The trick to success is to know when to micro-manage, when to macro-manage, and when to delegate. There are only 24 hours in any given day and you have to sleep, eat, have family time, catch an episode of Grey’s Anatomy… and somewhere in there you need to work.

Take your personal life, for example.

• Do you mow your lawn? Or do you pay a neighborhood kid or landscaping service to do it for you?

• Do you clean your house or do you have a cleaning person that helps out or does the work for you?

• Do you always watch your children? Or do you have a babysitter, nanny, family member, or daycare provider who watches them for you sometimes?

All of those things are delegation. Now let’s look at why you delegate.

1. If you have someone else mow your lawn, it could be for various reasons like: Paying $10 to the neighborhood boy is cheaper than spending an hour out there mowing you lawn when you earn $100 per hour. Or maybe it’s a “quality of life” issue because you only have 2 days a week with the family and it’s worth more to you to spend time with them than on yard work.
2. If you have someone else clean your house, it could be for the same reasons that you have help mowing the lawn.
3. When you have someone watch your children, it could be so that you can go out and enjoy some personal time, or so you can work and earn money, or so you can complete errands or attend meetings, or it could be for any other number of reasons.

So, why is your business life any different? If you pay someone to watch your children while you earn an income, why not pay someone to do things IN your business so you can earn more of an income?

I recently interviewed an entrepreneur, a business coach like myself, who did not outsource anything. I asked him how he spends his time and he broke it down for me in an email as follows:

• I work 10 hours per day: 9am to 7pm, Monday through Friday.
  • 1 hour in the morning for email.
  • 1 hour in the morning for blog posting and social bookmarking as well as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  • I have two 45 minute sessions with clients in the morning.
  • Then I take a 30 minute-to-an-hour lunch break.
  • 1 hour more of email.
  • 1 hour of bill paying, bookkeeping, and mail sorting.
  • I have another 45 minute session in the afternoon.
  • About an hour of following up with sales leads or prospects via email and telephone.
  • Then about an hour doing miscellaneous things, such as booking flights, finding conferences, looking for speaking engagements, working on my website/blog, and thinking up ideas for products and services.
  • One last email check before I leave — about 30 minutes or so — and the I close the office door for the day.

Wow! In summary he does the following daily:

• 2.5 hours of email handling.1 hour of social media/blogging.
• 2.25 hours of billable coaching sessions.
• 1 hour of bill paying/bookkeeping/mail sorting.
• .5 hour lunch break.
• 1 hour of sales lead handling.
• 1 hour of miscellaneous tasks.

Sure enough, that totals up to 9.25 hours in a day (plus the missing 45 minutes extra time spent on lunch or bathroom breaks!).So only 22.5% of his time is billable… AND he works 10 hours a day!I asked him how much he charges and he said it depends on the service: He makes anywhere from $90 to $170 per session.

If we take a “middle ground” average then he makes about $130 per session. By selling only 3 sessions a day, he makes $1,950.00 a week. While that is not bad, let’s be honest: That is a $101K/year salary; and while perfectly respectable, you don’t want to be working 50 hours a week for the rest of your life (and take a hit if you work less).

Let’s assume he outsources or delegates utilizing the “Three Strikes, You’re Out” test.

Question 1: Is it something that you don’t personally have to do, that someone else can do or be trained to do for you?
Question 2: Does the alternate person that could do it for you have an hourly wage less than your billable wage?
Question 3: Could you use that spare time on revenue generating activities or to increase your quality of life?

To take this “Three Strikes You’re Out” test, look at a task and ask yourself those three questions.

If the answer is “Yes” to all three then “You’re OUT”.

That’s right, YOU ARE OUT… outsource it!

If the answer is “Yes” to two questions, it should be considered.

If the answer is “Yes” to only one, it can be delegated as a last resort.

Let’s apply this to the tasks of the coach I spoke about earlier:

2.5 hours of email handling:

“Can someone else do it?” This is iffy. I am sure he could have a gatekeeper to handle some, while some he would end up having to handle himself. But let’s say a gatekeeper could cut the time spent in half, so the answer to question 1 is “yes”. (Strike 1). “Is the alternate person that could do it cheaper?” YES! (Strike 2). “Could he use the spare time to generate more revenue?” Certainly! (Strike 3). So, it is out… Outsourced!

