Stop Doing Everything Yourself: Business Delegation Lessons From a 7-Year-Old

Transcript

In this episode, we’re talking about delegation. G’day. My name’s Mike, and you’re listening to Lone Wolf Unleashed, where I help you to switch off sooner and to live larger.

This past week, my daughter came to me. She wants to earn a little bit more money.

She’s 7 years old, and we’re trying to teach her, you know, good financial responsibility, all those types of things. And one of the things we said, well, why don’t we get you to start to vacuum the house? We got one of those little stick vacuums.

It’s relatively easy to move around the house. It’s not one of those big, clunky old things that, you know, weighed a ton when I was a kid trying to drag it around the house, trying to vacuum.

You know, one of the things that I’m trying to do with my daughters is to create an environment and to teach them things so that they’re ready to leave the house when they’re 18.

So that’s one of my parenting philosophies, and in that is trying to find ways to teach them things and trying to let go of things that I do and trying to give them the responsibility of doing it slowly but in a measured way. And I’ll tell you that this teaching my older daughter how to vacuum has taught me more about delegation than any business book.

And practicing delegation is also going to teach you more about how to delegate well to people than reading about it well. So the purpose of this episode is to go through the things that we need to think about when delegating.

You’re probably sitting here thinking, mike, I’m a lone wolf here. I run a solo business. I don’t need a delegate. Wrong, guys. So out of the three things, elimination, delegation, automation.

Delegation is by far and away the most effective thing that you can do to save time. So elimination is sort of here nor there. It’s. Yeah, well, most of the things that I do sort of have a purpose.

Yes, you can eliminate things, but it’s typically not a whole great deal that’s going to really move the needle. Delegation, getting someone else to do the work that you’ve built systems around is going to be the best way that you can start to save time.

One of the main objections is that the person you’re delegating to isn’t as good at doing it as you are. And I want you to just put that out of your mind.

One of the things you have to keep in mind is we’re not looking at how long it takes someone else to do a job, we’re looking at how much time it saves you.

If you bring a VA in, for example, and you get them to start triaging your inbox and setting up calendar invites and things, it doesn’t actually matter that they take twice as long to do it as you would. The point is, is that that is a task that you used to do all the time and now you’ve given it to someone else.

So one of the things that we want to think about here is how do I let go of that anxiety, that control, how do I allow someone else to pick that up and do that work for me? So we’re gonna go through a little bit of a framework here. You know, there’s other people that you can delegate to.

So obviously you can bring in an employee if you want, if that’s suitable to you, if that aligns with your goals. I’m not sitting here saying that you have to, but it can be an effective way. Okay. Some of the other things you might wanna do, other contractors.

So if you’re doing project based work and you wanna outsource to a contractor, how do they set up projects? How do they do certain things they need to be able to know? It might even be a good way to start to automate or delegate to AI agents.

So if you want an AI agent to pick up some emails or respond to emails of a certain type, it’s still going to need to be trained and to learn how to do things. So the way that you explain the way that you document you is going to affect the way that you set that up.

The skill is about what’s capturing in your head, delivering that in a way that is understandable to either the reader or the watcher or whoever’s going to be doing the task. I’m going to break it down. My daughter. What do we do? We make sure that the vacuum is ready to use. Is it fully charged? Is the dust bin empty?

So have we emptied that out? Maybe it has stuff in it from a prior use. We want to make sure that it’s ready to use.

If it’s not ready to use, then we need to make sure that we do the things that allow it to be ready to use. So if the battery’s not charged, then we’ll need to put it on charge. We’ll have to come back and do it later another time.

Are there any attachments for the surfaces that need to be considered for us? No. We basically got tiles all the way through. It’s always on the same setting and it doesn’t matter.

Is there anything that needs moving before you start? Kids, obviously, they love their toys. They love having things out. They’re not particularly good at putting things away.

We need to make sure that before we start vacuuming that we put things away. So one of her jobs as part of vacuuming was not just the vacuuming. It was also tidying things away so the vacuuming could occur.

So that’s the setup phase. All right, so the next phase is the technique.

