Following on from my post last week I have been thinking about delegating and experimenting with personal outsourcing.

The stages of a business

When you start your business the founding entrepreneur is the face, soul and drive behind the business. As the business grows and more people join the team there is a point where the founder is stretched to breaking point. There is a moment in every business when the founder has to step aside and give more operational control to his or her senior team. This can be a very painful process and can be fraught with problems if you do not prepare for this well in advance.

Delegating and managing a team as opposed to doing the work is a real skill and something that takes time to learn. You need to have systems in place to help people do their job and you have to be on hand to troubleshoot and encourage.

A process for delegating projects

If you are going to move from the main operator of a company to more of a team structure there are a few things that I think might help you in the transition.

Build a great team

This seems obvious but it is hard to find great people. But more than that you need to have people in your team who are comfortable managing themselves and have attention to detail. You need to feel confident in your decision to give them more responsibility.

Design systems to support processes

If you have been doing all the work to date you will be best placed to know the ins and outs of every detail of the business. This makes you ideally placed to lay the foundations for systems and to write any manuals to those who will be stepping into your role.

Trust

Once you have starting delegating you really need to trust your team and have total trust in your decision. If you do not have trust then this new way of working will never work. There may be a period at the start where things do not go to plan you need to give it time as the benefits in the end will be worth it.

Do not micro manage or try to interfere

There will be a huge temptation to interfere and take over, this is the worst thing you can do. Firstly it shows that you do not trust in the person’s ability, and secondly you do not allow the person to learn if you keep jumping in and solving their problems.

Check in regularly

In the beginning you will need to check in with your team regularly to see if they have any questions, concerns or issues. You need to be readily available for people to ask questions. You cannot delegate and then think that you will not have to do anything until the project is due to deliver, there will be a period of transition. As your team get more confident you will need to check in less regularly.

High level overview

Once you have transitioned to delegating more you will need to get regular highlight reports from your team get a high level overview. I suggest daily emails on progress, any issues or items that need attention.

Now you should be free to working on growing the business and doing the things that will really make a difference to the growth of your business.

Personal outsourcing

As you may have read in a previous post I have been experimenting with a personal virtual assistant. The rationale is that you should try to outsource as many of your tasks as possible so that you can concentrate on the things that are really important in your life. This week I have used my personal assistant in India for the first time.

It was quite a learning curve and I think the next time will be a lot, lot easier. I emailed my enquiry to two outsourcing firms and the first one that responded I decided to use. Firstly the sign up process at VMG BPO was fairly painless, although PayPal rejected my card which was annoying.

Once signed up I read that in order to use the service I had to send an email to support. So I thought that I would start with something simple so I asked for someone to do some research to find an affordable Japanese restaurants near Covent Garden in London.

Then twenty-four hours later I had an email in my inbox with all the research I requested. I had a look through and the quality was superb and saved me quite a few hours. This was a very good start and cost me $6 (£4.50!).

I am going to try and use this service again in the future!