Can I tell you a little secret?
I’m an awful delegator.
Guaranteed, my husband is laughing as he reads this because he’s always picking on me about it. It’s his voice I hear in my head—”Can’t you have someone else do that?”
Until recently, the answer to that was “Haha. No. Not really.”
As a generalist running a small web agency, I took on a lot by myself.
I was always the person setting up all new projects and setting task lists in Basecamp—”No one else can do this. I was the one who scoped out the project. Only I know what is needed here.”
Only I could send invoices for new work—”Only I know when I promised this and by when.”
I give myself a bit of credit when I delegated some design and development for our website projects, but there were a lot of very basic administrative and project management tasks I thought only I could do.
Things these days are a little bit different.
I realized recently what it really takes to delegate is doing similar work that is repeatable and consistent. It takes doing a type of project over and over to really develop a process for it.
In my specialized business, I offer a small project called an SEO Roadmap. It is essentially a small audit and action plan. At this point, I’ve done this project with the same process and the same deliverables about 15 times.
I’m really getting into a groove, and I’ve been intentional about considering which parts of it are simple enough to be delegated. In the last couple weeks, I’ve started delegating the entire setup process and parts of the audit for the Roadmap.
I wrote a written process and recorded a few videos, and I’m having a member of my team completely set up and start every new Roadmap project now. All I need to do is email her that we have a new project booked, and she sets up the folder structure and starts the audit.
On the day that I have my part of the project scheduled, I get to sit down at my computer and dive into the most in-depth parts of the work. No administrative time needed.
This has been a big step for me.
My big takeaway here is that when you’re constantly doing different types of projects, you’re scoping out and setting up something new all the time. It’s really hard to give something away when you can’t explain it and don’t have a set process for it.
So, one of the benefits I’m seeing of specializing is that it’s helping me (as delegation-challenged as I am) to finally delegate administrative tasks and focus on the work. I am going to push myself to delegate even more of this project, and I know this will come slowly and surely as I continue to improve this particular process.
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