Delegation has always been a problem for a lot of entrepreneurs. In a many cases there isn’t even a question about it: it’s my business and therefore I must be as involved as I possibly can! It feels normal – I’m my own boss and because of it I don’t have anybody to help me, I’m only as successful as how hard I work.
And the problem is obvious: our business is our baby! It’s our heart and soul and we will fight anybody who will touch it!
Having been through a number of businesses myself, I’ve come to realize that we often have difficulty telling the difference between the business concept itself and the dirty little things that are involved in actual production or manufacturing process.
By default we think that as business owners we are supposed to be involved in every aspect of our business; that we have to know everything about everything that is involved in the process of the creation of the final product and that’s the way it should be if you want to run your own business.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
This kind of ideas actually run a lot of small business owners out of business every year and they rarely understand what kills them!
In order to see why it happens let’s go back a little bit and ask ourselves: what is a business? Is it an opportunity to provide your customers with fresh bread and cleaning services or an opportunity to make money for an entrepreneur?
It’s the money! It’s the profit that we want to receive from our business! That’s the main reason we quit our jobs and become entrepreneurs!
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 where it gets tricky! What is your cost of all the parts and components of your business? Are you sure you are aware of it? Are you?
Everything has a price! The faster you realize it the better! There is nothing free!
You know exactly where I’m going with this! That’s right! Your own time!
Inability to put a price on their own time runs a lot of small business owners out of business!
They think that if they do something themselves, they are getting it for free! This kind of entrepreneurs end up doing everything without any help hoping to “cut costs” and they don’t realize that the problem would never happen if they budgeted for every component and every position in their business.
Haven’t you met business-owners who never have 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!
It all comes back to budgeting. Did you budget for an accountant, for a cleaning lady, for a receptionist, for a loading-unloading professional, or you thought you would do it yourself and therefore it will be “free”?
One more time: everything has a price! Your involvement costs money!
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 don’t get to experience all this, then why bother?
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 Global Resorts Network Business we should be open to the idea of delegating most of the activities to outsourcers: article and press-release writing and submission, TrafficGuild activities, link building, social media communications, message boards and forums postings, content development and distribution, etc.
It’s not about losing control, it’s about gaining control! You are the brain, you are the brand! Let somebody else execute your ideas! After all you want the benefits, not just a feeling of involvement!
Keeping the big picture in mind is what it takes to build a large organization.
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 way I do it!
It would take me forever to finish one property and after having spent so much time and effort on it you get really frustrated when a prospective buyer refuses to see how special that house is. All they see is one more three bedroom house among the other three bedroom houses on the market!
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!
I remember how every year we all had to participate in this weird activity: no matter how wealthy you are, no matter who you are, everybody was getting really involved in planting and growing potatoes. We would plant it manually and harvest it in the fall by manually digging it out of the ground! It was a lot of work!
I kept asking my parents why don’t we just buy potatoes at the store (they were obviously very inexpensive) and they would keep telling me that if we grow them ourselves they are free!
I hadn’t been to college yet, but I was already feeling that it wasn’t the way to go, that this one-sided self-sufficiency was wrong, but I couldn’t figure out why everybody was still doing it.
I remember eventually, when I was already in college, when the time came again to harvest potatoes, I said to my family: “Hey, guys, I can handle it myself, you don’t have to go with me. I’m a strong guy and I will take care of it without your help!” They said: “I you sure? It feels really weird, because for years it’s been an activity that the entire family must participate in! Everybody else does it this way!” I said: “No, you are fine. I got it!”
Then I went to the place in town where bums were sitting all the time waiting for work and for barely any money I hired them to take care of this potatoes situation and it was done by the end of the day.
I don’t think I ever told my family what happened, because it would be almost a crime, what I did!
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 participate 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 taught 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!