Are you an entrepreneur wanting more free time? I’ve talked about how delegation is the most important muscle for business owners.
In this video, I’m sharing the different stages of delegation and how to get good at it.
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Transcription:
Are you an entrepreneur wanting more free time, and I don’t just mean like a little bit of free time. I mean, like semi retired free time, like four day, weekends free time. Well, I’m going to tell you in this video about the most important entrepreneurial muscle that you need to build and work on for you to be successful in growing your business. In my introduction, I said that delegation is the most important entrepreneurial muscle. And I absolutely believe that because as an entrepreneur, our role is to grow a business and an organization outside of ourself. Many entrepreneurs that I see that are unsuccessful when they start hiring staff and building a team end up basically having a whole bunch of people around them without much substance in the actual business itself. But a true business owner who owns a business who has a business, a real business is something that you can step away from, and have it still continue to run itself without you necessarily having to be there. And that’s really the definition of entrepreneurship is creating an organization or an organism that can survive and thrive without your day to day involvement. So how do we get there? Well, I’m going to be talking about delegation. And if you haven’t watched any of our other videos before, my name is Peter Moriarty. I founded a business called itGenius over 15 years ago, and we help small and medium sized business owners with their technology strategy to help them be more successful in business and create more freedom in their life. And we use something called the growth roadmap to take businesses through different stages of technology strategy, depending on what stage of business they’re at, we know that there are 1000s of tools. And there’s lots of information out there that tells business owners, you should use this tool and you need a CRM and you need a dashboard. And it tells you all of the conflicting information about what technology is right for your stage of business right now. And we try and like de-mystify that, make it easy, and then give you a logical progression of where you should be putting your attention. As you go through different stages of business. We also talk about some entrepreneurial development type topics, of which this is one of them on the channel. So if you’re not already subscribed, please make sure you do. So let’s swing back to talking about delegating. And the problems of not delegating will run you into some traps as a business owner. Number one, you’re gonna get caught up in low value tasks. And the mentality or the mindset around, this can only be done my way, or I’m the best person to do this, or someone else is going to bugger it up can really hold you back in business. Because let’s say, you know, just for starters, it’s impossible to grow a business once you run out of time. And if you run out of time, and for you that might be 40 hours a week in the business, it might be 60 hours a week in the business. Or if it’s a side hustle, maybe it’s only 10 hours a week that you’ve got available. Once you run out of your time, there’s no way the business can actually grow or be more successful until you literally start delegating. And so this is a skill to be worked on. Just like riding a bike is a skill to be worked on. It’s something that when you start, you’re probably not going to be very good. But over time with practice, you’ll get better and better and better. I’m going to show you the simplest way to get delegation happening for you. But before we jump into the framework, I want to first give you a bit of a reality check on what the value of your time is. Now we’ve got other videos on how to calculate your most important hourly rate. So you can focus on your highest and best use of your time. So you can make use of the 80-20 principle where 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results. I want you to be really good like kind of a detective in scoping out, where am I spending time on high value tasks? And what am I spending time on low value tasks, because when you put all of your attention and effort on your high value, critical and strategic tasks, you’ll find that your business results will quickly multiply in a good way. So how do we do that? Well, the first thing you need to do is gather some data. And to do that we will measure where we’re spending our time every day. Now there’s manual ways of doing this, like you know, writing down on a piece of paper, what did I do in 15 minute blocks all day long, or there’s an automated way to do that. And that’s using a tool called rescue time. And if you head to rescue time.com, you can download for free. We’re not an affiliate, but it’s highly recommended from us. That tool will be installed on your computer, and all day long it will track what you’re doing. Now what happens from there is that we’ll give you a report at the end of the week, and let you know how much time you spent on social time how much time you spent reconciling items in your accounting system, how long you spent in your emails, replying to customers, and how long you spent doing anything else that you need to do in your business. And the thing that I really love about this tool is it quickly highlights ways in which I’m spending unproductive time. It’s also a nice slap in the face for your own self accountability. If you’re spending time procrastinating or goofing off on social media, that’s going to quickly show you just how much time is going into those activities. So once you’ve got an idea of where you’re spending your time, you’re pretty certainly come to quickly find that there are ways where you might be spending your time inefficiently, or there are ways where you’re spending your time on tasks that you’re missing. Maybe not the best person to do, perhaps you could find someone else to do those tasks for you. And that’s when it’s time to delegate. So let’s talk about the process of delegation and how we actually make delegation happen. Now I’m going to give you a simple five step process. There are other frameworks and other layers, and you can google them and have a look. But I want to give you the most basic five step process, right. So the first delegation is basically, I’m doing it myself, and no one else is involved in the process. And that’s basically where we get started in. For some things, you may choose to still do that. It might be things like, you know, looking at how much money’s in the bank and making strategic decisions for the business, or you might be at an early stage of business. So you’re the one