4 Reasons to Delegate.
Four compelling reasons why mastering delegation is essential for every small business owner.
Henry Lopez shares why effective delegation is one of the most critical skills entrepreneurs must develop to grow and eventually step away from their business.
In this solo episode, Henry outlines four key reasons to delegate: to save time, leverage others’ skills, develop your team, and build a business you can sell. He highlights common challenges entrepreneurs face when letting go, including perfectionism and the belief that no one else can do it better.
“If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate,” quotes John C. Maxwell, emphasizing the theme of the episode. With additional insights from past guests David Begin, Dan Sullivan, and Barbara Turley, Henry explains how to create systems and processes that make delegation successful.
He also introduces free resources, including the Delegation Worksheet and Four Reasons to Delegate summary download.
Listeners will walk away with practical tools and inspiration to start delegating tasks today, freeing themselves to focus on strategy, growth, and enjoying more balance in their entrepreneurial journey.
4 Reasons to Delegate – FAQ:
Question: Why is delegation important for small business owners?
Answer: Delegation frees up your time, leverages your team’s skills, develops staff, and creates a business that can run without you which is critical for growth and potential resale.
Question: What are the four main reasons to delegate?
Answer: To get more done in less time, leverage others’ skills and ideas, develop your team, and build a business you can sell.
Question: What tools can help me start delegating?
Answer: Free resources like the Delegation Worksheet and the Four Reasons to Delegate summary provide structure and guidance for effective delegation.
Question: What tasks should I delegate first?
Answer: Start with tasks you don’t like, aren’t good at, or that don’t move your business forward such as bookkeeping or repetitive administrative tasks.
Episode Host: Henry Lopez is a serial entrepreneur, small business coach, and the host of The How of Business podcast show – dedicated to helping you start, run, grow and exit your small business.
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Transcript:
The following is a full transcript of this episode. This transcript was produced by an automated system and may contain some typos.
Henry Lopez(00:15):
This is Henry Lopez, and welcome to this episode of the How of Business. On this episode, I’m going to focus on the topic of delegation. If you want to facilitate the growth of your business, leverage the great ideas and skills of others on your team, develop your team, be able to take time off from your business and be able to sell your business, perhaps someday, then you must learn to delegate effectively. On this episode, I’m going to share some insights on why you should learn to delegate well and some tools to help you do so effectively. I want to start with addressing this issue of our hesitancy for a lot of us as entrepreneurs to delegate. Perhaps it’s because we think we can do it better than anyone else. We can do everything better. We understand best what we want and the results that we’re looking for, and the truth is sometimes we are best at it. But to grow and to have time to enjoy your life and grow your team, you must learn to delegate effectively. Listen to what David Begin. My long-term business partner and entrepreneur had to say back on episode 26 when we talked about delegation.
David Begin (01:20):
If you’re going to be a business owner, an entrepreneur, you sort of have this mindset that I can do it myself. I’m a pioneer. I’m a person that can go out and pull up my own bootstraps, and I think it’s not our personality. I think if you go from the corporate world into small business like you and I did, or if you start off in small business, you think you can do it yourself. So one of the big issues is it’s just, it’s difficult. It’s not our DNA to delegate necessarily. The other big issue is we think we can do it better than everybody else. That’s right. I think that’s one of the biggest issues is we can do it. We think we can do it better than someone else. And the big problem with that is we can do it better than most other, the people that have the vision, we understand what we want, we understand what the results need to look like, and so one of the common problems we run into in delegation, we just think, well, you know what? I’ll just do it myself.
Henry Lopez(02:12):
So I think it helps as entrepreneurs to accept that it’s simply who we are. It’s in our makeup, at least for a lot of us, me included, that. It’s just naturally hard for us to delegate. It’s hard to let go. It’s hard not to be the one that does it all in particular because for most of us, that’s what we had to do to get started. Certainly that’s what we had to do to get to where we are today because we did things. We got things done. So it’s only normal and natural that we resist delegating. We’re simply not good at it. It’s for most of us a skill that we just have not ever developed. So accept and acknowledge that and understand that that’s okay, that’s normal. What can I do to improve upon that so that I can grow myself and my business?
