Why do most entrepreneurs fear delegation so much? Partly because their businesses are their babies and they think that only they know what's best for them. It feels awkward, even dangerous to leave their baby in the hands of strangers. All of those what-ifs pop into their brain and before they've even thought the issue through, they've ruled out delegation altogether. Part of it is also the mistaken belief that they need to work harder to succeed. They feel that the hours, effort, and anxiety they put into their business, the more they will get out of it.
The problem they face is a tough one. When the business becomes their baby, who can they trust to run it but themselves?
I've been around long enough to know that owners often have difficulty separating the business's concept from all of the little intricacies that go into the actual production.
We feel that we have to know every aspect of our business, inside and out, and that nobody else could ever understand it as well as we do. We feel that everything has to have our personal stamp of approval or the business will fail!
Nothing could be further from the truth!
This poisonous mindset is actually what costs a lot of small business owners the very thing they are trying to protect-their business!
To find out why, we have to take a step back and ask, "Why did we start the business in the first place?" Are we in it to provide a service to our customers or generate income for ourselves?
The money, right? It's okay, be a little selfish. If you're a business owner, you've worked hard enough to deserve it!
So when we consider a new opportunity we have to calculate ahead of time: are we going to make money on it or we just know how to bake bread and clean floors and we assume that if we own the entire business it will automatically make money for us.
Ultimately, your work as an entrepreneur is to invest available resources at a rate of return that exceeds the price that you pay for them.
That's the hard part! Just look at all of the articles that go into your business's overhead! Do you even know what they all are? Really?
Everything has a price! The faster you realize it the better! There is nothing free!
Know where this road's headed? You got it, the value of your time!
What really hurts many small business owners is their Inability to put a definite price on the time they spend working for themselves. They fall prey to the misconception that if they do the work themselves, it doesn't cost them anything! This kind of thinking sucks you in by making you believe you are "cutting costs." What you don't realize is that they wouldn't have to cut costs if they had had an accurate budget to begin with.
Haven't you met business-owners who never has time available or money available because "You know, we run our own business, things are tough?"
Things are not supposed to be tough unless you make them this way!
The key is having an accurate budget. Allowing time and funding for an accountant? How about a cleaning service? You've at least got a receptionist, right? How about a loading-unloading crew? What, you thought it wouldn't cost you anything if you did it yourself?
Everything has a cost associated with it, your time included!
As an average small business owner you want to make average small business money, right? It should be high six- low seven- figures per year, on average $1,000,000.00 per year (according to John Assaroff), or $420.00 per hour!
So, every time you do anything for your business other than making a decision, you should ask yourself: "Can I buy it for less then $420.00 per hour?" and if you can - you should!
Another problem is - what if you can't? Then you have to be honest with yourself - your business idea does not have enough upside to support itself and you should immediately abandon it! And by "immediately" I mean IMMEDIATELY!
After all we start our own business to eliminate things that we don't like about being employed by somebody else: lack of financial freedom, lack of geographical freedom, lack of ability to spend time with our family, lack of ability to travel, lack of ability to contribute.
If we aren't getting those things, why put up with the hassle?
Robert Kiyosaki explains the difference between a business and a job this way: if you can leave it for a year and find it still running and even grown when you come back - it's a business, if it dies the next day you leave - it's a job!
So when we are talking about home based business we should be open to the idea of delegating most of the activities to outsourcers: article and press-release writing and submission, link building, social media communications, message boards and forums postings, content development and distribution, etc.
It feels a little funny at first, at least until you realize that you're not actually losing control of anything. In fact, you're just beginning to actually control things rather than letting them control you!
Do what you are the best at - business development and strategizing - and let somebody else handle all the technical details.
I remember, in the beginning of my real estate investing I was flipping houses: you buy a falling apart house, fix it up and sell hopefully making some money at the end. I was trying to do everything myself, because you can't let somebody else mess it up! It's my baby! Nobody else can hang drywall better than I can and nobody can install a new toilet the unique way I do it!
It took me such a long time to finish each and every house and when the potential buyers cam round, all they did was nitpick the place and complain. They never noticed all of the hard work that went into bringing the house back from the grave. It was just another house on their list to visit that day.
