You’ve done it! Graduating from business owner to entrepreneur is a serious milestone that should be celebrated. You know what you want to be doing, why you are doing it, and who you are doing it for with absolute clarity. Your systems are fine-tuned, and prepared for any challenge, come what may. You’re comfortable with risk and embrace failure with excitement and optimism, and you’ve got all the pieces in place to scale your business. It’s truly impressive, and puts you in rare company.
But, what if you took the main piece of that puzzle away? What happens when you step away from the business for a needed vacation? The final form of the true entrepreneur is one who can delegate, one who has built a business that can function and thrive without them. It’s a tough truth to accept, but an essential one. Delegating is freedom. It should be enticing, yet many entrepreneurs refuse to delegate and the main reasons are pride and fear.
Understandable reasons, to be sure. You’ve built this thing from the ground up, and in many ways your business is an extension of yourself, who you are. Naturally, you’re protective. But, that’s exactly why you should want time to step back and let the trusted people and reliable systems run the show. Not because you want more R&R or time on the golf course, but because it’s another opportunity to grow and evolve your business. Think about what you could do with a few extra hours each week (or day) to work on your business rather than in it.
If you want to delegate, taking these four steps will go along way towards getting you comfortable with it:
- Identify the right task – This one is simple. Figure out what can and cannot be comfortably delegated.
- Identify the right person – There’s a right person for every job. Maybe you’ve already got a trusted person in-house to handle it, and if not, now you know who your next hire will be.
- Set expectations – With the right systems in place, this should be automatic. Your people will know exactly what to do, how to do it, and when. So, when you come calling for them to handle a task, the work of setting the example is already done.
- Follow-up – This is where delegation lives or dies. It’s not enough to just hand off your tasks and assume they will get done. To put your mind and ease and make others comfortable with this process, follow-up so to ensure the work is getting done.
It can be as simple (or as complicated) as that. No one knows your business better than you, so no one is better equipped to think of the big picture and chart its future than you. That also means no one’s time is more wasted than yours when it’s bogged down by daily minutiae of running your business. If you agree that delegation is something that you need to make a priority, here’s a little secret that comes with delegation: you need to practice radical responsibility. There might be a time when the task you delegated gets screwed up. People make mistakes, it happens. But remember, you’re the leader, and no amount of pointing fingers is going to accomplish anything. As they say the buck stops here, and that’s with you.
To learn about the proven strategies used by Tony DiSilvestro to scale his own businesses and that you can use to scale yours, take a look inside his book The Business Scaling Blueprint: Building a Foundation to Grow Your Brand.
If you think you need a more hands-on approach or that your company needs to learn about its growth potential directly from a proven authority, reach out to Tony today!
For Tony’s latest thoughts on what it takes to build a scalable business that doesn’t own you, check out his podcast.