One of the secret ingredients to success is to effectively delegate tasks within your brand. The moment you realize you can’t do everything alone (and do something about it) is when you’ll move forward at a faster pace that ever before.
However, delegation isn’t easy. It’s a skill you can master, but hiring people for the sake of hiring people won’t work. You also have to repeatedly revisit your budget, revenue, and expenses because a few bad mistakes can force you to fire really good freelancers.
That’s the last thing you want to do on the delegation journey.
To avoid that pitfall and continue to expand via delegation, utilize these insights.
Identifying tasks you’d like to delegate is the easy part. Write a list of what you have to do but don’t want to do. That’s your list of tasks to delegate.
However, when you’re just starting out, you need to strategically choose what you delegate so you don’t go into debt and find yourself making hard decisions.
When you start out, delegate the tasks that take up the majority of your time. That way, you have more time to think strategically and plan out the direction of your business.
That’s an important point many people overlook.
While you’ll have to be in your business on a certain period of time, you must focus more of your time on your business. That means taking an aerial view and looking at the entire layout of your land (all current and potential endeavors).
You’ll learn a lot about the actions you need to take to move your brand forward. Knowing where to exert your time and then exerting your time in that area will allow you to achieve better results.
If you outsource the right task but delegate it to the wrong person, you’ll lose more time than what you would actually gain. Every hire must get micromanaged for the first week to ensure you and your new hire are on the same page, but you’ll never get on the same page as a low value freelancer. You might get on the same page of a different book with lower standards, but you’ll find yourself spending too much time making sure the freelancer is doing the assigned work and constantly correcting mistakes.
You need to make sure you hire the right freelancer or else your delegation efforts will be meaningless.
Ask each applicant to describe his/her personality. Look for the kind curious learners.
Ask each applicant to explain why they want to work for you. Look for the people who took the 5-10 minutes to do some research and meaningfully explain why your brand’s mission attracts them.
Look at the skill set. Make sure you hire a freelancer with the right skills for the part. This seems simple but it’s also a common mistake people make. Finding freelancers with additional skills based on the other tasks you want to delegate is a plus. If you like that freelancer, you can easily give him/her more money.
4, BONUS: When you hire great people, ask those great people for suggestions when you want to hire more people. Great freelancers tend to know other great freelancers who would be a great fit for your brand.
Paying attention to your budget is big. If you hire many freelancers, your expenses will significantly climb upward. You must now make additional revenue to pay for your growing team.
To avoid problems, you must set limitations based on your current revenue streams and expenses. If you make $5,000/mo, don’t spend $5,000/mo on freelancers. Start closer to $500/mo and set a ceiling towards $3,000/mo.
Of course, everyone’s financial situation is different, but you must set a costs ceiling that expands and shrinks in relation to the changes in your revenue.
Once you set your budget, commit yourself to maintaining that budget. Until you expand your budget by expanding your revenue, you may have to say no to quality freelancers.
Understand this going in and use this fact as motivation to generate more revenue.
When you hire a freelancer, you either do so to save time or generate more revenue than you would have without that freelancer.
I recommend you start by saving more time so you can have more time to think. Having more time to think will speed you on the path to success.
Once you have enough time to think, you’ll better understand how you can hire freelancers that directly result in additional revenue.
This is the most important thing to know when hiring freelancers. Your freelancers are depending on you for their income. That makes firing people so hard (it’s also a good reason to hire the right people to decrease the amount of those decisions you have to make).
If you have no plan to generate additional revenue and then can’t pay your freelancers, you are letting down that freelancer and his/her entire family. Some freelancers need that money to pay for their rent. Others are saving up for expensive college tuition.
Delegation doesn’t mean more time for you to kick back. On the contrary, delegation means you must kick things up a few gears because you’ve got people depending on your for their livelihoods and goals.
If you won’t put in the work to generate more revenue, don’t bother hiring freelancers. That’s sabotage.
Delegating tasks to trustworthy freelancers will allow your rapidly expand your business.
However, you can positively impact the lives of your freelancers by giving them work and the financial security they need to feel happier.
You’ll also positively impact the lives of your audience as you can create a more legendary experience through your content.
What are your thoughts on delegating your tasks? Have any tips for hiring the right freelancers and expanding your brand? Sound off in the comments section below.