And at some point I partnered up with a group of people who had been flipping houses for quite a while as well and, seeing how attached I get to the house we were renovating, they shared with me their approach: they would actually make an effort not to be at the property during the renovation process, they actually hired a project manager to supervise the process and to avoid the need for them to be at the property. They were subbing out everything, focusing only on acquisition and selling aspects of the business. This approach allowed them to avoid falling in love with each property and to become the biggest company on the market within literally a few months!
I have another great example for you.
Back home, in Russia, we have this belief that has been around for decades: you have to grow your own potatoes, because if you do it yourself - it's free. I'm not joking!
Financial background didn't matter at all. Everybody planted their own potatoes! It takes a lot of effort to plant potatoes in the spring and harvest them in the fall when you're doing all the work by hand!
I would always ask my parents why they didn't just buy the things at the grocery store. They were dirt cheap but my parents would always answer that by growing the potatoes themselves they were free.
I was still young but something about that struck me as wrong. I just couldn't figure why everybody was working so hard for a few potatoes when they could buy them for pennies a pound!
One year, after I had started college, I told my family I could handle the harvest by myself. "Really?" they asked, clearly upset by the potential of being excluded from this ritual. "Sure," I said.
There was a place in town where bums hung around a lot. I went there, paid a few of them a fare wage for a day's work, and the potatoes were all out of the ground before dark.
I didn't tell my family what happened because they would consider it almost sacrilegious!
Plus, they were so proud of me!
And, eventually, in college, I learned that I was right, when I read in the book the words that I remember by heart: "A world of individual self-sufficiency would be a world with extremely low living standards. Trade allows people to specialize in activities they can do well and to buy from others goods and services they can not easily produce. Specialization and trade go hand in hand because there is no motivation to achieve gains from specialization without being able to trade goods and services produced for goods and services desired. That's why economists use the term "gains from trade" to embrace the results of both."
So I was right!
It sounds like poetry to me!
One more time: you don't have to do everything in your business and you don't have to be good at everything in your business!
As John Assaroff told me: "Hire people who play at what you have to work."
The faster you learn how to delegate, the faster you will be able to develop your business to the point where you can finally move to Costa Rica, learn how to surf and get to spend day after day on the beach with your family relaxing and drinking those fruity drinks with little umbrellas!
You are a business owner! That's what you do: you own your business!
Let somebody else handle the technical aspects and that's when you will experience the freedom you started your business for in the first place!
The problem they face is a tough one. When the business becomes their baby, who can they trust to run it but themselves?
I've been around long enough to know that owners often have difficulty separating the business's concept from all of the little intricacies that go into the actual production.
We feel that we have to know every aspect of our business, inside and out, and that nobody else could ever understand it as well as we do. We feel that everything has to have our personal stamp of approval or the business will fail!
Nothing could be further from the truth!
This poisonous mindset is actually what costs a lot of small business owners the very thing they are trying to protect-their business!
To find out why, we have to take a step back and ask, "Why did we start the business in the first place?" Are we in it to provide a service to our customers or generate income for ourselves?
The money, right? It's okay, be a little selfish. If you're a business owner, you've worked hard enough to deserve it!
So when we consider a new opportunity we have to calculate ahead of time: are we going to make money on it or we just know how to bake bread and clean floors and we assume that if we own the entire business it will automatically make money for us.
Ultimately, your work as an entrepreneur is to invest available resources at a rate of return that exceeds the price that you pay for them.
That's the hard part! Just look at all of the articles that go into your business's overhead! Do you even know what they all are? Really?
Everything has a price! The faster you realize it the better! There is nothing free!
Know where this road's headed? You got it, the value of your time!
What really hurts many small business owners is their Inability to put a definite price on the time they spend working for themselves. They fall prey to the misconception that if they do the work themselves, it doesn't cost them anything! This kind of thinking sucks you in by making you believe you are "cutting costs." What you don't realize is that they wouldn't have to cut costs if they had had an accurate budget to begin with.
Haven't you met business-owners who never has time available or money available because "You know, we run our own business, things are tough?"
Things are not supposed to be tough unless you make them this way!
The key is having an accurate budget. Allowing time and funding for an accountant? How about a cleaning service? You've at least got a receptionist, right? How about a loading-unloading crew? What, you thought it wouldn't cost you anything if you did it yourself?
Everything has a cost associated with it, your time included!
As an average small business owner you want to make average small business money, right? It should be high six- low seven- figures per year, on average $1,000,000.00 per year (according to John Assaroff), or $420.00 per hour!
