A shared trait amongst entrepreneurs is the desire to control everything.
It does not take long operating your business for you to realize that there are many things outside your control. To keep your sanity you learn to control what you can influence and adjust to everything else.
This is the attitude that you need to bring to outsourcing and delegating in your business. Give up your need for control and delegate the tasks you are doing that are not an owner duty or in your genius zone (i.e., tasks you excel at, bring you joy and time passes quickly when you are doing them).
For your business to reach it’s full potential it needs your focus and attention on the key tasks that only an owner can do. These are your owner duties:
- Strategic planning
- Goal setting
- Determining marketing strategies and promotions
- Financial planning and management
- Establishing and monitoring performance to customer service standards
- Creating high performing teams that operate efficiently
- Monitoring that quality pet care standards are met or exceeded
How many of these items have you had the time for in your business in the last month or quarter? Have all of these items been done in the last year for your business?
If not, then you need to delegate tasks that others can do so you can start working on your business. The owner duties are how you grow revenue and increase your own pay. This is definitely a situation where you have an initial expense that will be repaid down the road, multiple times over.
How do you decide what to delegate?
Start with the tasks you dislike and procrastinate doing. Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Bookkeeping
- Checking and submitting payroll hours
- Staff scheduling
- Supply orders
- Editing photos and graphics for social media or marketing
- Writing blog posts, newsletter articles or marketing copy
- Cleaning, maintenance, pest control
Who do you delegate tasks to?
Review your current team for staff that you want to retain. Expand their responsibilities as a first step in growth to a career in your business. Next consider adding a part or full-time assistant role that can help you with administrative tasks. You are the executive for your business and you’ll be surprised how soon they become a productive and valued part of your team.
The digital economy makes it easy to find experts online that you can outsource a one-time task or ongoing projects at very affordable rates. Check out Upwork as a resource for multiple types of roles including:
- Data entry
- Graphic design
- Document formatting
- Video editing
- Writing
Can I afford to delegate these tasks?
Your business can’t afford for you not to delegate if the owner duties are not getting done. How much is your time worth hourly? Based on the average salary of pet business owners on the low end your time is worth $40 an hour. So your initial guide would be to delegate any task that you can get done for less than that.
The cost of delegating is repaid when your profits increase as you have more time to spend doing owner duties. Think how you would spend an extra 8 hours a week to grow your business. An extra day each month could be spent on:
- Marketing to sell more services
- Understanding your finances to reduce expenses
- Helping your team work more efficiently and lower payroll
- Providing more staff training to improve customer service or quality of care which results in more referrals and positive reviews
If your business earned $250,000 in revenues and your efforts increased that by 10% you would add $25,000 over a year. You also focused on reducing costs so let’s assume total expenses were $220,000 and you reduced that by 5% or $11,000.
In total your profits for the year would increase by $36,000. How do you like that pay increase? Are you ready to start delegating?