running all of the strategy. Or maybe it’s the kind of things where you disappear from the business for a day and do some thinking time on where you want to take the vision and the direction of the business. But pretty quickly, we want to get some of the more practical things that we’re doing day to day, like replying to customer emails, managing projects, dealing with suppliers, or vendors, and even doing things like customer service, to get involved with some other people in the business. And so the first stage of delegation is I’m going to do it, and you’re going to watch, that’s called observation. And so I’m going to still continually have full control of the task, and then someone else is going to watch me do it. Now at this point, you can already start embedding some really great training principles and practices to start getting people ready to take on this task. And one of the things that I do is, when I’m showing someone a task, I’ll always make sure I record the meeting. Now I love using Google Meet, because with one button, I can record a meeting. And then it’s automatically going to place the recording into my Google Drive. And so I can share that with team members who need access to that training video, or if you know, they’ve been delegated at some point in the future, they can always go back to when they were just watching me doing it. And from time to time, I’m going to be providing some commentary on this is the reason why I do this, or these are the you know, the intricacies of reconciling this particular account. And we’re going to share that into the recording so that anyone observing is going to be able to rely on that when it comes time for them to do the task. So step number three is we do it together. And that’s more of a collaborative effort, right. And so from there, that means that we’re going to share the task, maybe we’re on a shared Google meet together, and I’m going to do a bit and you’re going to do a bit. But basically, we’re both going to be really hands on and working on the task together. Sometimes that’s a matter of doing a little bit of stepping back, but guiding someone through the process. So it’s their hand on the actual mouse, doing what you need to get done. But you’re just kind of like guiding them through. And so you’re very much still doing it for them or doing it with them. But they’re actually in the driver’s seat. Now, this is some of the things like billing system updates, or maybe drafting a customer response in an email. Or it might be something like, you know, working on a particular piece of technology that you have inside the business, scheduling some webinars inside of Zoom, whatever that is for you, allowing someone else to do it. And then you instructing them works great at this third stage. Next is the fourth stage. And that is where you’re going to do it. And I’m going to watch. And this is where you start kind of like testing and evaluating. Is this person competent in performing this task, you can still record these if you like, just so you’ve got reference. And one of the things I love about Google Drive is it just automatically saves everything that I do in a simple place where I can find all of my past meetings. And in this stage of delegation, were really about checking if this person can do it or not. So what I like to do is kind of like sit back and let them do it. And I only jump in if someone gets stuck somewhere. Or if they have a question. Basically, the graduation point of competency is when someone can fully complete a task that I’ve delegated to them without me needing to jump in at all. And so I’m basically leaving it to them to do the task while I observe. And I’m just jumping in if they’re doing something wrong, or if they get stuck somewhere, then they’re going to jump up and let me know stage number five, you do it and just report back to me. And that’s where I fully trust that you’ve been delegated the process. And you can take care of this yourself. Now we’ve got some other videos, which include things like the system for creating systems and ways to communicate how tasks should be done when you actually share it with team members. So you can be better at documenting all of the systems in a business. And you can not have to go through this manual process step by step, and there in some of our other videos. And we also have more in depth videos on delegation and creating great business systems, including how to store them inside Google sites and build an intranet inside our Google Classroom. So if you check that out, it’s on the link below for the transfer in offer. If you’re an existing business customer of Google, then you get free access to our Google classrooms, where you can access that training on systemising your business. But for this one, this is all about delegation. And I want to make sure that you’re getting it right for your business. If you’re interested in delegating the responsibility of sales, customer relationships, follow ups and communication to your team, then you need a great technology system to make that happen. Now we are a global partner for copper CRM. And that is a system that takes a AI and automation driven technology data from your emails. It literally pulls all of the data from your emails. puts that into a amazing system for you to communicate and collaborate with your customers. Now you can use this for customer service, you can use it for deal management, any kind of relational work that you’re doing with a customer, copper CRM is the brain for everything that you’re getting done. And we use this right across our business to tremendous results. Now, if you haven’t seen some of our other videos yet on managing a CRM system and why a CRM system should be the heart of your business, then go make sure that you check them out. And we’ll link them down below as well. But we currently have a limited time of a few to review how you do relationships in your business and what kind of pieces of technology you use for them. Getting your personal relationships off your plate and onto the plate of your team members is one of the most important things for you to grow and scale as a business. And we want to help you make that happen. So jump on the limited offer below, under the link on this video. absolutely free of charge to have a consultation with our team. And we’ve got some amazing goodies on the other side of that landing page. I look forward to catching you in the next video. If you’re not yet subscribed to our channel, please subscribe. Share this with someone who you think might be useful. And if you drop us a like if you like that content, we would much appreciate it. I’ll see in the comment section and answer as many questions as I can. If not, I’ll see you in the next video. Cheers!
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