Delegating is the only way to grow your small business. If you don’t, your startup won’t really grow sufficiently because every little thing has to go through you. Sure, you can also try other ways like:
- Putting in more hours, but you have only so much time and energy to do everything.
- Raising prices, but it’s usually contingent on market constraints.
Why should you delegate?
Handing off tasks to others can help you in several key ways:
- It lets you focus. Instead of working in the business (like a mere cog), delegating lets you focus on specific parts of your business that will result in long-term growth.
- It lets you think of great ideas. Assigning tasks to others frees your time to see the bigger picture and give you room to come up with new ways to improve your startup.
- It empowers your employees. When you delegate, you authorise employees to perform a task without micromanaging them. This will make them feel empowered.
One way or another, successfully growing a business typically involves handing off tasks within your startup to others. Today, we go over ways how you can effectively delegate your startup’s processes so that you can scale it properly.
Create and implement repeatable processes
Effective delegation is all about creating repeatable processes, which can be assigned to others and performed without your involvement, while maintaining the same output quality and turnaround time.
To make this happen, you need to:
- List down each step in the process.
- Identify the role responsible in each step.
- Determine the time frame and necessary resources.
- Establish how to measure the results.
- Set standards for maintaining a minimum level of performance.
- Document every step.
Completing all these steps will allow entrepreneurs to shift from involving themselves in every process (which will make them the bottleneck) to just approving the final output.
Identify the tasks you should delegate
Since each startup and entrepreneur are different, we can’t just give you a list of processes to assign to someone else. Instead, you can use HBR’s six T’s to help you decide which to pass off:
- Tiny – small, seemingly trivial tasks that add up (e.g. signing up for an event, adding it to your calendar, booking the accommodations).
- Tedious – Simple enough tasks, but aren’t the best use of your time (e.g. updating pages of data in your PowerPoint presentation).
- Time-consuming – They’re important, rather complicated, and use up much of your time, but you can get involved when the task is 80% done to either oversee or okay (e.g. research).
- Teachable – Tasks that – while complicated – can be taught to others, with you checking its overall quality and approving the output (e.g. any process you’ve documented).
- Terrible at – Any task you feel incapable of handling, where you’d take more time than someone who specialises in it (e.g. writing the marketing copy for your e-commerce site).
- Time-sensitive – Any time-critical task that conflicts with other pressing priorities (e.g. contacting a hotel to change rooms while you’re busy preparing for a presentation).
Hire the right specialists
Once you’ve determined the tasks to delegate, it’s time to look for someone who’ll do them for you. For best results, hire offshore virtual assistants who specialise in such tasks. They’re reliable, cost-effective, and are typically more productive.
When your virtual assistant grows into the role, consider delegating some of the everyday decisions to them as well. This means, however, that you should find the best possible talent for your startup.
If you want to hire the right people for your organisation, team up with Remote Workmate. We do all the heavy lifting for you, including payroll and onboarding. This means finding the ideal virtual specialist becomes so much easier.
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