When Should You Delegate?

Hey what’s up? Yuri back with you, and today we’re going to talk about an important topic, about delegation, hiring, outsourcing. I wanted to hammer home a concept with you here, and that is, become competent before you delegate. So, let’s just break that away, okay, become competent before you delegate.

What to Become Competent At Before You Delegate

Now, small caveat to this, okay, a little caveat. I’m not talking about becoming competent in areas in your business that are not going to serve you. Like, for instance, if you are a coach, if you’re watching this, if you’re a thought leader and expert, your job is not to create nice looking graphics, your job is not to create a nice website.

Your job is to understand how to clarify your message, how to share your message, how to market your message, how to sell. How to motivate your team, how to lead a team, how to lead your clients. Your job is not create graphics, websites, and so forth. So, what I’m about to share with you doesn’t pertain to low end tasks that are not going to move your business forward.

So listen, what I’m about to share with you does not apply to creating graphics in Canva, you should not develop competency in graphic design before you delegate graphics, okay. So, things like that, that are small tasks, that are not big needle movers, get clarity in what you want them to look like and then hand them off. Don’t spend your time doing that stuff, because it’s going to waste your time, it’s not going to move your business forward.

So, what I am saying though, is, of those core activities that I mentioned, that are really important, like the messaging, the marketing, the selling, the leading, these are things you need to develop competency in before you delegate, and let me tell you exactly why.

I’ve been in the health space for a long time, 20 years. Online since 2006, helped a lot of health and fitness entrepreneurs build their businesses online. And one of my good friends, who, I won’t mention his name, is a New York Time Bestselling Author. I was catching up with him recently, and he was telling me he’s got a new book coming out, and I was asking how everything was going with the build-up, and the marketing. He said, “It’s kind of so-so.”

Because, what they did, what he did, is, he outsourced the marketing to another firm, and that firm completely dropped the ball. What ended up happening in that case, is that, he’s going to back to square one, taking things all internally now, and having to build everything out himself. And I’ve seen this, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen this happen. Where, a health expert, or a fitness expert, they’re the content person, they just want to teach and they want to share their stuff, so they just partner up with someone to do the marketing, completely hand it off.

Before you know it they’re completely screwed, because arguably, the most important piece of their business, they have no idea about. No competency in, and no control over. And here’s the dilemma with that, it’s like, if that person or that company no longer is working with you, then you have no way of getting your message out to more people. Your marketing, which is essentially the life blood of your business, is chopped off, it’s done, gonzo. So, don’t make that mistake. This is a prime example of developing competency before you hand it off. So let me give you an example from our business.

Knowing WHO To Outsource Your Work To

I love Facebook Ads, they are incredible. If you’re not running Facebook Ads I think you’re crazy, but I’ve been running my Facebook Ads myself for, probably four or five years. Before I handed them off to Nicholas Kusmich, who is one of the leaders in the world when it comes to Facebook Advertising and return on investment, he now runs our Facebook Ads.

But I was running my own ads for years before we’d brought him in, and the reason for that is, because I knew, number one, it was a really, really important piece of our business. Number two, I really wanted to get good at it, because I understood that, listen, nobody cares about your business as much as you do. Nobody cares as much as, your money, as much as you do. There are pieces of your life you need to get good at. There are pieces in your business you need to be good at before you just hand it off. Sorry, I feel like my face is catching on fire here. Alright, is that better? Okay, there it is.

So anyways, I ran my own Facebook Ads really profitably for a number of years, and then, I got to the point where I said, “Do you know what? Probably not my unique genius, the thing that I should be doing the most of. Even though I really am good at it, now I’m happy to hand it off. We’ve got a lot more profit coming in, I can make sense of delegating that to somebody else who’s amazing at what they do.” Bringing on an A-player to do the work, not handing it off to some random $5 dollar an hour Filipino VA. Not that there’s anything wrong with VAs in the Philippines, but, you know what I’m saying.

So, the reason I did that is because, worst case scenario, let’s say our relationship falls through, hopefully it never does, but let’s say it does. At least I know how to get back into Facebook Ads and run them if I had to, and now my business is not completely crippled. So, I really want you to think of this, okay, is, I want to give you three takeaways here to help you understand how to do this properly.

Three Big Takeaways

Number one, is get good enough to be dangerous. Get good enough at what is important in your business, to be dangerous, even if it’s not your zone of genius. Like, if you just want to speak on stage, but you know, for instance, that crafting the right messaging and marketing is important, do that stuff to the point where it’s really good, and you’re good at it, to the point where you can bring on maybe a director of marketing to run things for you, and then you can speak on more stages.

Okay, that would be an example. But, what I’m not saying, just as a reminder, is not getting good at graphics, okay. Let someone else do that from day one, just get clear on what you want your thing to look like.

Number two is, as I said, delegate the low dollar tasks quickly, and take longer with the higher value tasks. So, graphic design, web design, delegate that stuff immediately, that’s stuff you should never even bother with. But the things like I’ve mentioned, marketing, selling, all that kind of stuff, get good at that. Get really, really good at that, and then, down the road, eventually you can delegate it.

For instance, in our business I did all of our enrollment calls for a long time, in some cases I was doing seven calls a day. As you can tell, you can probably burn yourself out pretty quickly with that, but, with all those reps I got really good at what I did. I continued learning, and growing, and training. I got even better at sales, and now we’ve got an amazing team of coaches who do all those calls for our company. But it wasn’t something I started off with on day one.

I can’t even tell you how many high ticket closures have approached me, like, “Hey! Need a closer for your team?” I’m like, “Ah, not you, that’s okay, thank you very much. You have no clue about our business.” I would rather have trained it myself, gotten really good at it, learned from other experts obviously, put in the work, develop a system that’s going to work for us, that feels good for our core values, and then bring the right people in, to now run that for us.

So that’s an example of something that I took a lot longer to delegate, because it’s so important for our business. Because it’s front-facing we want to give people we speak with a really good experience, not like this high pressure, high close, must take a commission at all costs, type of nonsense. Okay, so that’s the second thing.

And remember, third, is that delegation buys you speed. So once you’re at the point where you are delegating, or hiring, remember that, the right people never cost you money, the wrong people do, but the right people accelerate your business growth. Because, if you want to get to $10 million, you could do it by yourself, it’s going to take you a lot longer, but if you delegate you’ll get there a lot faster.

That’s why a lot of venture capital companies will back of lot of these SAS companies, these app companies out in Silicon Valley. And they’re able to go from zero to hero in no time, because they bring on, immediately, 250 developers. They have an app up and running, boom! Happens in the space of one or two years. Where, normally, one person doing that, it would take them 10.

So, delegation or hiring buys you speed, but again, you need to have money to do that. So that’s why it’s important to go back to the most important foundations in your business, which is selling, and obviously getting people results.

So remember, think about it this way. If you don’t get this right it’s like a pilot delegating the flight of the aircraft to autopilot, without it knowing how to fly the aircraft. So that, when the autopilot’s about to come off, the pilot’s like, “Oh my god, what do I do?” You don’t want to be in that position, so learn how to fly the plane, and when you do, you can click the autopilot button.

Make sense? Alright guys, if this makes to you let me what you think below. I look forward to seeing you soon. Hope this finds you well, and I’ll see you soon.