Peter Moriarty: Are you an entrepreneur wanting more free
time, and I don't just mean like a little bit of free time. I
mean, like semi retired free time, like four day, weekends
free time. Well, I'm going to tell you in this video about the
most important entrepreneurial muscle that you need to build
and work on for you to be successful in growing your
business.
In my introduction, I said that delegation is the most important
entrepreneurial muscle. And I absolutely believe that because
as an entrepreneur, our role is to grow a business and an
organization outside of ourself. Many entrepreneurs that I see
that are unsuccessful when they start hiring staff and building
a team end up basically having a whole bunch of people around
them without much substance in the actual business itself. But
a true business owner who owns a business who has a business, a
real business is something that you can step away from, and have
it still continue to run itself without you necessarily having
to be there. And that's really the definition of
entrepreneurship is creating an organization or an organism that
can survive and thrive without your day to day involvement. So
how do we get there? Well, I'm going to be talking about
delegation. And if you haven't watched any of our other videos
before, my name is Peter Moriarty. I founded a business
called itGenius over 15 years ago, and we help small and
medium sized business owners with their technology strategy
to help them be more successful in business and create more
freedom in their life. And we use something called the growth
roadmap to take businesses through different stages of
technology strategy, depending on what stage of business
they're at, we know that there are 1000s of tools. And there's
lots of information out there that tells business owners, you
should use this tool and you need a CRM and you need a
dashboard. And it tells you all of the conflicting information
about what technology is right for your stage of business right
now. And we try and like de-mystify that, make it easy,
and then give you a logical progression of where you should
be putting your attention. As you go through different stages
of business. We also talk about some entrepreneurial development
type topics, of which this is one of them on the channel. So
if you're not already subscribed, please make sure you
do. So let's swing back to talking about delegating. And
the problems of not delegating will run you into some traps as
a business owner. Number one, you're gonna get caught up in
low value tasks. And the mentality or the mindset around,
this can only be done my way, or I'm the best person to do this,
or someone else is going to bugger it up can really hold you
back in business. Because let's say, you know, just for
starters, it's impossible to grow a business once you run out
of time. And if you run out of time, and for you that might be
40 hours a week in the business, it might be 60 hours a week in
the business. Or if it's a side hustle, maybe it's only 10 hours
a week that you've got available. Once you run out of
your time, there's no way the business can actually grow or be
more successful until you literally start delegating. And
so this is a skill to be worked on. Just like riding a bike is a
skill to be worked on. It's something that when you start,
you're probably not going to be very good. But over time with
practice, you'll get better and better and better. I'm going to
show you the simplest way to get delegation happening for you.
But before we jump into the framework, I want to first give
you a bit of a reality check on what the value of your time is.
Now we've got other videos on how to calculate your most
important hourly rate. So you can focus on your highest and
best use of your time. So you can make use of the 80-20
principle where 20% of your effort produces 80% of your
results. I want you to be really good like kind of a detective in
scoping out, where am I spending time on high value tasks? And
what am I spending time on low value tasks, because when you
put all of your attention and effort on your high value,
critical and strategic tasks, you'll find that your business
results will quickly multiply in a good way. So how do we do
that? Well, the first thing you need to do is gather some data.
And to do that we will measure where we're spending our time
every day. Now there's manual ways of doing this, like you
know, writing down on a piece of paper, what did I do in 15
minute blocks all day long, or there's an automated way to do
that. And that's using a tool called rescue time. And if you
head to rescue time.com, you can download for free. We're not an
affiliate, but it's highly recommended from us. That tool
will be installed on your computer, and all day long it
will track what you're doing.
Now what happens from there is that we'll give you a report at
the end of the week, and let you know how much time you spent on
social time how much time you spent reconciling items in your
accounting system, how long you spent in your emails, replying
to customers, and how long you spent doing anything else that
you need to do in your business. And the thing that I really love
about this tool is it quickly highlights ways in which I'm
spending unproductive time. It's also a nice slap in the face for
your own self accountability. If you're spending time
procrastinating or goofing off on social media, that's going to
quickly show you just how much time is going into those
activities. So once you've got an idea of where you're spending
your time, you're pretty certainly come to quickly find
that there are ways where you might be spending your time
inefficiently, or there are ways where you're spending your time
on tasks that you're missing. Maybe not the best person to do,
perhaps you could find someone else to do those tasks for you.
And that's when it's time to delegate. So let's talk about
the process of delegation and how we actually make delegation
happen. Now I'm going to give you a simple five step process.
There are other frameworks and other layers, and you can google
them and have a look. But I want to give you the most basic five
step process, right. So the first delegation is basically,
I'm doing it myself, and no one else is involved in the process.
