How to get more done

This week’s strategy tip will help you get more clients, make more money and scale your business much further is about delegating and delegating effectively.  If you want to grow your business, and you’re at a point where there’s just no more you to go around and no more time to go around, then you need to delegate. That makes sense, right, because otherwise you become the bottleneck in your business.  Everything has to go through you to get approved or to get done, and if there’s no more time and no more you to go around, then it slows things down massively in your business.

Turn to delegation.  What I’ve seen many, many times with my clients and my students, and this happened to me, too, is what I call the inner circle between the ICFS and abdication. ICF stands for Inner Control freak.  We all have it. You have it. I have it, and the ICF, the Inner Control Freak is absolutely necessary in the beginning when you start your own business.  Why? Because without feeling like you control everything, you can’t have your business be exactly like you want it to be.

There gets to be a point at which the ICF gets in the way because you want to do everything yourself. You feel you’re the only one who can do it well, and by the time it would take you to train somebody else to do it, you would have done it yourself. You know this because we’ve all felt this in our business.  We all have it. You have it. I have it, and the ICF, the Inner Control Freak is absolutely necessary in the beginning when you start your own business.  Why? Because without feeling like you control everything, you can’t have your business be exactly like you want it to be.

There gets to be a point at which the ICF gets in the way because you want to do everything yourself. You feel you’re the only one who can do it well, and by the time it would take you to train somebody else to do it, you would have done it yourself. You know this because we’ve all felt this in our business.

Now, that’s at one end of the spectrum.  At the other end of the spectrum, when we’re looking at delegating, a lot of people do what I call drive-by delegation.  That is imagine – I live in the suburbs, and we subscribe to the newspaper on the weekends.  There’s this guy, he’s been doing this for many years.  He – at 5:30 in the morning, he drives his car, and he throws the paper out of the window, but he never stops the car.  That’s called drive-by paper delivery.

Well, I’ve seen this happen where there are entrepreneurs that will do the exact opposite of the Inner Control Freak thing and basically do the drive-by delegating and abdicating, which means, “Just make this happen. Get this done,” and you’re no longer involved in it.  The danger with that is that you start thinking, “Okay, why isn’t this getting done the way I want to get it done? Why isn’t it given to me on time,” and then you see all this chaos. That situation creates an entrepreneur who is reluctant to delegate anything.

Between the two the Inner Control Freak and the drive-by delegation is balance, and that balance is where you have three things in place.  So, the first thing is you have documentation.  This is where you, as the business owner, document everything that you do so you can effectively give it to somebody else. So, documentation is one.

Number two is training and procedures.  When you’ve got everything documented, you can’t just throw it at somebody.  You have to train them and show them the exact way you want it done through procedures. This can show up as a checklist, a how-to, an operations manual, and it’s massively important.

Number three is checks and balances. Again, you can’t just throw an assignment to somebody else and expect it to get done exactly the way you want it done.  The solution is having checks and balances where you let the people on your team know how you want it done and then you check in with them, and you have this system that allows you to know exactly where they are in the process, and you can check the status of something at it’s getting done.  I’ve seen that without these three things it’s very, very difficult to delegate effectively and to get the results that you want.

So, the questions I have for you today are, one, what needs to be delegated right now in your business that you’re not currently delegating? What is that is stopping you and making you the bottleneck in your business?  So, that’s question number one, what needs to be delegated?

Number two, how can you document the steps that it currently takes you to do something so that you can delegate effectively to someone else? So, documenting the steps that you can do to do that.

Finally, how will you set checks and balances in this process so there’s a balance for success? How will you set checks and balances so you know exactly how the project is being handled, and you have your finger on everything? This is the only solution that I know of for delegating where you are no longer the bottleneck, and yet you get the results that you want.

Try that. This will help you get more clients, make more money and scale your business.  Why? Because you’ll get more things done without you actually doing them.