How To Delegate

Hi there. Alright, it has been a little bit since I have had a chance to record a video, but I thought today would be a great day to do this.

We are just getting into the last week in January of 2022. The last few months have been a little bit crazy around here – we put our house on the market and it sold within four days! So, we had to move within 34 days of actually putting it on the market…. in the middle of Thanksgiving, right before Christmas.

So, needless to say, Q4 was insane around here. Packing after 16 years and getting everything decluttered and organized. While getting ready for the holidays and all those great things that were going on, were a little bit overwhelming. So, I took a little break from recording videos. But, here we are today. We are settled in for the most part in our new house. And it’s been really good. So, my focus can come back together a little bit now.

Alright, so today I want to talk a little bit about delegating, because that is part of what made my transition possible from our old house to our new house and still have my business running without any issues.

It helped make it a lot easier, by being able to delegate a lot of what was going on in my business. So I could focus on more personal things, and not let my business fall apart in the process.

One of the things that I know a lot of us business owners experience is that we’re kind of the do it all kinds of people that we wear all the hats, we do whatever we need to do to get things done. And we figured out if we need to. And maybe that’s not the most efficient way, but that’s how we we started our business. That’s how we got to where we are today. And it’s a little bit difficult to break that habit. Learning how to delegate and let go, and really learning what could be delegated, so that we don’t have to be doing it all, is a little bit of a process. That’s what I wanted to chat about today. I’m not going to be sharing my screen or anything like that. It’s just a quick little chat to talk about how to delegate and how to do so efficiently. 

It’s not as complicated as you may think. Of course, finding the right person to delegate to is the biggest piece of the puzzle, because that is a little bit difficult sometimes, but we’re not going to get into that piece of it right now. That’s more of a hiring thing. I like to look at it that learning how to delegate is really broken down into three simple steps.

The first thing would be to do a audit of your time.

For this particular piece of it, I would probably take at least a week or two, depending on how much your schedule varies from week to week, and audit what you’re doing every single day, writing it down, if you also kind of make a note of like how long you’re spending on each of these tasks. And I mean, really map out what your day looks like every single day. And so I mean, like I said, if it’s if your schedule varies a lot from week to week, you would probably want to go ahead and do it for maybe two weeks, that is a span instead of just one week. And once you’re done doing this audit, this is going to give you really an inventory of of each of the tasks you’re doing in your business. And then you can sit down and go on to step number two.

Step number two, you’re going to just be deciding what do you really need to be doing each day?

Look at each of the items on this list, does it really need you to be the person that is accomplishing this task? If not, then that’s something that you could be delegating. And let’s take that into consideration. Another piece is like, yeah, you might have a lot of things that you could be delegating, but which ones do we need to prioritize? So that’s the part of deciding what needs to be delegated is prioritizing and what order things need to be delegated. So maybe this is taking a lot of your time, like task number one is taking a lot of your time, and it would be really simple to delegate. So maybe that should be on the top of your list because it wouldn’t take a lot from you to be able to hand that off to someone

And so thinking about all those different pieces, as you’re deciding what to delegate, you can start to map out basically a plan for delegation. And so that is going to help you focus on what you’re going to be handing off next. And really streamline that process for what needs to be delegated. Because that’s something that I’ve noticed a lot of business owners, they know they need to delegate, they know they need more time back. But what are they supposed to delegate like, it just gets a bit overwhelming. So that is step number two is really deciding what needs to be delegated, and prior toward prioritizing that an order of which it should be delegated.

The very last step, step number three is record the process and then delegate it.

And so what I mean by that is, you’re going to have to do that step that task one more time, when you’re doing that task, record yourself doing it. So you’re recording your screen, you’re recording, you talking through the process, I would record what tools you’re going to need. For it at the very beginning, I’ve kind of mentioned like, oh, I need Canva and, I need ConvertKit, you know, step through each of the tools that you’ll be using, and then walk through that process from start to finish, as if you had never done it before. And everything that you’re going to be doing.

In each piece of that that task, you’re going to be showing talking and really discussing it through the video. And that makes it a lot simpler to create an SOP is something that you’re not going to even want to think about creating an SOP and how do I get all this put together. And you know, this long document with all these steps. No, don’t worry about an SOP, all we’re doing is just creating that video. And it’s more natural. And it’s a visual, because so many people are more visual learners anyway, being able to actually see you doing it, and not just trying to explain it and type it out in a paragraph is going to be a lot easier for that person that you delegate to.

Once you’ve recorded that video, I would save it in a library of videos probably on Google Drive, or wherever your online storage space may be, for now, and you can always improve this process later. So typically, once we’ve recorded a video, and we’ve painted off to the person, I like for that person to actually create that long SOP document. So we do have, you know, a documentation for it. And then not just the video. But that piece gives them the ability to be able to create it for you, and you not have to actually sit down and do this step by step. But that’s it. So like, once you’ve created that video, that is your way of doing things that gives you a little bit of comfort in knowing that you’re not just handing this task off to somebody and you’re not really sure how they’re going to get it done for you. And it’s that relief, knowing that you’re not going to have to think about it. And so, of course, you know, once you’ve delegated II, I’m sure you’ll want to do like a quality control kind of thing and make sure it’s getting done correctly. But that’ll just be for the first few times and then eventually you will feel more comfortable with just you know, I’ve recorded this video, can you go ahead and get this done for me. And you can start handing off tasks a lot smoother way than then trying to meet with a person and talk about it and, and take up too much of your time. And so that is how I like to delegate effectively and efficiently. And so hopefully, that’s helpful for you.

And of course, if you do need any further help with any delegating or how to delegate or how to systematize something a little bit more streamlined, check out some more of my videos, or of course reach out and we can have a chat.

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