Social Media/blogging: This is a “yes” to all 3! It’s outta here!

Billable coaching sessions: “No”. He has to do those.

Bill paying/bookkeeping/mail sorting: This is a “yes” to all 3!

Lunch break: No.

Sales lead handling: This one is iffy, but let’s say for safety it is a “no” (because nobody knows your business like you know your business).

Miscellaneous tasks: Again an entrepreneur always has some things he or she has to do, so let’s assume this is a no to all three.

So what we have now is the following:

• Half of the email an assistant can handle.
• Social Media is something else the assistant can handle.
• Bookkeeping/Bill Paying. The assistant can handle that, too.

What he has just done has decreased 3.25 hours of his day in exchange for maybe $75 or so (averaging $20 – $25 per hour for an assistant).

He could take on 3 more sessions a day for an increase in revenue! Or he could only work 7 hours a day! Or he could spend those extra 3 hours multiplying his income stream by creating products, goods, books, etc.

So… my message to you: Delegate/outsource in 10 minutes a day by using the “Three Strikes, You’re Out” Test.

Related posts:

1. The Value of Outsourcing
2. Reaching the Peak: When Delegation Shines
3. Master Your Day in Just 10 Minutes – Part 2

Number crunching
First, let’s think of the numbers: According to The Economist’s Pocket World in Figures, there are about 6.4 billion people in the world and about 28% of them of them are under 15 years old. Using some broad assumptions about the age of kids who believe in Santa (let’s say 10 and under), along with the understanding that not every child in the world lives in a country or practices a religion that recognizes the fat jolly man (let’s say three quarters to be safe, but it’s probably far more), I’m estimating about 300,000,000 children get toys from Santa each year.

Project management schedule
Now, let’s work backwards in Santa’s production timeline, beginning from his delivery: If he starts about 8pm on Christmas Eve at the International Date Line and stuffs stockings all the way around the globe back to the International Date Line at about 4am on Christmas Day, he actually has more than 24 hours of effective delivery time. (Closer to 32 or 36 if my chronological estimates are correct).

There’s probably a week of loading and likely some drop points along the way, so let’s assume a week or two of distribution. And if he takes Mrs. Claus on a two-week Caribbean cruise, he’s left with about 336 days of the year to make toys for three hundred million children.

As a project management guru, Santa is not only an expert at delivery (as we’ve seen) and distribution (as we’ve safely assumed), but he’s very likely also a master of delegation. If every stocking holds an average of 10 gifts then Santa has 3 billion gifts made in 336 days. What kind of staffing delegation is required for that effort?

Delegation is the key
If every elf can make 3 toys a day then one elf can make about 1000 toys in a year (with 2 weeks off for vacation, plus other duties during the distribution phase that leads up to Christmas). Using that calculation, Santa needs 3 million elves to do his work.

When you consider that Santa also needs raw materials to make the toys, he seems to have set up an impressive supply chain that rivals anything created by Dell. And do I need to mention: Animal support for his eight tiny reindeer, plus time to read and answer children’s letters, plus the inevitable union challenges and HR headaches that come with having that many employees working together.

And will all of this attention to detail, he still has time to be jolly and make tireless public relations trips to malls and parades around the world. Amazing! If he would only write a book to tell us his productivity secrets, he’d have an army of productivity coaches and enthusiasts lined up to read it.

Merry Christmas!

Related posts:

1. Project management skills to make the holiday season better
2. Project Management in 10 Minutes
3. Horror story from the front lines of project management

I was recently reading a blog in the New York Times (published October 15th) by a CEO of a NY-based company. She referenced that, in a previous blog (published October 7th), she had written about ways to bypass high-priced agencies and run your own PR. And in that blog, someone had shared with her a brilliant piece of wisdom which sounds like something I tell people every day: In essence, the commenter said “you’re already busy as a CEO; why do the PR yourself as well? Focus on your core competencies to build your business and leave PR to someone else.” Read her original October 7th blog, entitled “Which PR Firm Do You Use?” .

That was her October 7th blog and she followed it up a week later with a reflection on that comment and the challenges she faces in deciding what work to keep and what work to delegate. Read her follow-up October 15th blog entitled “More On Do It Yourself PR and My Role as CEO” .

