Course Navigation:
- Lesson 1: One Size Fits All?
- Lesson 2: Ditching Custom Proposals
- Lesson 3: Hiring & Delegation
- Lesson 4: 10x'ing Your Hourly Rate
How to Hire & Delegate Without Sacrificing Quality
Hey there! Brian Casel here again from Productize & Scale.
Today let’s look at how to grow beyond just yourself, and start delegating your day-to-day client work to a team—without sacrificing quality or dealing with management headaches.
Let’s start there: The 2 things that hold us back from hiring and delegating our work. Maybe you’ve experienced these pitfalls and they caused you to retreat back to doing everything yourself.
As you probably know—like I knew for a while—doing everything yourself is not only stressful and unsustainable, but it also puts a ceiling on the amount of work you can bring in and the amount of income you can generate. That, of course, limits your ability to actually grow your business.
So what are those 2 barriers to growth?
- You’re afraid that handing off your work to someone else won’t produce the same quality that you’re able to deliver. And you’ll be stuck doing the work over again and missing client deadlines.
- Or you’ve got “manager-phobia”. You’re just not interested in being a manager, and having micro-manage people or constantly scramble to keep your people busy.
Neither of these sound like fun ways to spend your days. You didn’t start your own business to babysit your team or fight management fires or stress yourself out. Right?
Well, I’m here to show you the key to being able to grow your team and confidently set them up to do amazing work for your business, while freeing yourself up to do the things you’re best at: Strategy, creating new assets, and focusing on “what’s next”.
That’s what running a business is all about. Building your machine that will produce more freedom for you to keep building and leveling up.
(Not to mention, freedom to enjoy the rewards of your business, freedom to take time off without taking a pay cut).
Ready? Here’s the answer:
Systems & Processes.
It may seem simple. Maybe it seems obvious, at first. But let me tell you: Building your systems and processes will be the most critical ongoing project you’ll take on as you build your business.
Here’s an example:
Back when I was a freelance web designer, living project-to-project and trying to delegate some of the design and coding work to others, I constantly struggled with quality issues and management headaches. I had to re-do work all the time, and I struggled to train and onboard new people to my team.
The problem was that every project had a different roadmap, a different timeline, required different approaches, skills, and strategies.
But once I productized my web design service, focused on one ideal customer and niched down, I was able boil everything we did into one standard process.
Sure, every customer’s website was still their own. But our system for creating, launching, and supporting a customer’s website followed one, standard process.
It involved a series of steps, all carefully crafted with meticulous detail, and fully documented in our process management system. Then each step was matched to a specific role—a person with the perfect skillset to execute each step.
Then it was all put together into a seamless system—like an assembly line—which then enabled me to hire a small group of people who came in with the exact skillsets required of each of our roles.
Most importantly, they had the step-by-step processes all documented and ready to guide them through so they could produce our work the way we want, every single time.
Now, you’re probably thinking: OK, but what about when a special request comes in or something goes wrong?
Well, once you systematize how you deliver the work, you can go up a level and systematize the management of the work. You can put managers in place and give them standard guidelines on how to communicate with clients and handle common scenarios when they come up. It all can be part of your documented system.
Keep in mind, that by focusing your your service on solving one problem in one way, the work becomes highly routine and standardized anyway, which helps when it comes to systematizing.
Even sales and marketing can be dialed in, optimized, then systematized and delegated to experts to run those processes.
Do you see the power of systems of processes?
Now, of course you won’t build any of this overnight. It took me years to get my businesses to run on autopilot and fully remove myself.
But I can tell you, the reward is incredibly liberating and opens up so many new doors.
Next, let’s talk about those rewards, shall we? What would it look like to 10x your hourly rate with just a simple change in strategy? That’s what my next lesson will show you.