One of a hundred things I wish I knew when I started my business is delegation.
When you delegate responsibilities the capacity of your business is limited to the number of capable resources you can employ in your business. Without delegation you’re limited to what you can accomplish within the hours of any given day.
Since only God can make time stand still, don’t plan on adding any hours to your day to increase your capacity. Consequently, at some point your business will reach max capacity and possibly even take a hit on quality of output should your load spike and exceed your capacity.
Before You Delegate
As most things in life, delegating responsibility is easier said than done. There are many things to consider before you should delegate responsibilities:
- You have to be willing to let go and understand that mistakes will be made, but it’s okay so long as the appropriate actions are taken to make things right so the expected end result is achieved every time.
- Cash Flow. Be sure you will be able to support the resources. How will you determine that a resource is giving you a return on investment? When does it become profitable, and how long will it take to get to that point? What resources can cover the responsibilities until it makes business sense to bring on that additional resource?
- Establish a training program, or a how-to document that employees can reference as they need to. You may even give new employees a mentor for the first X days/weeks/months.
- Identify roles and responsibilities for the positions you intend to fill.
- Set Goals. Be sure to identify the expected max capacity of one person filling that position, and how you intend on measuring their performance.
- Track, Measure, and Review performance on a regular basis
- Quality Assurance. Make sure your team is delivering the level of quality you’re selling to the customer. This means you need to “set the bar”… in other words, make a thorough checklist that should be followed as a way to assure quality is maintained.
Perfect Example of Delegation
Like many service oriented businesses the business owner does everything from attracting customers, providing the service, invoicing the customers, collecting payment, following up to ensure satisfaction, and doing drip marketing in an effort to get a repeat customer or client referrals.
Although there are MANY elements to a service business that should be delegated, one of the most important aspects to running a business is filling the pipeline with customers. In this day and age the best way to fill your pipeline is by driving traffic to a professional web design through proper Internet marketing techniques. Getting people that are in need of your products or services to visit your optimized website will yield quality leads to your sales team.
Wait… did I say “sales team”? That’s RIGHT! Effective marketing and advertising will send a flood of opportunities to the business owner making him so busy he can’t fulfill because he’s too busy answering the calls. So, the business owner should get sales people to “take the calls.”
Delegate Everything
Earlier I said, “…delegation is easier said than done.” Perhaps the responsibility of delegation is something you should delegate?! When the time is right in your business, hire a CEO to run the mothership. While you still own the business, the day to day operations are being overseen by your CEO who has a CIO, CFO, COO, CMO, etc… Meanwhile, you’re deciding which iron you should use to make that 174 yard shot to the pin without ending up in any of the hazards surrounding the green.
In your business…
- What responsibilities do you wish you could delegate?
- What resource has made the biggest impact in your capacity?
- What has been the most effective way for you to track performance, assure quality, or prove ROI?