James Dooley:
Hi, today I’m joined with Mads Singers, and today’s topic is how to effectively delegate work to your staff.

Mads Singers:
Yep. And delegation is one of the biggest headaches for most entrepreneurs and managers.

What are the core steps when it comes to delegation? The first thing to understand is you always want to delegate responsibility instead of tasks.

Unfortunately, a lot of online gurus sit out there and say: figure out how to do things, put it into a process, give it to your staff… then figure out the next thing, put it into a process, give it to your staff.

Now I can promise you the CEO of IBM is not sitting there figuring out what 200,000 people have to do. That ain’t happening, right?

If you want to grow slow, if you want to hinder your growth of the company and your staff, that’s a great way of growing. However, if like James and me, you like growing fast and building great businesses, that is not the way to go.

So, how do you delegate responsibility and why do you do it?

Number one is very simple: you only have 24 hours a day and you can only ever do so much.

A company is like a pyramid, right? You want to consistently increase the value of each stone in that pyramid. And the way you do that is take stuff from you and push it down to a level below you. Then you take more valuable stuff and start doing it.

When you look at many corporate companies, people are so afraid of losing their job that they’re afraid of someone knowing everything they do. But here’s what happens: when no one else can do your job, you will never get promoted.

Because guess what? If someone takes you out of the team and promotes you, your team will collapse. If you’re in that situation, you’re holding yourself back.

So delegation fundamentally is about giving areas of responsibility.

If we look at it from an SEO standpoint, this could be splitting down SEO and breaking down on-site, offsite, and technical. Fundamentally, what you want to do in any business is you want to have your process — the thing you do repeatedly — and you want to break that down.

Most people come to me and say they want to duplicate themselves. I’m like: don’t do that. Figure out the process you’re doing, break it into pieces, and develop experts at each piece of that process.

It’s way faster, way cheaper, and you get way higher output results at the end.

So when you’re delegating responsibility — if I say, “Hey James, I’m super busy. I don’t have the time to look at how we can buy links or build links. I want you to be responsible for our off page because I’ve seen your ability to build links is great. Here’s what we need to do. We need to build 20 links per site per month. Here are the sites we have. Here’s the goal.”

So you give a specific ownership, a specific area of ownership, you give a specific goal, and sometimes there’s a quality metric around it as well — x amount of links that fits this criteria — and then you hand that responsibility over.

Now if you know how to do it, can you show the person? For sure. Should you? Sure. In the early days you can record a Loom video or jump on a call and show them how to do something.

But your goal is for them to own the process. Your goal is not for you to sit and look at every step of the way.

You need to give them the ownership. You need to tell them what output you’re looking for. Then you need to let them go away and deliver.

And when you have a goal like that, you can put it in your KPIs. You can say, “Okay, James has responsibility for this KPI that says build x amount of links per month within x quality metric.”

Then every week — or however often your KPI is updated — you look at your dashboard and say, “Is James on target?” Yes or no.

When you have your weekly one-to-one with him, you say, “James, we’re below target. What are you doing to fix it?” Not, “Oh, we’re not building enough links, let me go and figure out what we should do.”

No — you give someone the responsibility and you let them figure it out. You give them the ownership and responsibility and say, “James, you’re not building the links you need to. I want you to go and figure it out.”

And here’s the key thing: every single entrepreneur or manager today — you’re here for one reason. At some point, someone trusted you. Someone gave you money, or an opportunity, or trust in the business and said, “Go figure this stuff out. I don’t know what to do. I don’t have the time.”

You would not be where you are today if no one did that.

Now here’s the kicker: you are not doing that for your team. You are not trusting your team. You are not letting them grow and develop and become awesome like you.

So my question to you is: why are you holding your team back, and why do you not want your company to be full of great people?

So that’s delegation — delegate the responsibility.

James Dooley:
So I’ve got a question there for you. You’re saying how to effectively delegate to staff. At what point do you decide whether to delegate to staff, or outsource it to a freelancer that’s great at doing it?

Like you said: “Come and get James to go to Searcheroo and get some off page and backlinks.” That’s delegating responsibility to a freelance company, as opposed to delegating it to in-house staff.

