Delegating Your New Process

Let's talk about delegating.

This is either an overly relied upon crunch or an underused support system. As you go into 2021 you probably started the year in Phase 1 (Identify problems and brainstorm ideas.)

This is a two-team process:

Team 1 is you.

You have a direction you would like to see your company go and you have objectives you would like to be successful in.

Team 2 is your upper staff.

They may have marketing strategies, goals, and projections they need to meet.

Phase 2, (Design) is when everything goes to hell.

You spend an outrageous amount of time trying to implement these things on your own. To be fully transparent, I used to not want to delegate the design portion of things out of fear that someone could take off with my intellectual ideas. I had to accept that my work was becoming less than optimal and that I was not focusing on what I was good at because of fear. Some people are specialists in their area and I needed their specialty. I am so glad, in 2020, I brought in partners for my SEO, Digital Ads, and Website clients. They are experts and I am not. However, I am a specialist in branding and copy. I needed to stay in my lane. 

I have also seen this go the other way. I have a client who refuses to get his hands off the wheel so he can take the credit. It was financially costly because he was not qualified to be making such decisions that heavily affected the brand. He is great at finding water in the ground and may I add plenty of it. He still needed to be present with his team and he did not need to be making minor detail decisions. He was always coming up with new ideas and then expecting others to make them a reality. This is not how you delegate. Delegation needs leadership. 

Phase 3 (Build or Test and Evaluate)

After ideas and design have come to the table, your leadership should have delegated tasks that are most efficient in production. Eliminate any tedious processes that are outdated or costly in time management. Trial and error happen in this phase, so do not try something once and then throw your hands up like well that didn't work. You need to give any new strategy 90 days to even be able to take a temperature of how it is working. Imagine you are taking a new prescription and the doctor says come see me in a couple of months to see if we need to increase or decrease the dosage. It is the same philosophy as processes.

Phase 4 (Share Solution)

Make sure a launch is profitable, therefore do not give your intellectual ideas out into the words until there is a place for them to access the new solution. Create a marketing rollout. Make this as clean and clear as possible. Do not leave room for confusion and make sure you test changes on a small group first. This will be easier to manage any kinks that need to be ironed out. You may find that change frustrates some clients, most likely older ones. However, your brand has to continue to grow and needs to be easily managed by yourself and your team. You can not continue to use old processes because it is "just what we've always done." 

Last phase (STOP)

Yes. Stop. If you keep tweaking and tweaking and tweaking you will only confuse and frustrate your base customers. Just leave it alone for 90 days and then address if something needs to be tweaked. This, honestly, is the hardest part for business owners. You need to trust the new process and your team to implement them. Solves are not always for your customers, sometimes they are for you as a business owner. You may need a solution for time management, faster response time, a better follow-up system for reviews, an easier POS system, an easier online engagement system, or just protecting your time off. 

 -Izzy Gentry

clvplanners.com