One of the hardest things for entrepreneurs in their early stages has to be delegation. They want to do it all, it’s their baby. But in order to grow your business, you have to be able to let go of some things and delegate them to trusted team members.
I remember people telling me early on that I should be delegating more tasks to Virtual Assistants. But… I didn’t want to listen, mainly for two reasons:
- I thought it would be faster if I did it myself
- I thought I didn’t have the budget
Let me address those two points in case you hear the same little voices in your head.
Why You Need To Delegate to Grow Your Business
Start by making a list, checking it twice…
Yes, if you plan to delegate a task that only needs to be executed one time, it’s probably faster if you do it yourself. But usually those are not the tasks we want to delegate. In order to come up with the tasks that you can outsource to your Virtual Assistant, I recommend that you have a piece of paper on your desk during a full week, and every time you’re working on a repetitive task that could easily be done by someone else, if explained well, write it down. If you need some help with ideas, Chris Ducker has written a great list with 101 tasks to outsource to virtual staff.
Finding the right person
Let’s face it, the human aspect of any corporation, large or small, is the richest but sometimes also the most difficult aspect of the business. Not every work-relationship you enter will be a success. But your challenge is to find the best possible fit for your team. And once you have found that person, you will be accelerating the growth of your business within a few short months.
Creating a system
Yes, it can be a frustrating process if not organized well: you just spent 3 months training your dream team member when she announces that she’s pregnant and will no longer run her business! Bummer!
That’s where the system comes in. I wish I could say that I invented it, but I didn’t! I simply read Sam Carpenter’s book ‘Work The System’ and highly recommend you do too. In his bestseller Sam explains how important it is to create operational procedures for each task in your business, whether you delegate it or not. It sounds like a big word for a small business, but all it is is a description of procedure for each task. In the example below you see the Operating Procedure that’s in place for creating a blog vital, a blurb I create for each blog post to make the task of sharing it after on Social Media easier.
The system helps to keep the costs down
As I mentioned earlier, you will not always find your dream VA right away. But by putting in place operational procedures you will only do the ground work once. And if it doesn’t work out with the first person, you will have the system in place for the second one.
Delegating without a budget?
When starting out it is really hard to spend money on things you could do yourself (because you don’t have enough clients yet). But whenever you are spending hours creating visuals for Facebooks, or scheduling your tweets for the month, well, you are not using your time very efficiently. Instead you could be out networking, bringing in new clients, creating a new training course or developing a new product. I recommend you start delegating early on, just a few tasks, and as your business grows you are already in the ‘delegation habit’ and can outsource more and more. That’s what I did in my business.
I hope this has given you some food for thought for your own business and encouraged you to start looking at outsourcing options.
Where and how can you find the right people for your dream team?
The best resource I’ve come accross is this 100+ Service Contractor list from Melissa Ingold, the queen of outsourcing. I’m referring to it every time I’m looking for a new Virtual Assistant, Web Designer, Copywriter etc etc. I highly recommend it. If you’re not just ready to hire your assistant yet, here are two more resources:
- Fiverr, where you can get pretty much anything, starting at $5 !
- TextMaster for copywriting projects and translations
No matter how small the project, but remember that you need to delegrate to grow!