Finding the delegation balance amidst our busy roles
Many of us have been in her shoes: We’re leading a growing organization and trying to discover the balance between what we should do ourselves and what we give up. Although there are different sizes of businesses – the freelancer who hires a virtual assistant and the CEO of a 15-person firm who hires a COO, and everything in between – the challenge is surprisingly similar: Each leader is busy and has to figure out what to give up and what to keep.

Rules of thumb for leaders who want to delegate
First, give up what you don’t like to do. After all, you should enjoy your work! This isn’t always possible, depending on who you hire, but it might help to influence who you hire. (For example, if you’re a freelancer and you hate selling, you might want an assistant who can handle a large part of your selling process).

Second, give up the work that isn’t related to your core competency. This is easier to do for the freelancer than for the CEO of the larger business because a freelancer can easily identify his or her core competency as the specific revenue-generating activities they do. But a CEO has core competencies that are not necessarily specific to revenue generation, and this is discussed briefly in the October 15th blog I referenced earlier. The CEO is good at PR, even if she’s not running a PR firm. So, core competencies are more “business-growing” activities rather than strictly “revenue-generating” activities. If you’re a CEO and you’re a visionary, then embrace that and hand off the day-to-day to a COO.

Third, give up the work that is your core competency. No, this advice doesn’t conflict with the passage above. I think it’s the “next step” in taking a small business into the big business world. Small business owners do the revenue generation themselves; in big businesses, leaders eventually need to pass off business growing activities to sales and marketing experts, revenue-generation activities to production people, and they even willingly pass off core competency work to others, ideally duplicating their effort by sharing their wisdom. Take a look at a mammoth company like Dell: Michael Dell may have once picked up a screwdriver to assemble a computer… that was a revenue generating core competency of his. However, I’m fairly certain that he hasn’t picked up a screwdriver in a quite a while. And even if he has competencies in other areas (like efficient systems, for example) we can be fairly certain that he has other people doing that too. He’s kept a few things and passed off many other things (business building, revenue generating, core competencies) to other people.

Certainly, there are no easy answers and it does look different for every business owner or business leader. But one answer is clear: You can’t do it all so you have to pass some things to other people.

Happy Blogging!

Related posts:

1. There’s only one thing that can’t be delegated

If you follow me on twitter you have seen a ton of recent tweets about @emailcenterpro, about ‘click – click – move – move’, and about Inbox 0!

Some of you may be wondering: How I am doing that? Others may already know because you subscribe to my Tips in 10 email newsletter. I won’t write it out in detail (but if you want to get the step by step instructions, just subscribe to my Tips in 10 newsletter using the sign-up form on the right hand side of this blog post).

In summary:

1. I use www.emailcenterpro.com
2. I have a virtual assistant
3. I have spent lots of time and energy making sure my assistant is well-versed with the important information:  Who every client is, what every email is, where my documents are stored, what things mean, projects I am working on, who does what within my organizations, etc.

I realized this week that I have reached a “peak”; the top of the mountain, so to speak. We (my assistant and I) have spent 4 months with email traffic of approximately 200 incoming daily and 100 outgoing daily.

It started out slowly the first two weeks. She was able to handle about 10% of my email (which were copies etc. that she was able to appropriately categorize and file). Then, by the end of the first month she started handling about 25% of my email – the copies plus the stuff that really should not go to me but should go to someone else.

The second month we stepped up training and started having her save documents people sent me to my filing system and retrieving documents people were requesting. By the end of month 2 she was handling about 40% of my emails (copies, delegation, documents and attachments).

In the third month I started delegating mini-tasks. In other words, not necessarily a project but usually an internal issue within the organization – like maybe a bug in one of our systems. By this time she knew who it needed to be delegated to, she knew who was reporting it and needed it fixed, and was acting as the middleman (which I normally do) to make sure that it is fixed, tested, and all parties advised. By the end of month 3 she was handling about 60% of my email.

We are almost done with the 4th month and she now handles about 90% of my email.

The 60% mentioned earlier – and now the additional 30% to bring it  up to 90% -  includes appointments, resolving issues, transmitting reports to clients by due dates (i.e. I do the work, turn the reports over to her when done, she proofs, makes sure she understands content, turns it over to the client and answers any of their questions), makes sure all invoices or receipts are forwarded to the accounting department and then follows up to assure they are entered and / or paid.

