When launching and growing your small business, one of the challenges you’ll eventually experience is delegation – the process of turning over responsibility for specific tasks and goals to your employees or consultants. In this overview, you’ll explore how delegation for small business owners can be a turning point on the road to success, showing that you’re ready to trust others with key tasks so that you can focus on growth, profitability, and more.
How to know if it’s time to delegate
You may have launched your business with a few or even no employees. While this gives you total control over your day-to-day operations and long-term plans, too much control can eventually take a toll on your success, especially because no one person can have all the necessary experience, skills, or time to run and grow a business effectively.
If you don’t eventually delegate tasks, some areas of your business can be overlooked, leading to more stress for you and your business.
Consider areas where insufficient delegation may be holding your business back. You may already know the areas that aren’t optimized, so you likely need help. For example, if you’re only focused on creating goods or delivering services, your marketing strategy or financials may suffer.
Even if you’re covering everything right now, ask yourself whether:
- You’ve created a work-life balance, meaning that after all is done, you still have some time for friends, family, and hobbies.
- Or if everything you’re doing is completed as well as possible.
If you find that you can only accomplish everything by working 6-7 days a week, more than a regular workday, or accepting “good enough for now” in key areas, then it’s likely time to delegate.
An example of when to delegate
Let’s use a graphic-design business as an example to demonstrate when it’s time for you to start delegating:
- You own and are currently the only employee of your graphic-design business. When you launched, this worked well, but now that you’re three years into your business, you have created niche opportunities that have resulted in steady growth
- You don’t want to hand off design responsibilities yet, because that’s both your passion and the base of how you’ve built your business. Still, there are opportunities that you turned down because you didn’t have time, and your business’s financial records are also a bit of a mess. You’re also concerned because you haven’t had time to market your business actively, and if a couple of clients go elsewhere, it will leave a big revenue hole.
This type of situation is a common dilemma – and it’s where delegation for small business owners is essential.
- As a result, you must balance your desire for control with your need for support. To get your business back on track, you need help with bookkeeping, sales, marketing, and, potentially, some additional creative work.
Who to delegate to
One of the key considerations on delegation for small business owners is who to entrust with which responsibilities. The answer can be employees, outsourced consultants, or a mix of both. This will often be determined by assessing your current employees and their existing skills and experiences, as well as their interests in learning more, what you can comfortably hand off to others, and what makes sense for your budget.
Let’s go back to the earlier example:
- Hiring a part-time marketing and sales person can help you implement your marketing strategy and build your business. However, you’ll also need a part-time or freelance designer and content creator to fulfill some of the day-to-day work on your plate. And as you look at your bookkeeping software online and realize that it hasn’t been reconciled in months, you know you need some bookkeeping assistance, too.
- While your current budget can’t support all of these positions as staff members, you realize that having a sales and marketing person on a part-time basis is doable and should give you project growth and additional revenue, which can support outsourced bookkeeping and design work while enhancing your business’s longer-term revenue growth and profitability.
How to build your team
If you already have team members, find out if anyone has skills that could be further developed so they can take on tasks you can delegate. For example, maybe there’s someone who joined your coffee shop’s team because they’re retired but wanted part-time work, but before life as a barista, they managed a retail store. That person likely has several skills you can leverage, as long as you’re willing to entrust them with the work.
Here’s what to look for and what to develop:
- Skills and experience: Whether you’re bringing on new employees, leveraging existing skills, or outsourcing tasks, you want team members who know or can learn the work. Depending on the tasks, trust is also a factor – you’ll want to ensure that your business’s financials are in good hands, for example.
- Workload and capacity: If you’re delegating tasks to an employee, be sure they either already have time to take it on or that some of their existing responsibilities can be shifted to other team members or outsourced to freelancers or consultants.
- Training and expectations: For delegation to be successful, you need to make sure that the person taking on the tasks has the necessary training and knows the goals and expectations.
Create a detailed description or list of the tasks, clarify goals and benchmarks, determine the reporting structure, and set timelines. Then, find out if any additional training or licensing is needed and make a clear plan to help your chosen delegate get what they need, whether through onsite or online courses, mentorships, licensing courses, and more. - Provide support and feedback: For your new delegates and anyone else on your team who may be impacted by the changes, check in regularly to see how things are going.
While it’s rare for there to be no hiccups on the course of delegation for small businesses, there’s also rarely any challenge that can’t be overcome with time, training, and communication.
Pursuit has financing to help your team grow
Often, delegation for small business owners is challenging because you love what you do and what you’ve built – and, perhaps, because you also have concerns about whether you can afford to invest in help. If you need financing to hire more team members, to allow you to outsource tasks, or for other parts of your business, we’re here for you.
Pursuit is a leading small business lender serving businesses in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, Illinois, and Washington. We offer loans and a line of credit for working capital, commercial real estate, equipment, and more. We’ve helped thousands of small business owners get the funding they need, and we can help you, too.
