Flat out? Overworked? No Time?

Is your business causing you to be far too busy? Struggling to see a way out or a solution? This is an incredible common problem, but there are also good solutions. In this episode I look at the root causes of the problem and some solid solutions.

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This podcast is for small to medium business owners. You've got a lot to gain, a lot to lose, and business is tough; there's a lot at stake. Business acumen is what every business owner needs, it will make a profound difference to your business.

This podcast will cover marketing, positioning, branding, lead generation, selling, negotiating, customer service, managing staff, managing finances and accounts and much more.

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Are you completely overwhelmed by work, no time, no energy?

For business owners, this is incredibly common, but that doesn't make it a good idea or desirable. Nor is it compulsory. And it's certainly not a badge of honour.

Being overworked is probably the most common problem for business owners and the root cause is that they are under delegated. So what can be done about this?

Well first let's look at the reasons so many business owners have not delegated enough.

Typically they would fall into:
1 can't afford to pay someone to do the job,
2 don't have the right people to delegate to,
3 don’t trust anyone else to do the work because they've tried in the past to delegate a particular task and it didn’t work ,
4 haven't really thought through what they can or should be delegating, and
5, most insidious of all, don't have the time to train someone up to do the job.

Before we dive into thinking about what to do about this, let's stop and reflect on why we would want to do this.

Well firstly who wants to be over-busy all the time? It's stressful, likely to result in burn-out and probably shortening your life. You probably know that already.

What you might not realise is that when you are super busy, you’re lost in the weeds - you’re not thinking deeply and broadly about where your business is going. It’s a bit like rowing madly, but not looking where you’re going. What’s the point of rowing in the wrong direction?

Just as importantly, what future does your business have with you doing so much work? How are you going to grow your business? How are you going to eventually sell and step away? By the way, if you think you aren't going to eventually sell your business, I've got bad news for you - you’re mortal - you are going to exit - even if it means they take you out in a box.

So by this point, you might agree that there's no future in being this busy, something needs to be done.

Step 1 is changing your overarching mindset. You need to ultimately work yourself out of your business. Everything role in your business ultimately needs to be delegated to someone. Maybe not today, but eventually. You should not be doing anything IN your business - eventually. And before you think you'll have nothing to do, don’t worry, that will never happen. There's a full-time job to be had, just finding the people, putting them in place and making sure they're doing their job. And when you're not doing that, you're spending time thinking about the future direction of your business, or talking to your top 10 clients, or getting involved in industry or professional associations etc etc.

OK so you have the mindset. Never forgot that you’re constantly working yourself out of the business.

Step 2 is to work out what to delegate. To guide this decision making, I have what I call the “hierarchy of value”. You typically delegate the low value work first, working your way up to the higher value.

So what does the hierarchy look like?

At the bottom of the hierarchy is admin work. This would include your book-keeping, order taking, packing, purchasing, scheduling, report compiling and so on.

Next up is the junior technical work. This is the first scary step for a small business owner - make sure you have some way of monitoring quality, and you’ll be fine.

Next is the senior tech work, management of the tech people, project management, service delivery management. At this level I would also include a commercial manager, usually an accountant, if you've got big enough to need one on staff.

Next is account management - often called the farmers - looking after the customer relationships and looking for sales opportunities within the current customers. It is often difficult for business owners to hand over these relationships but turns out far more successfully than they initially fear. I found it to be transformative, life changing, when I finally did it.

Second from the top is the BDM - the hunter. This is the person who goes looking for new customers, as opposed to the account manager (the farmer) who looks after the existing customers.

Finally, at the top of the hierarchy is the leader. That's you. Every business needs one and it's the last role you delegate - if at all.

OK, so you've got some ideas on which role to delegate next. Now you've got to work out how to afford it. To do this, you'll need a business financial model. I call it a profit model. It's a simple spreadsheet which predicts how much you'll make given the staff you have and the sales you make. You use it to do a what-if by adding in the role you've got in mind, and work out how much more revenue you'll make as a result, as well as cost. You'll often be surprised that it turns out to be quite profitable.

Remember that even if you create a role which simply does some admin, so a non-revenue generating role, you free up someone else (you perhaps?) to earn more profit, through either doing more work or making more sales. So once you think it through properly, you could well find that you can afford to delegate more.

The final step is to recruit the person, or find an outsourced solution like an external service provider, and put them to work. Now, the biggest mistake everybody makes is to give them a laundry list of stuff that needs to be done, and not think about the outcomes you want to achieve. I don’t know why we will do this, but it is the single biggest mistake we all make in delegating. Think carefully about the outcomes you want to achieve, then make them responsible for achieving those outcomes. By all means mandate some standards and do some training, so they have the capabilities to achieve the outcomes, but give them plenty of flexibility around how - how they do it - and be a dictator on the what - the what you want to achieve.

The worst thing you can do is to fill up all your time and energy working in the business. It is simply going backwards. The only way forward in business is to become good at delegating. The good news is that following these steps is likely to work for you.

Got any questions? want help thinking through your plans? Make contact, I'm happy to chat.