At the end of my day I am only handling about 10% of my email load (20 incoming/10 outgoing daily). This is a huge relief for me. Running half a dozen companies and performing billable work as well as working on non billable entrepreneurial endeavors can fill a day. Now, I am doing things I was never able to do before:

1. I get off work at 5-6pm. No exceptions (unless for some reason I want to stay on and work – which sometimes I do).
2. I am getting in at minimum 6 hours of billable work a day, which before I was pushing my luck to get 2-3 hours in.
3. My clients (for the most part) are a lot happier. Don’t get me wrong, there are downfalls; I know some clients are thinking “she is too busy to respond to me anymore”, but at the end of the day they are getting a faster response time and more efficient work.
4. Yesterday I took a lunch break for the first time in over 4 months. (I mean, I actually went out to lunch vs. eating at my computer).
5. Today I decided “I am going to blog” – completely unplanned.
6. When I am done writing this I am going to send it over to her to proof, put the graphics in and post on my website.

What I am trying to say is: so many people hire us for virtual assistant work and never fully take advantage of what we can offer. Sometimes they think they just don’t have the time to teach, either. I took the time with Joan (my assistant). I created many video tutorials and used the features in Email Center Pro to give her tips, tricks and explanations.

She is not cheap, she works for me almost 40 hours per week, but she has made me achieve efficiency, improved my quality of life, and given me more time for billable work, which is offsetting her salary. Day by day she is getting quicker and doing more as well.

I feel today that I have finally reached my peak and have proven that, with time and effort, delegation is no longer outsourcing a task or two because it is more cost effective, rather, delegation is partnering with someone (or multiple people) who can learn who you are, how you work, and what needs to be done in order to make sure that the time you do spend you are 1) getting paid for, 2) creating something that will generate more revenue down the line or 3) improving your quality of life.

Thanks Joan!

Related posts:

1. Outsourcing/Delegation in 10 Minutes a Day

Delegation that has fallen through the cracks: If you’re relying on something from someone else, and they’re not delivering, you need to get things moving by nudging them, then pushing them, then threatening them (in that order). If possible, continue on with other aspects of the project. At some point, you may need to replace them and that’s something you should start working on between the “push them” and “threaten them” stage.

Lack of clarity: This is a bigger issue than most people realize and it is often the unknown reason for project slowdown. It happens when you’ve divided up tasks and are performing one task after another and then you hit a wall and can’t quite seem to start or finish the next task in the list. I’ve found that the reason is actually quite simple: The next task in the list is poorly defined or much larger and more unwieldy than the other tasks. So you can often “unstick” your project by breaking that task down into smaller parts.

Procrastination: Procrastination happens because there’s often something we’d rather be doing. It’s human nature. Sometimes it’s because that other task is more enjoyable, but often it’s because we don’t want to work on the task at hand. The best thing to do is just to delegate it. This isn’t always possible, but it’s the best scenario. Get someone else to do it and when they do, you’ll probably find that it unlocks the project’s momentum. If you can’t delegate that task, try delegating a portion of it. Or, ask for help.

No deadline: This is another one of those critical but not-easily-recognized problems. Humans need deadlines. We don’t like them, we fight them, we push the deadline limits, but we NEED to have that due date. Sometimes in projects we’ll have due dates for larger objectives and, of course, for the end goal, but we don’t have deadlines for the smaller tasks. Ironically, it’s these smaller tasks which get pushed back and pushed back (because of a lack of deadlines!) and they build up to risk the project’s timely completion. So, set deadlines for everything.

Lack of definitions: In a way this is related to the “lack of clarity” above, but it is a broader-based problem. Lack of clarity is tied to specific tasks while lack of definition is tied to the project as a whole. Areas where I’ve seen a lack of definition stall a project: The outcome wasn’t clearly defined, the alignment between this project and the company’s goals weren’t clearly aligned, there wasn’t a well-defined leadership and reporting structure in the project, or, there weren’t well-defined benefits to keep the budget from being given to someone else. To resolve this, get definitions! It might be too late (it should be done as early as possible in the project) but if a project is recently stalled, you might still have time to more clearly define the project to get it moving again.