So one of the things that I noticed that when she was trying to move the vacuum around is she would try to lift and shift, and this obviously tired her little arms out. And she did complain. Dad, my arms are getting tired. Can I stop? It’s like, well, no, they won’t get tired.

If you do it this other way, how do you steer the vacuum? By turning your wrist. It will change the direction of the vacuum head. Those types of things we want to do overlapping passes. So back and forward.

Overlapping passes, not, you know, squiggly chaos. How does moving around the edges work? It’s obviously a lot of dust collects in the edges of the room.

So how do we make sure that we collect all of that up really well, what does done look like for each room? Is there still stuff on the floor? What does done really look like? And it can be, you know, particularly on carpeted floors, it can be hard to tell.

So you need to walk through and go, okay, we know that this is done, and it’s done well because of xyz. Then there’s the navigation.

So what order of rooms need to happen? We normally do our house front to back, because obviously the front door and around the garage brings stuff in when people come in from outside.

What do we do about obstacles? Do we move them? Do we lift them up? Do we get vacuum underneath?

Are we just using the main head of the vacuum, or are we using some of the attachments? Do we move the furniture? Do we go around it? All those types of things. And then there’s the completion phase.

So once we have done the vacuuming, maybe the batteries run out. Maybe you need to go and charge it and come back and do the rest later. But we need to empty the dust chamber.

So I always like to have the thing that I’m using to be ready for the next person. So I do this at church as well.

When we’re packing the van, I like to have the equipment arranged in a way that it makes it easy for the next person to get it out. Right. So this looking at the orientation of how the wheels are on different, you know, cases and things like that.

How do we make sure that it’s easy to pick up for the next person that’s going to come and do this job?

This is really important, particularly for people delegating to others in business, because the person that has to come and pick it up when that person away is going to be you, right?

So we want to make sure that you are in a position that you can pick it up easily when that person is not doing that role for whatever reason, that maybe they’ve taken leave or they’re sick, or there’s just a higher volume there that you’re going to need to step in again and to take care of things. There’s cleaning the filter, right? There’s returning it to storage, there’s plugging in a charge.

All those things are little micro steps that need to be learned. It is the transfer of that tacit knowledge that you have to another person. The point is, is that I said vacuum the house, right?

But there’s actually 15 plus discrete decisions embedded in that instruction. So what’s best is if you do a video of yourself doing something or you explain it and you record it.

There are tools now where you can literally feed a transcript in and it will give you a SOP, a standard operating procedure. Always.

Just make sure that when you’re giving an instruction, it may seem like a simple instruction, but for someone who may not have done something before, it’s actually quite difficult to understand everything that might go in or out of that. The other thing here that we need to think about is how we monitor and control what the person has done.

So with my older daughter, once she had vacuumed, I would go and I would see what she’s done. Check the floor. Have you gone around? Show me how you’re doing that. Oh, this is a problem. Can you redo this bit? The same goes for delegation.

It’s not abdication of responsibility here. It is the setting up for success. It is the passing of responsibility.

So we want to make sure that when we give a task to someone, there is a feedback loop there that is effective. Did I go through and vacuum for her again? No, I didn’t. I pointed out where certain things needed work.

I explained to her how and I explained to her why. And then she would go and she would correct what she’d done. What does this mean?

It means that the next time that she goes to do this, she’s going to be better at it. Practice makes perfect, right? If you continually step in and you can continually pick up where the ball’s been dropped.

People won’t ever learn how to do things properly. And you’ll always complain, oh, so and so, just, oh, they just don’t get it. Maybe it’s not them who doesn’t get it. Right?

I’ll put that challenge to you. So what can get delegated, particularly for solo operators?

So this can be a little bit of a challenging one, especially if your strategy is to stay solo. But I want to give you some other things to think about. What type of things can be delegated for AI automation? It’s really repetitive.

It’s rule based, okay? It’s black and white. They are low judgment tasks for contractors. You know, it’s project based, it’s specialist work.

Maybe there’s a series of procedures that need to be gone through in a systematic manner, but maybe it’s more complex work, okay, a little bit more gray. Maybe there’s other client considerations that need to happen for each time.

