In this week’s video call session of our Business Owners Mastermind group, we met again to touch on an important topic for new entrepreneurs, and that many times we let it go by making our work much more heavy or tedious.
Many times we do not realize the logistics involved in any project within the workplace, and although as an owner we would like to take control of everything by delegating the duties within our payroll, some of them are not the competence of the employees, that is, they are not hired for what is being requested of them.
This is something that I had a hard time understanding, especially because I did not want to see reality. Until the solution came to me, outsourcing.
Alan Reeves tells us about his experience
The first five and a half years of my business was just me. And I had no business experience, I was a technician, who was basically growing organically. And in 2003, I had 500 or more assets mostly, and the days got really, really long. And it started to affect my health. And one thing that I was really challenged with at the time was money management, because I had the best intentions in the world.
But when I was shooting 12 hours a day for five days in a row, I knew very well that I was wasting time. I give up that morning and go out and say, when the day is done, I’m going to catch up on billing. And when I got home, I was down, and this would go on for days. And for those who are just starting out, you may not believe this. But, if you don’t enter the time, the day you do the work, you’re going to have a leak, I bet you’re going to lose 25-30% of your billable time. And that is absolutely huge.
Do this exercise: should I outsource a VA virtual assistant? Should you delegate it to an employee? Should you automate it?
This is what I do that I do myself at least twice a year, listing the business tasks they perform. And you can also make your employees do it too. List the business tasks you do, how much time per week you spend on it, a checkbox will appear in any of these columns.
Do you like to do that or wait? Don’t you like to do it? And aren’t you good at it? Put a checkbox there? Do you like to do it? And you are good at it and you should not do it because you are the owner or that person, who is doing it? And then ask yourself if this task can be delegated, automated or outsourced, by the time you’re done with this, and this will be one of those things you just did. Like I’ve been doing this for over 10 years.
So every now and then it’s good to reevaluate reevaluate your system.
Strive to resolve a call, giving people the opposite empowerment of you, your team, to take over the call, someone calls for whatever reason they can, just handle it, whether they have to. attract other team members.
But if you are struggling to achieve one call resolution, I think that will put you above, and beyond, all the rest. Often times, it’s the little things you do that they might never have seen before, might never have done for themselves. They may never have thought about it.
Everybody has weaknesses. I know for a fact that in my business, if I have a customer service problem, I am 100% better off involving them with my wife instead of them talking to me.
So that would be the only piece of advice you would have to constantly review, assess your people, their strengths, their weaknesses, give them more of the work they are great at, and minimize the things they are not very good at. It is much easier to maximize strength than to change weakness.