Of course there are plenty of other reasons that projects might get stuck but I’ve found that these five are among the biggest. You’ll do well to mitigate these risks before they happen but if you ever find yourself in a situation where a project is already stuck, start here.

Good Luck!

Related posts:

1. Project Management Tip: Feedback Best Practices
2. Santa: The Ultimate Project Management Guru
3. Project Management Gone Wrong

Great discussion today on #businesslunchclub (on Twitter; but see BusinessLunchClub.com for more details).
The conversation today centered around delegation, and specifically around something that @IAC_Heather calls “the 3 Strikes, You’re Out” rule. The conversation was primarily between @IAC_Heather, @askleo, and myself (@AaronHoos), with @Hazewalker chiming in towards the end.
You can read our entire conversation on BusinessLunchClub (If you’re not reading this on the day it’s posted, go to BusinessLunchClub.com/users/archive and select July 13 from the calendar).

The “3 Strikes, You’re Out” rules are 3 simple rules to help you know what to delegate. The rules are:

• 3 strikes rule 1: Is it something that you don’t personally have to do; is it something that someone else can do or be trained to do for you?

• 3 strikes rule 2: Does the alternate person that could do it for you have an hourly wage less than your billable wage?

• 3 strikes rule 3: Could you use that spare time on revenue generating activities or to increase your quality of life?

@askleo talked about the challenges of finding the right person and training them appropriately. And I talked about the challenge of being a sole operator for so long that it was difficult to “disassemble” projects I normally do automatically and identify which portions of the tasks should be done by me and which portions should be outsourced.

@IAC_Heather used the example of a babysitter when responding to @askleo, pointing out that parents do the best job of raising their children but they still “outsource” to a babysitter from time to time. She also recommended the use of Camtasia to capture processes to enable faster training.

I was curious to know what people outsourced (which is relevant to a conversation I had yesterday with a friend who suggested that he only outsources items that don’t add value to the client relationship). So far, I’ve only outsourced administrative work but kept my value-adding work and most of my sales efforts as my own tasks. @IAC_Heather outsources as much as possible (except where liability might be a concern) and, just as Business Lunch Club was wrapping up, @Hazewalker added this helpful advice: As long as you are unwilling to delegate, you cannot create a business that runs without you.

Good conversation in today’s Business Lunch Club!

As originally posted on: Blog by Aaron Hoos

Related posts:

1. Tips to get more out of #businesslunchclub
2. 8 Ways to use #businesslunchclub to grow your business
3. Lunch 2.0 Launched! #BusinessLunchClub, #BizLunchClub, #BLC

A small business owner might contract with a virtual assistant to take on some of the administrative work, and a large business might delegate its day-to-day functions down from the executive to middle management (or its sales functions to a sales team or its manufacturing functions to the factory, etc.), however, there remains one function that cannot be delegated; it MUST be done by the business leader:

Vision-casting. The role of the leader is one who casts vision, who directs, who inspires, who leads. As a leader, you can delegate absolutely everything else but you must direct it all by pointing everything in the right direction.

Your business will do well if that is what you do all day. (Disclaimer: The smaller your company is, the more likely it is that you’ll have to do other things, too!!!)

Vision-casting is about envisioning the future state of your company and creating the ideals and values and goals that will drive your organization. Now, I realize that for some business people, that sounds “touchy-feely” and not really the way to do a solid, profitable business. But if you are going to multiply your efforts, you’ll do it through delegation, and in order to delegate appropriately, you need to give vision.

I think back to my time working for other people, before I owned my own businesses. The ineffective managers would say: “Heather, first I need you to do this, then I need you to do that, then I need you to this third step, and then I need you to follow it up with steps four and five.” It was all laid out for me. Compare that to the managers who were far more effective (and, no surprise, more enjoyable to work for). They’d say: “Heather, we need you to do a job and ultimately the intended outcome of that job is this. Get started any way you think is appropriate and if you need some suggestions, let me know.”

Huge difference! One treated me like a programmable robot that simply performed a series of tasks in a predetermined order. The other gave me the end-goal and let me find my way. Who knows, by using the latter form of management, I might find a more efficient way of getting the job done.

As a business owner, or a manager, or as anyone who needs to delegate tasks – the most important thing you CAN’T delegate and you MUST give is your vision for the project.

Related posts:

1. What should be delegated?
2. Why Deadlines are a Good Thing