The Art of Delegation: Setting Up Your First Hire for Success

Transcript

The Promise and the Risk of Delegation

Good day. My name’s Mike and you’re listening to Lone Wolf Unleashed, the podcast where I help you to take your time back from your business and to use it on your terms. Thank you for joining me today.

We’re covering how delegation is the fastest way to save time in your business without having to learn all this automation stuff. But it comes with the highest risk — because we’re dealing with these wonderful things called human beings.

I’m going to walk you through how we go about setting you and them up for success so that you can save time.

We’ve talked about delegation before on this podcast. You can go back and listen to some of those episodes — I’ll link those in the description.

The premise is that we need to know what we’re giving people, and we need to have it well documented so they can be set up for success and go and do the job well. Episode over. Well — we’ve already covered it. Thanks for joining me tonight.

The Cycle Most Business Owners Go Through

Here’s the crux of what I’ve seen recently — and it is a very common thing for business owners to go through.

You’re a business owner working 60 to 70 hour weeks and you go: I’ve had it up to here. I am doing too much. I think I’ve grown to a point where I am ready to hire someone. And you go: I know, I will get someone in and they can take care of — let’s say my marketing content. Great decision.

And that is the extent of the thinking that goes into the hiring decision. That’s not enough. I’m really sorry that you have to hear it from me. Simply saying you’re going to bring someone in to handle your marketing content is not enough.

There’s more work to do here. We need to know the type of work we’re going to give that person. We need examples of what good looks like. We need step by step instructions. We need to give them context about why the marketing in your business is the way it is. All of that needs to be in place before you even think about doing an ad or reaching out to see who might be interested in the role.

And there’s a new process we need to establish: your hiring process. It can be very scary to think about what that looks like if you’ve never done it before, because there are certain artifacts that go into the execution of that process. You’re not just documenting the tasks you want to hand over — you’re fleshing out a whole new process.

The advantage of thinking about it this way is that you don’t have to define your hiring process every time you hire. It’s the upfront work you do before the first time. You’re building a scalable engine, and the next time you go to hire, the things are already in place.

Step One: Do You Actually Need to Hire?

If this sounds familiar, here is my recommendation for what to do first.

Number one: establish whether you really have a need to bring someone on. You might just be in the mindset of — I’m working too much, let’s just bring someone in. If you’re feeling that way, it’s likely that yes, you do need to bring someone in, but let’s not rush into it.

The first thing we need to establish is what are the types of tasks you want to get rid of. This may not be so straightforward. You might just be overwhelmed, and it’s hard to make good decisions when you’re overwhelmed.

So take a little step back and look at your business as a whole. I’ve done episodes on mapping out your business as part of a profile and what your processes are. Take a deep breath, sleep on it. You make good decisions when you’re well rested and not overwhelmed. Look after yourself.

Number two: figure out the type of work you really like to do. Chances are you’re thinking about getting rid of the work you don’t like doing — and that’s perfectly natural. But that may not be the right place to start, or it might be. Then document out the things you want to hand off.

Getting the Infrastructure in Place

Once you’ve determined what work you want to hand off, we need to make sure the ecosystem — the infrastructure — in your business is set up to share that with people.

That means mapping out whatever process it is so you have those tasks on a page, or multiple processes depending on what the scope of the role will entail. Then you need to document out those procedures — get those step by step instructions down. How does the system work? That’s really what you’re describing when you sit down and work through what the system is, what it does, and how it works.

Make sure your document templates are in place. This is a big one. Recently I did an analysis with one of my customers — they’re saving between 30 and 45 minutes per document when it’s accessed and used. That’s a lot of time. If you can get your document templates in place, the person can come in and hit the ground running rather than designing stuff that should already be there before they start.

Building Your Hiring Process

Now you’ve got a picture of what you’re handing over. The next thing is to determine what your hiring process looks like.

If you’ve never hired before, that’s fine — there are plenty of resources online. Here are the basics.

Position description. Articulate the tasks you’ve determined onto a position description — a document that describes what the position is, what it does, what its purpose is, who they report to. That’s the first document you want to produce. As you complete it, it may become clear that you actually need two different part-time people to handle everything.

Job ad. Use that position description to write a job ad. The job ad is a marketing tool for employees to join your business. It gives them a picture of who the business is, why it exists, who the customers are, how long you’ve been around. Cover the key details from your position description — you don’t necessarily need to share the full position description straight away, but you can share it with interested candidates prior to setting up an interview.

Selection criteria. Define what type of person you’re looking for. Something to keep in mind: in business we want to hire the highest capability people at the lowest cost. There are always trade-offs. A highly experienced person costs more but needs less handholding. As a solo founder you might not have the cash to pay a lot, which is fine — but understand that person is going to need more support. Establish some way of figuring out capability and what to pay.

The interview. People will apply, you’ll look at their CVs, and you can use AI to help match which CVs are good fits. Then set up interviews with a targeted set of questions about how people would handle specific tasks within that job. Not every interview set should be the same. Make the questions really meaningful — get to the outcomes quickly. Know what the crux of what you need to find out from this person is. Skip the generic stuff like “what’s your greatest weakness” and craft questions where you can get into the real detail.

Employment contract. When you find someone you want to offer the job to, you need an employment contract. Go to a lawyer. Please don’t use ChatGPT for this. Go to a lawyer, get a contract done up. There may be local government resources in your area with guidance on what should and shouldn’t be in employment contracts, but engage a legal professional. Do this earlier than you think — get the contract in place before you even start hiring. When you go to make an offer, you fill in the relevant details in the placeholder text, send it off for signing, and get underway.

Onboarding and Managing Well

Congratulations — you’ve hired someone. It doesn’t end there.

I have a friend, Rory Berry, who is a people strategy specialist, and he really hammers home the importance of the onboarding experience. I highly recommend figuring out how you’re going to deliver a good, solid onboarding to your new starter.

It helps if they’re in person. If they’re online, establish a cadence and rhythm for catching up early and make sure they have what they need.

Remember: the whole goal is that we don’t spend more time managing them than we would have taken doing the job ourselves. We want to spend less time managing them — because that’s how we’ve saved time. Establish those cadences, make your expectations really clear, and make sure that if they’re not meeting the role requirements, you know about it early. Hire slow and fire fast.

Make sure you can see what they’re up to, that you’re getting the outcomes you desired when you went to hire. The goal is a happy employee who brings their best to work. Create a culture that enables that — I don’t have time to cover that today, but it’s really important.

The Bigger Picture

Not to freak you out — and not to discourage you about all the work involved in bringing on your first person. Ultimately it is a boon to businesses to bring people in. More people means you’ve been growing and you’re ready to make that first step. And it will save you time.

Remember: you are the shareholder in your business, the founder of it. The ultimate goal is to create systems and processes that other people can run, so that you can reap the rewards through business ownership.

So what have we learned today? Hiring is worth it. It can be an experience setting it up for the first time. But it is very rewarding to hand off work to someone and have everything in place for them to go and do it — so that you can save time. I don’t want you going in with rose-coloured glasses though. There is a lot of work that needs to be done.

Thank you so much for joining me. You could have been doing a million things today, but you decided to hang out with me and learn about how delegation of your first hire can save you time and what strategies to use. Make sure to go check out my website at lonewolfunleashed.com/resources for tools that might be useful in your systemisation journey. Until next week — I’ll see you then.