“Here. Let me just handle it quick.”
Have those words come out of your mouth before?
There are many variations, but the end result is the same.
A task needs to be done and you, the owner, end up doing it.
It doesn’t matter if the task is taking out the trash from the office or going to a meeting with a huge potential client.
Some small business owners have a challenge with delegating.
Now, there is nothing wrong with the owner of the company taking out the trash once in a while. But in the grand scheme of things it’s maybe not the most important task for the owner to be doing.
Delegating is an essential part of every growing business. It’s something the best businesspeople have always been able to do; they look for ways to make their business and its processes as efficient as possible.
If you’re struggling with delegating then here we have a step-by-step guide for doing it and growing your business.
Step 1. Document Business Tasks And Your Tasks
This is the first step, biggest step and probably the most important step.
Hopefully you won’t get tripped up on this one because it can be time consuming, but going through the exercise can be wonderful. You’ll probably learn something about your company that you didn’t know. You’ll probably instantly identify ways to make your company more efficient.
For example, for my business I kept getting asked what the price was. I would get inquiries with that question. Our product had the same price. I didn’t have it on the website. It would take just a couple minutes to respond, but I realized I could put the price on the website and eliminate all those emails.
It can be little things, but also sometimes it can be big things. You’ll get the a-ha moment where you say to yourself, “Why am I doing this?” or “Why is he doing this?”
It takes time to document your tasks, but it’s a worthwhile exercise and one you can do every quarter or year.
Step 2. Prioritize The Tasks
Next comes prioritizing the tasks. And this is hard because it’s easy to become like a hoarder. You don’t want to let go of everything. Like someone might think that their polyester bell-bottoms are worth keeping in the closet you might think that keeping a task is worthwhile.
You only have so much time in the day. Your employees only have so much time. Your business can only focus on so many things.
You have to make difficult cuts in order to optimize your business.
Create a list. It can include things you’re doing now and things you want to work on in the future.
You can also look at the list and think that you should be doing something. That’s an indication that you need to bring on the resources to make it happen so your business can grow.
Step 3. What Do You Want To Do?
I like the phrase: You are what you do every day.
Do you want to do the service work at your company, the production work?
There’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s what you’ll be and you can be the owner at the same time, but there are other important tasks to be handled and you’ll have to hire business managers.
You don’t need to be the business person at your company. You also don’t need to be the production person, but there are things that your business needs and the reality is that if you want to grow you can’t do it all.
Identify your vision for yourself in the company. Set yourself up to be the best at those tasks. Look at others in business that you respect. Look for successful companies. Chances are the leaders aren’t doing many things (because they can’t).
You’ll get an idea for how much you can do. It’ll probably be less than what you think you can do and that’s okay. Let the person with the forever-small business be proud of how much they work.
You’re going to work hard at your specific tasks and build your company.
Step 4. Trust Your Team
This is a big step.
You have to trust others to do the tasks for your business. Can they do them as well as you? Maybe not, but that might be okay.
The more likely outcome is that they do it differently than you, but maybe that method is better. And that might actually be the likely outcome. You’re probably good at managing all kinds of tasks and doing them all pretty good, but not great. You can get the job done, but maybe not as well as you think.
Trust that you can hire someone to learn the job.
When you document all the tasks for your business the next step will be to create procedures that people can follow to execute the tasks.
Step 5. Provide Ownership Of Tasks
The next step is to give each person ownership of their tasks. You’ll give them your procedure for doing a task, but make sure they know that they can find ways to do it better. Have them check with you and if they discover something really great then maybe you can do that same improvement in other areas of the business.
Final Step: Communicate The Vision
Finally, I like to add this step in the process. It’s the owner’s responsibility or perhaps the CEO’s (if you hire one) to share the vision and communicate what the vision is for the entire team.
People like to know what they’re working to achieve. Let them know the goals of the company and what you see the company being in 5, 10, 50 years.
Conclusion
If you’re working all kinds of crazy hours for your small business and getting nowhere the chances are that you need to delegate.
The really first step is to admit what’s going on. And if you have the ambition and vision to grow your company beyond what it is now you’ll need to look at each of these steps and figure out the future of your business with other people (or tools) performing tasks.
There’s just no way for you to handle it all yourself.