So, every time you do anything for your business other than making a decision, you should ask yourself: "Can I buy it for less then $420.00 per hour?" and if you can - you should!
Another problem is - what if you can't? Then you have to be honest with yourself - your business idea does not have enough upside to support itself and you should immediately abandon it! And by "immediately" I mean IMMEDIATELY!
After all we start our own business to eliminate things that we don't like about being employed by somebody else: lack of financial freedom, lack of geographical freedom, lack of ability to spend time with our family, lack of ability to travel, lack of ability to contribute.
If we aren't getting those things, why put up with the hassle?
Robert Kiyosaki explains the difference between a business and a job this way: if you can leave it for a year and find it still running and even grown when you come back - it's a business, if it dies the next day you leave - it's a job!
So when we are talking about home based business we should be open to the idea of delegating most of the activities to outsourcers: article and press-release writing and submission, link building, social media communications, message boards and forums postings, content development and distribution, etc.
It feels a little funny at first, at least until you realize that you're not actually losing control of anything. In fact, you're just beginning to actually control things rather than letting them control you!
Do what you are the best at - business development and strategizing - and let somebody else handle all the technical details.
I remember, in the beginning of my real estate investing I was flipping houses: you buy a falling apart house, fix it up and sell hopefully making some money at the end. I was trying to do everything myself, because you can't let somebody else mess it up! It's my baby! Nobody else can hang drywall better than I can and nobody can install a new toilet the unique way I do it!
It took me such a long time to finish each and every house and when the potential buyers cam round, all they did was nitpick the place and complain. They never noticed all of the hard work that went into bringing the house back from the grave. It was just another house on their list to visit that day.
And at some point I partnered up with a group of people who had been flipping houses for quite a while as well and, seeing how attached I get to the house we were renovating, they shared with me their approach: they would actually make an effort not to be at the property during the renovation process, they actually hired a project manager to supervise the process and to avoid the need for them to be at the property. They were subbing out everything, focusing only on acquisition and selling aspects of the business. This approach allowed them to avoid falling in love with each property and to become the biggest company on the market within literally a few months!
I have another great example for you.
Back home, in Russia, we have this belief that has been around for decades: you have to grow your own potatoes, because if you do it yourself - it's free. I'm not joking!
Financial background didn't matter at all. Everybody planted their own potatoes! It takes a lot of effort to plant potatoes in the spring and harvest them in the fall when you're doing all the work by hand!
I would always ask my parents why they didn't just buy the things at the grocery store. They were dirt cheap but my parents would always answer that by growing the potatoes themselves they were free.
I was still young but something about that struck me as wrong. I just couldn't figure why everybody was working so hard for a few potatoes when they could buy them for pennies a pound!
One year, after I had started college, I told my family I could handle the harvest by myself. "Really?" they asked, clearly upset by the potential of being excluded from this ritual. "Sure," I said.
There was a place in town where bums hung around a lot. I went there, paid a few of them a fare wage for a day's work, and the potatoes were all out of the ground before dark.
I didn't tell my family what happened because they would consider it almost sacrilegious!
Plus, they were so proud of me!
And, eventually, in college, I learned that I was right, when I read in the book the words that I remember by heart: "A world of individual self-sufficiency would be a world with extremely low living standards. Trade allows people to specialize in activities they can do well and to buy from others goods and services they can not easily produce. Specialization and trade go hand in hand because there is no motivation to achieve gains from specialization without being able to trade goods and services produced for goods and services desired. That's why economists use the term "gains from trade" to embrace the results of both."
So I was right!
It sounds like poetry to me!
One more time: you don't have to do everything in your business and you don't have to be good at everything in your business!
As John Assaroff told me: "Hire people who play at what you have to work."
The faster you learn how to delegate, the faster you will be able to develop your business to the point where you can finally move to Costa Rica, learn how to surf and get to spend day after day on the beach with your family relaxing and drinking those fruity drinks with little umbrellas!
You are a business owner! That's what you do: you own your business!
Let somebody else handle the technical aspects and that's when you will experience the freedom you started your business for in the first place!
About the Author:
Author: Pavel Becker is a known contributor of articles about Web-Promotion and Small Business Development. To learn how to make money on-line go to his website PavelBecker.com
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