What Should I Delegate

(and should I keep doing myself?)

One of the biggest mistakes I see small business owners make when they start hiring is delegating the wrong things. Either they hold on too tightly to tasks that are draining them dry, or they hand off critical responsibilities that no one can do better than they do.

Here’s my practical guide to figuring out what you should delegate first, and what you should keep doing yourself.

What Not To Delegate

Before I recommend what to delegate first, I’d like to highlight some tasks that I recommend refraining from delegating until you have truly mastered them.

Fundamental marketing strategy

Who are you serving? What do they need? How do you differentiate yourself from everyone else in your market? As the business owner, it’s up to you to know and understand your customers better than anyone else. You can get guidance and advice, which I encourage if you’re new to marketing, but the strategic decisions need to sit with you.

Product and service design

The decisions about what you offer, how you deliver it - those need to be yours. You can absolutely bring in consultants for guidance, but ultimately these decisions need to be yours. It’s highly unlikely that you’d find someone who cares more about this stuff than you do, because it’s your business.

Delegate These First

Low-skill, high-frequency, repeatable tasks

These are the tasks you’re doing every day without even fully noticing them. Individually they seem small, but added up they’re consuming hours of your week that could be spent on actual business growth. The best part? They don’t require a five-year degree. You just need someone detail-oriented and reliable, and those people are out there, if you know how to find them.

Think: responding to emails, admin, social media content creation, social media scheduling, bookkeeping, video editing, customer support. These tasks are high-frequency, which means the time savings are significant, and the risk of outsourcing them is relatively low.

Energy drainers

These are the tasks you dread. The ones you drag your feet on. The ones that leave you feeling flat even after they’re done.

As the leader and heart of your business, you do your best work when you’re pouring your energy into the tasks you were built to do — the things that light you up and delight you. The challenges that you are uniquely gifted at solving. “Energy drainers” pull you away from these tasks, and make you far less productive.

There are so many people out there who genuinely love admin, who get a thrill from tech setup, who find bookkeeping deeply satisfying. Hand those tasks to the people who love them, and watch your business transform - Your admin will be done better than you could have done it yourself, and you’ll have the time and energy to shine in your zone of genius.

Growth blockers

If there’s a task you know you need to start doing in order for the business to grow, but you keep putting off because you simply don’t have the time or the skill. A common example of this is putting out more marketing materials. These are great tasks bring a new team member in for - because they already have the skills and the time that you don’t.

The Most Commonly Outsourced Tasks

Based on my decade-plus of working with small businesses, these are the tasks people almost always outsource first:

Customer support and email management
Administration (both business and personal)
Bookkeeping
Social media content creation
Video editing

Delegation of these tasks is common for good reason. They’re time-consuming, don’t require deep specialist knowledge of your industry, and can be done beautifully by a highly skilled and experienced offshore VA for $10 - 15 USD/hour.

The Payoff Is Real

I’ve seen it many times over the years. When a business owner delegates the right tasks, in the right way, to the right people, the business grows and the business owner’s life improves considerably.

They reclaim time. Their energy levels go up. They start thinking more creatively about their business rather than just keeping the wheels turning. Things get easier overall.

If you’d like to have a no-obligations talk about your next potential hire, feel free to reach out. You can book in a call by clicking here.