How to Delegate and Why You Don’t Do It

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This post is a follow up to my recent One Essential Ingredient for Big Bucks Online article in which I drew the conclusion that in order to make any decent money, and to have a real business, an online entrepreneur needed to figure out how to leverage other people’s time and have their business grow beyond the magical number of ONE.

I was hinting at outsourcing and my struggles with the concept, but really outsourcing is just a specific form of a bigger concept: delegation.

In the comments a person with the very unusual name of “Seeking Revenue” left an excellent and honest comment in response to my questions:

Skills Required?
Yes and I don’t know how to break it down into no-brainer parts so that I can outsource or automate.

Trust Required?
Yes, I can’t let go.

There was more, but those bits are the meat of it. We’ll cover off the “break it down into no-brainer parts” in a future post…that’s the easy part. The tough part is the “I can’t let go.” Turns out that Seeking Revenue is not alone [my hand is extremely raised at this one].

Reason’s why people don’t delegate:

• I could do it better myself.
• I don’t know if I can trust her to do it.
• I don’t have the time to show anyone how to do it.
• There is no one else to delegate to.
• I don’t want to give up this task because I like doing it.
• I’m the only person who knows how to do this.
• I can’t afford to hire someone to do it.

Any of these look familiar? They sure resonate for me.

How to Delegate with this Control Freak Present

Usually control freaks are not swayed by logic, but really business should not be about feelings, it should be about numbers.

Most of the above excuses are based on feelings and allowing these limiting feelings to control important decisions in a business is not a grown-up thing to do.

Some of them are of course true “I could do it better myself” is an example, but then it becomes your job to create training and support so the person can get as good or better than you at their tasks.

“I can’t afford to hire someone to do it.” This is one that I find in my head all the time. It is a classic symptom of CEO Ignoramus-itis. It really means I don’t know what the hell is going on in my business/project. If I did have some kind of profit metric in place for the task to be outsourced, then it is simple math to determine whether or not it is affordable to outsource.

Expected return is greater than outsourcing cost then outsource = YES

It’s really that simple. To have a real business [my constant craving] all you need to do is create a scalable system that can turn 100 dollars in to 110 dollars. Of course that’s the ideal, it may start as a return of 60 and have to be racheted up to be greater than 100, but without the metrics, it is impossible.

If we refuse to spend the 100 dollars in the first place, then we’re doomed to always having a small and burdensome business.

To conclude here are some delegation tips.

Make sure the standards and the outcome are clear. What needs to be done, when should it be finished and to what degree of quality or detail?

• Delegate the objective, not the procedure. Outline the desired results, not the methodology.
• Ask people to provide progress reports. Set interim deadlines to see how things are going.
• Be prepared to trade short term errors for long term results.

Jon Symons
Getting beyond my comfort zone…in search of greater success.

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