How to Delegate to Elevate Yourself as a Business Owner

As a small business owner, you’re overloaded with tasks. You start out as marketing associate, sales manager, HR director, cashier, administrative coordinator, director of product development, customer service associate, and accounting manager. You’re doing everything. And, when you’re small it’s not only necessary, but doable. Sure – there may be some long days, but you can keep up. The balls stay in the air (or at least most of them do).

But, as you grow, you need to start delegating tasks. If you continue to try to do everything in your business, after a certain point, the balls will start dropping. At first, it may not seem like a big deal, but soon customer orders will be delayed, you’ll forget you have a new employee starting, or you’ll miss a sales tax payment. The little things pile up and your business is in chaos.

Most business owners wait too long to delegate. They don’t think they can afford to hire someone to help them or they don’t trust someone else to do the work, so they continue trying to do it all. What they don’t realize is that by doing so, they are holding their business back.

I Can’t Afford It
If you think you can’t afford to hire someone, think about how your revenue will grow if you’re able to delegate work off your plate and focus on the important things. It’s possible you can’t afford not to hire someone. There are a lot of ways to hire someone in the early stages of business.

1. You can hire someone part-time, so that you’re not committing to a full-time hire. Even just 5 hours per week can help relieve some of the administrative and time-intensive tasks that you can then shift into higher-value work.
2. You can outsource tasks. There are a lot of tasks in a small business that business owners aren’t really qualified to handle. Accounting, IT, HR, and marketing are all tasks that can be outsourced if they are taking up too much of you don’t have the skillset that align. You don’t have to outsource everything at once. Pick the task that takes you the most time or is the most difficult for you to manage yourself and choose that one to outsource. You’ll also find that many outsourced providers will have different levels of service. So, you can start small and then add services as your business grows.

No One Will Do It Like I Do
This was me. I held on to way too many things over the years because I just didn’t think someone else could do it as good as me. And, you know what, I might have been right related to certain tasks. But, there were also many tasks that were actually performed better when I put someone else in charge of them. Delegating takes effort.  

1. Invest the time needed to document procedures, train your team member, and adjust checklists and workflows as determined during training.
2. Inspect what you expect. You can’t delegate a task and then just disappear. You need to check in regularly. After first delegating a task or process, check in daily or weekly. As you gain comfort in the quality of the work being performed, the timeliness of completion, and the confidence of the person assigned the task, you can start to extend the time between check-ins and loosen the leash.
3. If you’re giving someone the responsibility for a task, you have to also give them the authority perform that task. You can’t micromanage their every move. Yes, you should check in. And, yes, you should review and approve, but you should also give them the authority to make decisions. Over time, as the team member gains your trust, you can give more authority.    

How Do I Decide What to Delegate?
Spend the next couple weeks performing an audit of your time. Track your tasks and how much time those tasks take.

1. Which tasks are most important for you to keep now? If you’re the primary product development person in your company, it makes sense that you would continue to own that. If you’re an expert at marketing and really passionate about your brand, you might continue to manage that function. If you’re terrible at accounting and you’re always behind, that’s probably one you can let go.
2. Pick out your most low-value tasks. First, consider whether anyone needs to keep doing them. Sometimes you’re doing something that isn’t serving you or your business. Then, consider the amount of time the other low value tasks take on a weekly basis and think about the best way to group those tasks together to delegate those to either a part-time employee or an outsourced VA.
3. Don’t just delegate something because you hate doing it. If it’s important that you are the one to continue owning that process or you really are the best person for the job, it may be in your best interest to continue. However, if there is something you hate doing and you also aren’t the best person for the job, that should be top of the list!

If you want to grow your business – or just gain back your sanity – you have to delegate. It’s one of the most important leadership skills you can learn.