For a VA, you know, you might be looking at admin, overflow, scheduling, research, all those types of things. How do you want those things to be done? What does good look like?

Provide them an example that you’ve done, Walk them through what you do, how you do it, what decisions need to be made along the way. This is not just about doing, it’s also about those little micro decisions that need to be made along the way.

So the question before any delegation is this, does this task require my judgment or just my knowledge? So if it’s just knowledge, capture it and hand it off. If it’s just knowledge, just capture and hand it off.

If it’s judgment, you can either keep it or you can train the judgment. Okay? It’s harder, it’s longer. There are a lot more rules involved. Human brains are really good at jumping to the end of a conclusion, okay?

Skipping steps along a decision tree. So being able to capture these things, how decisions are made, all those types of things, is important, but it does take longer.

If you’re trying to delegate authority, then you need to make sure that you are more rigorous in that documentation.

If you want to retain the authority and it requires your judgment, retain that and then palm off the things that just require the knowledge, not the judgment. Here is a procedure template that you can use.

You can get this on my website at lonewolfunleashed.com/procedure-template Here’s the basic outline of it. The trigger. So what kicks off the task? Why are we doing it? We have the inputs.

What do you need before starting so as I said with vacuum, you know, is it ready to use, is it charged? All those things, the steps, put them in numbers, make them specific, screenshot them, take photos, accompany visuals.

All these types of things really help.

If it is a judgment thing, you might have a table with the different inputs and outputs and how certain things, under what circumstances things are done. There is a definition of done. So how do we know that the task is finished? It looks like this. The floors are clean, there is no dust.

You know, list out the things that need to be true for that task to have been completed and then hand over. So who needs to know that the task was done? There is a great interview on the Tim Ferriss show. I’ll put the link on the show notes.

It’s the interview with Sam Caucus who used to be the CEO of Levels and he used a phrase which is if you don’t communicate, then you didn’t perform. So if you fail to communicate, then you fail to perform.

And that is really interesting sort of take is because if you don’t let the next person know that it’s their turn to do the thing, then it’s like you didn’t perform at all in any way in the first place. Make sure that you put on the document who needs to know that the task was done? So here are some things to think about.

I often hear people who have failed the delegation thing. They didn’t do it right. Maybe your instructions were incomplete or how it was communicated to the person trying to do the job was not quite right.

Maybe it’s not their fault. Maybe you need to elaborate more in your instructions. It took longer to explain than to do it. Yes, the first time. Okay.

As I said, people need to practice. People learn by having a closed feedback loop. You need to be able to monitor what they’ve done, provide feedback, get them to correct their mistakes.

If they don’t do it and you just pick it up because it’s faster, you’re going to constantly be picking up for them. They’re not going to be able to learn. They keep asking questions. Great. This is a good one.

Whenever they ask a question, make sure to go back to the procedure and to update it with the question. Okay.

Have a frequently asked questions and make sure that you update it as they are asking questions because this means that it will be more complete the next time you try to delegate this task to someone. We know that especially in this environment, employees aren’t forever.

If you’re trying to delegate to someone, it’s likely that you’ll be delegating this task to them again in the future. How do we make it easier for next time? I had to redo it anyway. Did you define done really clearly?

Did the person have a really good idea about what done looked like so that they could hand off something of higher quality? Most solo operators don’t delegate because they are attached to being needed, so the business is running without them.

It feels like a threat, not a goal. The goal is to have a business that can run without you, and that is by building up really good systems.

People are a part of systems and delegation are part of systems. If you can’t hand off vacuuming to a seven year old, you definitely can’t hand off that client onboarding system to an employee. So let’s start small.

Document one thing this week that is your homework this week. Document one thing this week the skill of delegation is still a skill that needs practicing.

It is a skill that compounds it has a return on investment. So you can get the procedure template link at my website. The link will be in the show notes.

Check out my website lonewolfunleashed.com thank you so much for hanging out with me this week. It’s been a pleasure showing you how to do delegation.

You could have been doing so many other things but you decided to hang out with me and learn about how you can free up time through the use of delegation. I look forward to seeing you in a fortnight. Take care.