Business owners need to be relentless when it comes to winning back their time. Two reasons:
- Owner overload can bring growth to an absolute halt.
- As the business grows it will keep asking for more and more of your time.
If you don’t develop the tools to deal with it, the “not enough time” problem will plague you forever and will make your life eternally miserable.
As it is, a typical business owner would need 8 straight days to finish all the jobs on their to-do list, which means a high level of dysfunction creeping into the business from the key jobs being missed. The real budget for an owner is 4 days or less in real hours once you take into account sickness, holidays, family, and other life tasks needed to maintain health and happiness.
This is a guide to “cleaning” your role as it gets gunked up with low-value tasks ($0-100 per hour), so you can graduate to high-impact CEO projects ($1,000+ per hour).
Delegation
Delegation is one of the new skills many business owners have to learn as they grow a business beyond themselves. To make task-delegation less daunting, turn it into a process with the following steps:
- Decide – There will always be a reason why a task is “not ready” to be handed over. This causes us to hold onto dozens of not-ready tasks. But when you decide a task needs to come off your plate, you will always find an imperfect but good enough way to make it work.
- Instructions – A set of steps for the person to follow to complete the job.
- Handover – Usually a conversation to assign responsibility over to the new person.
- Support – This is the bit that allows you to hand over the job IMPERFECTLY. The person will take ownership from day 1, there will likely be a temporary drop in quality or speed, but this is remedied with support/coaching over the following weeks.
Troubleshooting
Having trouble finding things you can safely delegate? Here are some ways to start now.
- Don’t delegate a whole role. Just the simplest part. For example, don’t delegate the whole sales process, delegate the first phonecall, which may simply be collecting some basic information and scheduling the next call.
- You will never be “ready” to delegate. It doesn’t work that way. You hand over, then use your Support (e.g. daily or weekly check in) to troubleshoot.
- Pay the price. The standard of work is expected to drop temporarily. We willingly pay this price to gain a bigger win. Two hours extra CEO time per week will generate way more revenue than any loss caused by mistakes (e.g. a lost sale or misplaced order).
Delay
The delay tactic is the most overlooked and underrated move to make when we need to protect our time. We have the ability to delay “urgent” tasks so that they still get done, but not at the expense of our scheduled growth/CEO time.
Examples:
- An urgent client issue may be scheduled for later in the week or next week
- Questions from staff are contained to a time at the end of day or end of week to encourage independence and de-fragment staff support
The key to “delay” is communication.
We need the ability to tell people what suits us. 90% of the time people are satisfied with an indication of when their issue will be solved.
Delay gives us control of timing. Instant response eats away at our schedule.
Delete
If you have not been consciously pruning your time you will definitely have some tasks you are doing that are not essential to achieving your goals.
Examples:
- Over-servicing of clients just to be helpful (versus better communication with clients about the scope of work included).
- Tidying up tasks for staff because you can (versus giving them feedback that they aren’t completing jobs to 100%).
- Checking numbers daily (versus a good summary report you only need to see weekly).
Note: You may need to invest in a small project before you can eliminate a task (like build a spreadsheet for your key numbers), but if 4 hours setup can save you an hour a week for the next 52 weeks you’ve got a 13x return on your time.
Turn this article into money
Being a good CEO depends on creating the space for it. The problem is you are in an environment (business) that is determined to add things to your plate. The solution is the same as in a game of Space Invaders – you must shoot down the aliens (tasks) one at a time before the next wave attacks.
- List all your jobs for the week
- Label them by role (e.g. marketing, finances, admin, sales, CEO)
- Knowing the business will ask you for even more next week. Choose one regular item to get off your plate (start small).
- Decide whether it should be delegated/automated, delayed, or deleted.
- Calculate the time saving (x52 weeks) versus how many hours you need to remove or reduce it.
- Execute, using decide/instructions/handover/support if delegating.
- Repeat with another task next week.
Note: If you are a solo business owner with no staff, your focus will be on delay and delete, and instead of delegation consider automation and other efficiency gains (a better sales call process may save you from hours writing proposals; a checklist may speed up your blog writing or sending invoices).
Looking for guidance and accountability through this constant process of waste-removal? See the MG52 \\ 1-1 Measured Growth Coaching Program.