Where do you decide on that? At what point do you say: I want this in-house versus I want to delegate it to a freelancer?

Mads Singers:
Yeah, it often comes down to a few things — there’s not really a right or wrong.

What I like to do is identify areas of failure and complexity of the ownership.

For example, if you take something like link building, you’re doing something a lot of other people are doing at a similar level. So I would naturally be more likely to find a company who can build links for me, rather than something like content.

Because if I’m building content for our own website — there are good content agencies — but most of them won’t know our company like our company. Hiring an in-house content writer is more likely for me because they can get to know our business, brand, and what we do — and write significantly better content.

Whereas someone building links for us won’t really build better or worse links depending on whether they know our company — that’s not a big contributor.

I also look at: is it something we know in-house?

Let’s say you take a brand like Ferrari. Ferrari might say, “We could outsource customer service and save money.” I’d say: don’t do that.

If you’re Ferrari, you want to own customer service 100% because your entire brand is about the customer experience.

So whenever we set up a business, we identify: what are the areas that are critical to success that we absolutely want to own in-house?

For example, if you own an e-commerce business, you probably don’t want to do deliveries yourself — it’s more effective to use specialists.

Do you want to do packaging yourself? That depends. Can you do it significantly better than everyone else, or will outsourcing get a similar result?

The less you have to own, the more capacity you have — because if you own everything in-house, there’s so much to manage.

So you identify what’s critical for business success. For some companies that might be link building — maybe they win because they’re great at link building, so keep it in-house.

But it’s about understanding what can be outsourced, and what you really want to be on top of.

As another example: PPC. There are many great PPC agencies, but PPC is one of the things where I know the most people who have ever been burned.

People think SEO has a bad rep, but PPC agencies not delivering results is probably the most common complaint I hear.

Often it’s not even their fault — it depends what you start with: the brand, the landing pages, conversion issues, etc.

Finding good PPC agencies is really difficult. I suggest trying it — there are good people out there — but most people I know succeed with PPC when they bring it in-house.

If you’re spending a couple grand a month, it might not matter. But if you’re spending 20–30 grand a month, you probably want to own it in-house.

James Dooley:
What’s interesting is I completely agree — Facebook ads, PPC, and content writing: I will never outsource.

People don’t put the time and effort in to understand everything about the brand.

With PPC, changes need to be made — not every day, but every hour. There’s negative keywords, keywords not working, conversion rate optimisation on the website.

If I’m going to run it, I need someone to run it efficiently and properly. Initially I want to be checking day-to-day, and then a head of paid ads checking with the PPC person, making sure everything is being split tested to death.

I want every little tiny bit of the process.

Same with Facebook ads: I want to keep testing my hook — the first three seconds of the video — to make sure it gets attention. I want the offer to be the right offer.

When you don’t know what works at the start, there could be a hundred different A/B tests needed. I don’t want to wait four months for that. I want to be doing it day-to-day.

With content — nobody knows the business better than you. Once you’ve trained someone up, they’ll beat freelance content agencies.

Those agencies jump from one topic to another — basic level, almost AI level content. There’s no information gain, no going above and beyond. They often miss the tonality, even if you give them the tonality.

So delegation is key — passing it down to staff — and it’s also key knowing when to outsource to freelancers versus keep it in-house.

I’d never heard that PPC point — very interesting.

Mads Singers:
Yeah. For me, when you have a small business and you don’t know PPC yourself, going and spending 5–10 grand hiring a great PPC person can be expensive and risky at the early stage.

So sometimes there’s a benefit in getting an agency in to at least do something initially to see if they can get traction.

Now you’re at a different stage — you’ve run a lot of PPC, so you know what success looks like.

But generally, in most companies, you want PPC in-house if it’s a sizable budget. If you’re spending a couple grand a month, it might not matter. If you’re spending 20–30 grand a month, you probably want to own it in-house.

James Dooley:
Yeah, for sure. Anyone watching this — is there anything myself or Mads has missed with regards to delegating to staff, or when to outsource to freelancers and outsourcing businesses for growth?

Let us know in the comments section. I appreciate having you on, Mads. Thank you very much.

Mads Singers:
Again.