Why Delegate and How to

Why Delegate?

Because there are only so many hours in a week and some of those hours should not be spent on your business for the sake of your wellbeing and your love of your business!

Seriously though, you know your business better than anyone, so should be the one driving it forward, perfecting the service or product you provide, going out and meeting amazing new clients and telling them why your business should be their number one choice, not tied to your desk working through 500 emails from slightly dubious origins trying to sell you slightly dubious things, chasing an unpaid invoice from 6 months ago or trying to work out if the saving of £50 on a flight is worth the three changes and 16 hour wait in Nauru (what you get when you google “remote countries on earth”).

Your time is valuable - say your hourly rate is £100 per hour, a VA’s average hourly rate is £30. By outsourcing routine and time-consuming tasks, you can free up your valuable hours to focus on higher-value activities that directly contribute to moving your business forward and income generation.

How to Delegate

Identify the work that is not business critical.

1. Take a minute just to list all the work that you do in a week.

2. From that list separate out the items that you feel you really shouldn’t be doing, really don’t want to be doing or just dislike doing!

3. From this list create three columns called Recurring (e.g. inbox and diary management, invoicing, social media management), Ad-Hoc (e.g. travel and social arrangements, content creation, campaigns) and One-off (e.g. event organisation, research, website updates).

From the Recurring list and to dangle your toes in the delegation pool, hand over one or two items such as inbox and diary management to a VA or member of your team who you feel would be best suited to this task. Then, reallocate the time you would have spent doing that to one of your business or strategy critical tasks or go for a walk (some of my best ideas happen when I am in the least corporate of places).

Spend time explaining and giving feedback.

Although you may feel “I may as well do it myself”, spending time at the beginning of delegating each task explaining in detail how you want the task to be done will save a whole load of time and reworking at the end. Set out guidance for:-

· Priorities

· Deadlines

· Your preference for the way tasks are completed

· Company or Industry Best Practices or your business style

· Key people or contacts to liaise with

· Tasks that may relate to the task in hand

· When you are available for communication

· How often you would like to be updated and how (phone/email)

At the end, give credit where credit is due, or explain how it is not quite how you would have liked it. It can take time to build a relationship, especially when it is virtual, but every bit of feedback between you and your team will help make it a well-oiled machine.