When you first start a business, you are often doing all of the jobs, all of the time because you have more time than money. While you sit and stare at your email or phone waiting for new clients to connect with you, you have plenty of time to post on Instagram or catch up your bookkeeping. But as you grow, you will have to find ways to pass off some of your responsibilities in order to not lose your mind or your customers. This is easier said then done sometimes, so let’s talk about how to do this well.
When I started my business, I spent my days doing a little of this and a little of that. As the business grew, I was struggling to get everything done and make sure I was delivering quality work to my clients. Something had to give, but I wasn’t sure what. So, I started by making a list of all of the tasks or jobs I did over a two week period. Then I ranked those tasks on 3 criteria: how much I enjoyed doing them, how much time they took in a week, and how important they were to my business success.
Cost Benefit Analysis
As your business grows and the value of your time increases. For me, this means that I am constantly evaluating whether there is more ROI in spending time on something or in hiring someone else to do the job. This was my first step in looking at what I wanted to delegate.
I reviewed my list of tasks and highlighted the ones that were the most important to my business success. It felt crucial to me to keep my hands on those tasks to keep the ship moving forward.
In contrast I also pulled a list of tasks that I actually felt were at least less necessary and in some cases, could be dropped completely. These were the low hanging fruit that could free up some time right away.
The third facet of this review was to look at the tasks that I could do and were moderately important, but maybe someone else would do better or faster and my time would be freed up to do the most important work.
What Do You Actually Enjoy
Most of us get into business because we enjoy the main work of the business,, not because we love paperwork or finances or marketing, necessarily. After being in business for a while, I realized that there were certain tasks I just didn’t love doing and others I could spend all day on.
This is a great place to look when figuring out what to delegate. Don’t hand off your favorite parts of your job unless you absolutely have to. That has a chance of completely killing your drive and enthusiasm. Instead, let’s hand off the things you dread.
When I went through this exercise I had a half dozen tasks that I really hated and therefore procrastinated doing. These tasks went straight on to my list to hand off. I also had another small group that I would be willing to hand off, if I could find a person or a system that could do it better and faster.
Time is Money
When I was assessing my own situation, I knew that I wanted to cut about 10hrs a week off of my own plate, so I needed to really understand where my time was going. When I mapped my hours over that two week period, it gave me that data.
For the next step, I took my list of Definitely Delegate, created in the first two reviews and mapped out the total time. When I pulled that all together, I actually had more possible hours to cut then I needed, so I felt good about that as a starting point to creating a job description and finding the right person/people to help.
Building Your Team
As I built my job description from the tasks on my list, I realized that the bulk of them fit pretty neatly into the job of an Admin Assistant/Office Manager. That was where I decided to start. I built a job description for 8-10hrs/week and found a student who fit the bill perfectly. I brought her on as my first employee and it she helped me to get organized and catch up on all of those tasks I had procrastinated.
A few of the other tasks on the list made more sense to hand off to contractors who specialized in those areas. One person helped to overhaul my client intake and management software. They were key in making my workflows and automated systems run smoothly. They brought an amazing level of expertise for that short term project, turning it around in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to muddle through.
Delegation Is Self-Care and Smart Business
You are smart and capable. But, just because you can do all of the things, doesn’t mean you should. By handing off tasks that make sense, you prevent burn out, are more present for the work that is the heart of your business and you would probably have more satisfied clients as well.