I know you might be scared that if you delegate the things you don’t want to do in your business, your staff are just going to make mistakes and you’re going to spend more time correcting their work.
Here’s how you get over that:
Realizing that it’s a time investment that you need to make a deposit in order to get a return on. And… it won’t even take as long as you think it will.
For example, a lot of business owners think very short-term in the moment, like, “It’ll take me an hour to do this particular task, but it’ll also take me an hour to explain it to someone else to do it and then another hour to check and correct their work, so why bother giving it to someone else?” and you end up doing the work yourself to save time.
But really, there are a few assumptions messing up the thinking here that also have a trickle effect end in slowed down business growth in general.
The first is that under the pressure of so much to get done on your to-do list, the mind is giving faulty time estimations to prove that any further stress or delays are unacceptable and will cause more stress and delays.
But in reality, it usually turns out that it takes LESS time to explain and delegate than you think it will, let’s say in this case maybe half an hour. Then maybe it will take the hour you assumed to review their work and give feedback, corrections, etc. – but that’s only the first time!
Then the employee does that task again, and again, and the second and third time you have less and less feedback, and by the fourth or fifth time, you have almost none – and that task is off your plate forever.
(That’s a big piece of how my clients end up doubling or tripling their business AND having a lot more free time in just a few months, btw 😉 )
Let’s look at a real-world example from one of my clients who had a 35% increase in his business in 4 months because he learned how to mentor and delegate more effectively.
He owns an insurance agency and he let me know that he wanted to increase the number of policies written by the agency to a certain number, but that he was also having a hard time keeping employees (so that was costing him a lot of time), and that with young children at home, he didn’t have the time to put in more hours at the office.
I worked with him to identify how he could best leverage and invest his time to produce the results he wanted, because as business owners we’re often so focused on the short-term goals that we overlook what’s needed to put in place to reach the long-term goals.
He was fantastic at selling (that’s how he ended up starting his own agency to begin with), and I thought there was an opportunity for him to download more of his sales knowledge to his employees so that they could sell more FOR him and be motivated to stay with his agency.
So we worked out how he could fit time into his schedule for him to sit down with his employees WHILE they made client service calls and for that time to be really productive.
(This also involved eliminating some things from his schedule that weren’t as important – and that’s a topic I’ll be covering on a future post)
When he was on the calls with his agents, he noticed that they were doing a good job servicing the clients, but they were missing opportunities to ask a few small questions to find out what additional coverages would help the clients meet their long-term needs.
He was good at it, but he didn’t realize they weren’t. So there were all these opportunities to increase the number of policies they sold without having to add more outbound calls from lead sources (another way he took time-consuming tasks off his plate) or him having to make a huge amount of sales himself to keep the pace and to win the growth awards he set as goals from his company.
He also developed a system from these live mentoring sessions to track leading indicators of their sales behaviors and reviewed them weekly with each employee.
By delegating more, and mentoring along the way, he turned increasing the agencies sales production into a true team effort, and everyone got energized and rewarded for it.
Then we met for coffee a few months later, and he reported that his business had already increased 35% in those few months and was on target to double that year. The employee turnover had stopped, and he was on pace to win the award for agency growth and take his team on the prize trip with him.
That’s what’s possible when you learn to not only delegate, but empower your employees with your mentoring during the process: it takes a little more time for you in the beginning with them, but you end up with less on your plate and more income as a result.
Helping business owners to identify the greatest area of opportunity for delegation and taking work off their list to grow their business is one of the things I help clients with in my 8-week program.
I also cover how to use emotional clearing techniques to get past the fears, doubts, and/or stresses that keep you from scaling your business, like taking the kinds of actions that this client took to see his best opportunities, rebalance his time to take advantage of these opportunities, and see his business take off.
DM me on Facebook if you’re interested in the program and we’ll have a short chat to see if it’s a good fit.
