How to Delegate Tasks

One of the hardest things we do as business owners is learn to trust and delegate tasks to others. We want things done our way and we only trust ourselves to do them. Afterall, doing things ourselves is more efficient and saves money, right? Wrong! I’m going to try to convince you otherwise in today’s discussion.

As you are starting out in your business, you probably won’t have much money and you may not have enough work to fill up your schedule. As a result, you will probably be doing everything for your business yourself. Accounting, sales, marketing, planning and executing all aspects of your business. This is normal and it’s a good thing. You should know the ins and outs of every part of your business. When I start a new business, I learn to do everything myself. When I started my casino party business, I learned to deal all of the casino games, even the complicated game of craps. It’s important to know how to do it; however, as you grow your business, this habit of doing everything yourself can lead to some major opportunity costs. Learning to trust others to take over responsibilities is essential to growing your operation in the most efficient way.

Your most valuable tool for earning money is your time. The problem is, your time is limited to 24 hours in a day. When growing your business, it requires that you allocate your precious time to it’s highest and best use. For example, If you teach music lessons at $50 per hour and you are spending a significant chunk of your time doing something that you could hire out for less than $50 per hour (like billing your customers or doing data entry or something) then you are paying an opportunity cost. Your time should be operating on the highest hourly rate possible. Another example: If you are not doing anything to grow your business because you are swamped with tasks related to running your business, you are probably not leveraging your time effectively. I bet those tasks that you are doing could be given to others. If you do that, would you have more time to do things in your business to help grow it? Let me tell you how I have taken this to the next level as I’ve grown my business.

I try to work on my business, not in my business. I have found that my time is best spent networking and doing things related to growth and getting sales. I can’t effectively do that if I’m doing administrative tasks inside my business, or I’ll get bogged down with that and the important growth tasks I’m doing will fall by the WAYSIDE. Every time I’ve hired someone to do something that I was doing but don’t actually need to do, it has resulted in more money in my pocket, despite the cost of hiring someone. I have really made some big moves in terms of hiring others to take on these tasks. Each time I hired someone, it was scary for me. Thoughts that came to me included “I can save money if I do this myself”. “They won’t do it as well as I can”. Everytime I hired someone to take something over, these fears would dissipate because I always ended up making more money. I still get nervous any time I hire out a new position but I get less nervous every time because as long as I’m thoughtful and careful about the process and who I’m hiring, my income goes up. AND, I’m able to give someone a job that they love doing. Win-win situation.

So, why isn’t everyone doing this? In conversations with some of my business owner friends about how things are going in their business, I frequently identify areas in which they are missing out on huge opportunities to delegate tasks that they are doing. I sometimes point out that if they hired someone else to do this, then they could spend their time doing that instead and their business would grow. As I bring this up to them, I’m usually met with some kind of risk adverse response. “It’s just easier if I do it” or “I don’t want to spend the money to hire someone else to do it” or “Nobody will be able to do it right except me”. I don’t usually press it too much because it is their business but in many cases, I want to shake them and explain that they could really make more money if they can let go and take a little bit of risk in hiring someone to free up their time to do things that will yield bigger returns.

One of the big hurdles for people in delegating tasks is, they feel like they can do the job better than anyone else. I can relate to this. EARLIER in my career I was very reluctant to have anyone else do anything. Even as I started to hire some people, I found myself just doing the job myself. It took some significant courage and trust to let go of more and more of these responsibilities. As I did this, I learned something interesting. People are very smart and very capable and they did these tasks as well or better than I did. Trust your employees. They are capable and extremely smart. If you hire an expert in the area that you need help in, they are more capable and smarter than you about it. It might take a little transition time but you will thank me after you do. Speaking of a transition, do realize that when you make this transition, it will actually increase your time spent on these tasks at first because you will be training someone. Think of this training as an investment. It will pay off down the road.

In my businesses, if I have enough work to keep me busy, I eliminate almost everything off of my plate that I don’t have to do. If a customer calls and wants to talk with me, I have to do that. Similarly, if there is a networking opportunity where I have a valuable role to play in the relationship, that is probably the best use of my time. But I try not to do anything that I can hire someone else to do. A lazier person might then decide to just watch TV all day but it is in my nature to work hard so I will fill my time with very effective ways to grow my business. Most business owners don’t grow their business because they spend all their time putting out fires and doing things they can hire others to do. People who learn to delegate responsibilities have an advantage over their competition because they can spend their time growing their business. Their competition can’t.

I suggest you check out a book called the 4 hour work week. In this book, Tim Ferris discusses how to take this concept of getting work off of your plate. He takes it to an extreme level. As with most things, I have taken some of the concepts and implemented them and have ignored some of the concepts that weren’t interesting to me. My goals and the way I would like to spend my time is different than him. But, the book was a game changer for me. I began getting stuff off my plate in effective ways. I started to let my business work for me. In some ways, I took the concept to an even bigger extreme than Tim Ferris does. One of my businesses is completely absentee. I do not work at all in it. I have a manager that handles all of it. She even writes herself her own check. Every few months I might go in and take a peak at what is going on but I trust her to handle it and she does a great job. The best part is, she absolutely loves the situation. She has told me it is the best job that she has ever had and because we do a profit sharing situation, the better she does financially. I’m rewarded for my financial investment and my starting the company and the support I give and she is rewarded for doing a great job.

Thanks for watching today. I hope you found the concepts worthwhile and you are able to think about how to work more efficiently and smarter. As always, click below to follow or subscribe. I'D love for these videos to help you in growing your business.