And that's basically where we get started in. For some things,
you may choose to still do that. It might be things like, you
know, looking at how much money's in the bank and making
strategic decisions for the business, or you might be at an
early stage of business. So you're the one running all of
the strategy. Or maybe it's the kind of things where you
disappear from the business for a day and do some thinking time
on where you want to take the vision and the direction of the
business. But pretty quickly, we want to get some of the more
practical things that we're doing day to day, like replying
to customer emails, managing projects, dealing with
suppliers, or vendors, and even doing things like customer
service, to get involved with some other people in the
business. And so the first stage of delegation is I'm going to do
it, and you're going to watch, that's called observation. And
so I'm going to still continually have full control of
the task, and then someone else is going to watch me do it. Now
at this point, you can already start embedding some really
great training principles and practices to start getting
people ready to take on this task. And one of the things that
I do is, when I'm showing someone a task, I'll always make
sure I record the meeting. Now I love using Google Meet, because
with one button, I can record a meeting. And then it's
automatically going to place the recording into my Google Drive.
And so I can share that with team members who need access to
that training video, or if you know, they've been delegated at
some point in the future, they can always go back to when they
were just watching me doing it. And from time to time, I'm going
to be providing some commentary on this is the reason why I do
this, or these are the you know, the intricacies of reconciling
this particular account. And we're going to share that into
the recording so that anyone observing is going to be able to
rely on that when it comes time for them to do the task. So step
number three is we do it together. And that's more of a
collaborative effort, right. And so from there, that means that
we're going to share the task, maybe we're on a shared Google
meet together, and I'm going to do a bit and you're going to do
a bit. But basically, we're both going to be really hands on and
working on the task together. Sometimes that's a matter of
doing a little bit of stepping back, but guiding someone
through the process. So it's their hand on the actual mouse,
doing what you need to get done. But you're just kind of like
guiding them through. And so you're very much still doing it
for them or doing it with them. But they're actually in the
driver's seat. Now, this is some of the things like billing
system updates, or maybe drafting a customer response in
an email. Or it might be something like, you know,
working on a particular piece of technology that you have inside
the business, scheduling some webinars inside of Zoom,
whatever that is for you, allowing someone else to do it.
And then you instructing them works great at this third stage.
Next is the fourth stage. And that is where you're going to do
it. And I'm going to watch. And this is where you start kind of
like testing and evaluating. Is this person competent in
performing this task, you can still record these if you like,
just so you've got reference. And one of the things I love
about Google Drive is it just automatically saves everything
that I do in a simple place where I can find all of my past
meetings. And in this stage of delegation, were really about
checking if this person can do it or not. So what I like to do
is kind of like sit back and let them do it. And I only jump in
if someone gets stuck somewhere. Or if they have a question.
Basically, the graduation point of competency is when someone
can fully complete a task that I've delegated to them without
me needing to jump in at all. And so I'm basically leaving it
to them to do the task while I observe. And I'm just jumping in
if they're doing something wrong, or if they get stuck
somewhere, then they're going to
jump up and let me know stage number five, you do it and just
report back to me. And that's where I fully trust that you've
been delegated the process. And you can take care of this
yourself. Now we've got some other videos, which include
things like the system for creating systems and ways to
communicate how tasks should be done when you actually share it
with team members. So you can be better at documenting all of the
systems in a business. And you can not have to go through this
manual process step by step, and there in some of our other
videos. And we also have more in depth videos on delegation and
creating great business systems, including how to store them
inside Google sites and build an intranet inside our Google
Classroom. So if you check that out, it's on the link below for
the transfer in offer. If you're an existing business customer of
Google, then you get free access to our Google classrooms, where
you can access that training on systemising your business. But
for this one, this is all about delegation. And I want to make
sure that you're getting it right for your business. If
you're interested in delegating the responsibility of sales,
customer relationships, follow ups and communication to your
team, then you need a great technology system to make that
happen. Now we are a global partner for copper CRM. And that
is a system that takes a AI and automation driven technology
data from your emails. It literally pulls all of the data
from your emails. puts that into a amazing system for you to
communicate and collaborate with your customers. Now you can use
this for customer service, you can use it for deal management,
any kind of relational work that you're doing with a customer,
copper CRM is the brain for everything that you're getting
done. And we use this right across our business to
tremendous results. Now, if you haven't seen some of our other
videos yet on managing a CRM system and why a CRM system
should be the heart of your business, then go make sure that
you check them out. And we'll link them down below as well.
But we currently have a limited time of a few to review how you
do relationships in your business and what kind of pieces
of technology you use for them. Getting your personal
relationships off your plate and onto the plate of your team
members is one of the most important things for you to grow
and scale as a business. And we want to help you make that
happen. So jump on the limited offer below, under the link on
this video. absolutely free of charge to have a consultation
with our team. And we've got some amazing goodies on the
other side of that landing page. I look forward to catching you
in the next video. If you're not yet subscribed to our channel,
please subscribe. Share this with someone who you think might
be useful. And if you drop us a like if you like that content,
we would much appreciate it. I'll see in the comment section
and answer as many questions as I can. If not, I'll see you in
the next video. Cheers!