows you’ll want to put systems in place and train other people in your company to start taking over the sales aspects, so that you don’t become the bottleneck.
The delegation mindset
When it comes to delegating there are many different ways to slice the apple.
The most important thing is making sure that you have the right delegation mindset.
As a recovering control freak, I totally understand how hard it is to let someone else do work that you’re perfectly capable of doing yourself.
Plus, there are other considerations that come into play: finding the right people, paying them, trusting them to do things well, and not becoming a micromanager.
So here’s what I’m going to say about all of those obstacles:
What I mean by this is that in order to be the owner of your business, other people in your business need to have full ownership to get their work done.
That means that they can make decisions on your behalf, and they can make things happen without depending on you. This helps reduce the bottleneck and the stress that can creep up when you start to hire people in your business.
I can say this because I’ve made this mistake myself, sometimes hiring people can be more stressful because you take on all of the ownership for what they are doing instead of letting them have the ownership of what they’re responsible for.
Once you have this attitude towards delegating and hiring, it’s way easier to to filter through the different people who you might consider hiring. You can just ask yourself, would you be comfortable giving this person ownership of this piece of the business?
Let me give you a few examples: when it came to organizing the Off The Charts Live conference last year, I gave ownership of a couple of the different aspects of the event to our brilliant execution strategist.
She was in charge of sponsorships, and not only did she think of the sponsors, contact them and also nurture and ensure that everything went smoothly for them, but she really rocked it in a way that I never could have done myself.
In other parts of my business, we have systems in place that make it easy to implement things that we do on a regular basis, like making these videos, uploading them, and publishing the newsletter.
I don’t have all my delegation skills dialed in yet, but like most things, delegation is a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it.
If you give your team ownership and the right instructions, you might need to steer them in the right direction if they go off course, but they’ll be more likely to run with the projects you give them and be a dream to work with!
How do you delegate in your business?
I’d love to hear what your relationship with delegation is like. Do you feel like you’re giving ownership or are you still the bottleneck in your business?
Be sure to share your tips in the comments below. I’d love to hear all about your strategies for delegating tasks in your business!
P.S. We’re hiring!
It’s funny how things line up sometimes, but we’re currently looking to hire a Digital Business Manager – if that sounds like you or someone who would be a good fit, please pass it on!
