How To Hire When You

Want To DelegateA Workload That

Fluctuates Significant From Week To Week

One of the most common concerns I hear from small business owners who are thinking about hiring is this: “But what if I don’t have enough work for them all the time?” You’ve got 30 hours of work one week, and 5 hours of work to delegate the next. So it’s hard to find steady staff. How do you build a reliable team without constantly scrambling to fill their hours?

In this article, I’m going to walk you through how I solved that problem.

Little Tasks Add Up

Back in 2020, I was taking 15 to 20 sessions a week with business coaching clients. After each session, I’d download the Zoom recording, upload it to YouTube, add it to a playlist, and send the link to the client. It only took me five or ten minutes, so I didn’t think much of it.

But as my business grew, so did my workload. I didn’t want to work all the time. Life is about more than just work. So I started looking critically at the work that I was doing, asking myself, “Do I really need to do all this stuff or can I hand over something to free up my time?”

I realized that I was spending over three hours a week just on transferring zoom videos across to youtube. So I hired a VA, handed the task over, and she nailed it from the very first go — no corrections needed. Just like that, I had reclaimed three hours back every week.

But it wasn’t just the time that I reclaimed.Those little admin tasks take me out of “creative” mode and put me in “boring admin” mode. They drain my energy. So once I’d handed them over, I felt lighter, more creative, and more present for the work that really energises me.

That experience made me wonder: what else have I been doing that I could hand off? So I ran a little experiment.

The 20-Minute Alarm Trick

I set an alarm every 20 minutes throughout my day — while working, while doing personal tasks, across everything. Every time it went off, I wrote down what I was doing and asked myself one question: can this be delegated?

After 3 weeks of this, I had written down literally dozens of tasks that I had never considered delegating before. This amounted to a full job description for an executive and personal assistant, at least 10 to 15 hours of work a week that I’d been doing myself without even realising it. The type of work that I could outsource for a fraction of my own hourly rate.

I only needed to take on one new client to cover the cost of my new VA, but the time that I saved enabled me to gain much, much more than just one new client.

I hired for that role. I freed up my time. And most importantly, I freed up my headspace. Within a few months, my business literally doubled. Yes, I understand this sounds like a silly cliche, but it’s actually true. 15 hours/week is an incredible amount of time. I finally had the headspace to reconsider my entire niche and business model. I tweaked my business model and it paid off - things blew up in the best possible way.

That’s the power of this process. And it’s also the answer to the question of how to make sure there’s always enough for your staff to do. Allow me to explain.

Stop Hiring for Peaks. Start Building Relationships.

The temptation when work gets busy is to hire someone for that rush, then let them go when things quieten down. The problem is, next time you’re busy, you have to find someone new, train them up, and figure out if you can trust them. You do it over and over again. It’s exhausting and inefficient. Eventually you succumb to doing everything yourself, which is a total dead end.

What works far better is building long-term, sustainable relationships with your staff. When someone has worked with you for a while, they understand your business, they care about your success, they’re invested in your success, because your paths are tied together. That kind of loyalty and commitment produces much, much better work. Plus, you get to enjoy a real sense of team, not transience.

But to make that relationship work, you need to offer them some consistency. They need enough work to justify a long term hire.

So how do you create and justify that work for the long term?

Two Buckets: Urgent/Essential Tasks and Important Tasks

Here’s the system I use:

1. Urgent and essential tasks. These are the priority. These get done first.
2. Important Projects. This is a running list of everything that isn’t urgent but would genuinely move the business forward if someone had the time to do it.

When your VA has finished the urgent work and things are quiet, they move onto the backup list. No downtime, no awkward “I don’t have anything for you” conversations. There’s always plenty of meaningful, useful tasks for the VA to do for you.

How to Build Your “Important Projects” list

This is where the 20-minute alarm process becomes relevant. When you start paying attention to everything you’re doing and asking “could this be delegated?”, your eyes start to open to all sorts of things you’d never even considered outsourcing — not because they weren’t worth doing, but because you simply hadn’t had the bandwidth to think about them. We aren’t taught to think about what we can delegate, so we get used to doing everything ourselves. But there is so so much that you can achieve when you open your mind to what’s possible when it comes to outsourcing.

Here are just a few of the things that found their way to my “Important projects” list:

Updating your Instagram bio
Writing and scheduling Reels or other content you’ve been putting off
Emailing a list of warm contacts you’ve never properly followed up with
Tidying up your website copy or fixing pages that need a refresh
Organising your systems, files, or inboxes
Research projects you’ve been meaning to get to
Upgrading your internet or phone plan

These are the tasks that never make it to the top of a busy to-do list, but when a skilled VA finally gets to them, they can make a real difference to your business and your life.

Once you start delegating and have some success with it, you start to realize how much more you can achieve with this new superpower, and new projects reveal themselves that previously felt out of reach. It’s like growing an extra pair of arms.

As part of our onboarding process for new clients, we provide a comprehensive list of literally hundreds of tasks that people successfully outsource. You’ll find all sorts of things there that you may have overlooked.

The ROI That Makes It All Make Sense

Here’s an idea worth sitting with.

Let’s say, for example, that you earn $100/hour, and you can hire an outstanding VA for $10/hour.

If you hand over 1 hour of odds and ends to a VA, that’s 1 extra hour that you can spend serving clients. So you spend $10 but can earn an extra $100.

Here’s another way to think about it. If you get 1 new contract for just one hour, you can hire a VA to spend 10 hours on your business.

Let’s scale this up - you have a VA doing work for you for 10 hours/week. You pay $100/week for this privilege. But in those 10 hours/week, you take on 5 new clients, so you earn $500/week more, and you have another 5 hours/week free to do whatever you want to.

With those 5 hours/week, you can build that online course you’ve always been dreaming of (or what ever your equivalent is) to start earning passive income and stop trading your time for money.

The core of it is this: Handing over tasks can feel scary, but when you get the set up right, the returns can be exponential.

How To Put This Into Action

The short answer to “how do I make sure there’s always enough work?” is this:

Do the “20 minute alarm” trick. List out all the things you could potentially delegate
Create your ESSENTIALS bucket and your IMPORTANT PROJECTS bucket. Generate a good size-able list of backlog tasks that you’ve been putting off. This will give your new team member plenty to do when there’s no urgent work.
Hire the new team member, and get started!

If you like the idea of bringing on a support person, but you’re not sure where to start, I’m always happy to have a chat. At Unicorn Staffing Agency, we don’t just find you the right person. We help you set them up to succeed from day one.

You can book in a call by clicking here.

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