by Pavel Becker
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.
Let’s take a look at the first problem. You’re right to feel that your business is your baby. You brought it into being and you alone are responsible for it. To a certain degree, you do know what is best for your baby.
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.
That’s completely backward!
This poisonous mindset is actually what costs a lot of small business owners the very thing they are trying to protect-their business!
Step back and look at things from a different perspective. What is the essence of a business? Why did we want to be business owners? Was it the sheer joy of providing fresh bread or superior toilet cleaning services to customers? Or was it the ability to make money doing something we actually liked?
Isn’t that financial independence and prosperity is the reason why we took the leap of faith and went into business for ourselves?
That’s why, before we start any venture at all, it is important to know if the business even has a chance of becoming successful or if we’ll just be stuck baking bread for the rest of our lives.
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.
Sounds simple but it’s not really. Think you know what exactly it cost to make each individual widget or loaf of bread? Are you sure?
Everything costs money! Everything.
Think you’ve figured out what I’m talking about? How about your time? Isn’t that worth something?
The inability or unwillingness to stick a concrete price on the time they spend running their business can cut the legs out from under any entrepreneur before they even get started. They seem to forget that if somebody was paying them to do all of the things that they do, they’d be making a pretty good chunk of change. For some reason, everyone thinks that if they do something themselves, the labor is somehow free. Nobody thinks ahead that far but the issue would never even come up if owners budgeted for every aspect of their business before-hand.
Haven’t you met business-owners who never has 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!
You figured you could start and an “average” small business and make “average” money. Any idea what that means? Try high six- low seven- figures per year-or $1,000,000.00 per year. And that’s according to John Assaroff. That’s $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 home based business we should be open to the idea of delegating most of the activities to outsourcers: article and press-release writing and submission, link building, social media communications, message boards and forums postings, content development and distribution, etc.
It feels a little funny at first, at least until you realize that you’re not actually losing control of anything. In fact, you’re just beginning to actually control things rather than letting them control you!
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 unique way I do it!
It took forever to finish a single house just for the buyers to come in and make rude comments about the choice of paint or carpet. They never saw how much effort I had really put into that property. It was just another three bedroom ranch in a field of three bedroom ranches to them!
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 never understood why my parents refused to buy potatoes in the market. They were cheap enough but every time I brought it up, they would say that by growing the potatoes ourselves, they were free.
I was still young but something about that struck me as wrong. I just couldn’t figure why everybody was working so hard for a few potatoes when they could buy them for pennies a pound!
One year, after I had started college, I told my family I could handle the harvest by myself. “Really?” they asked, clearly upset by the potential of being excluded from this ritual. “Sure,” I said.
I remember I went down to this place where jobless men used to gather and offered them some hard cash for their labor. They had all of the potatoes harvested before the day was over.
I never told my family what I did. I knew they would be beside themselves if they ever found out.
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 specialize 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.”
I had been right and there was the proof!
It sounds like poetry to me!
Once again: 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 get 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!
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