Henry Lopez(02:58):
So part of learning to delegate is accepting and understanding that we have to try to avoid being perfectionist on the wrong things. Being a perfectionist is part of what got me to where I am today, but I have to start to understand that I have a team. I have to build a team that helps me take my business to the next level. It does take time, energy, and effort and a process to delegate effectively. I’m going to share with you some tips on how to develop a process to delegate effectively. Think about as Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, teaches the concept of the 80% rule. So you get something sometimes to an 80% level that’s good enough, you delegate it to someone else, and then they bring to it. They’re 80%. And I’ll expand upon that in a moment about the value of delegating and leveraging other people’s skills and insights that you may have never even thought of to bring to a particular task or problem or project.
Henry Lopez(03:56):
Here’s a great quote that I love on this topic from John C. Maxwell quote, if you want to do a few small things, do them yourself. If you want to do great things and make a big impact, learn to delegate end quote. There are lots of reasons why we need to get better at delegating as business owners, but I’d like to focus on four reasons in particular for why we need to get better at delegating. Because the growth and success of your business, not to mention your health and happiness depends to a great extent on your ability to delegate effectively and consistently. Delegating frees you up to focus on what’s most important, what you are best at, and to spend time away from your business. It also utilizes the strengths of your team and their unique abilities and builds a stronger organization that you might even be able to sell someday.
Henry Lopez(04:48):
So what are those four reasons why we need to get better at delegating? Number one, to get more done in less time, pretty obvious by delegating certain tasks and projects, you can focus, as I said, on what’s most important and what you are best at initially. It might take some time to delegate, and that’s often one of the challenges or one of the pushbacks is, well, it’s going to take me longer to teach somebody how to do it. I can just do it quicker. But as you get better at it and you implement and execute a system, a process, you will begin to reap the rewards of delegating. Your team also needs to learn how to own these delegated assignments, but once they understand the system, then they are free to add their value, and that’s where it really gets powerful. They add their perspective, their insights, their tips and experience to the task and to help you grow your business.
Henry Lopez(05:37):
Focusing on where you add the most value and delegating to others means you have more time off from the business as well. That time often turn keeps you energized and focused on managing and growing your business. Here’s a tip. There are three types of tasks to consider delegating, especially if you’re starting out. Think about the, that you don’t like to do things that you are not very good at and tasks that don’t move your business forward. They’re not strategic. Perhaps they’re repetitive tasks immediately. Of course, one of the easy things that comes to mind is anything having to do with bookkeeping, anything having to do with paying the invoices. Those types of repetitive tasks are great examples of things that need to be delegated, but it goes beyond that. That’s just a good place to start. So think about those things that you don’t like to do that you’re not very good at, and be honest with yourself about that, and that don’t move the business forward.
Henry Lopez(06:31):
They don’t impact the business. They’re not about thinking about the strategies of the business. Reason number two, leverage the skills, strengths, and great ideas of others. And others could be your staff, your subcontractors, freelancers, virtual assistants, but that input that you’re going to get from others because you begin to delegate is extremely valuable. It really is one of the secrets of the power of delegating. It’s one of the big surprise benefits of delegating effectively, and that’s that you get great ideas and from those to whom you delegate, we may think we’re the only ones who can get something done perfectly, but the truth is that if you have a competent team of people, they will come up with ideas and approaches to solving problems that you may not have even ever thought of. If you have not built a strong complimentary team of employees, consultants, maybe crowdsourced freelancers or virtual assistants, then you’re limiting your growth by not fully leveraging them and their unique ideas.
Henry Lopez(07:32):
So number three is more about this, about developing your team. That’s the third reason you need to get better at delegating. Delegation is perhaps one of the most important business leadership skills, and you should strive to get better at it every day. When you do it correctly, it saves you time, like I’ve said, and it develops and fully leverages your team when you delegate important and meaningful tasks, not just repetitive administrative tasks, although certainly that is a place to start. You can teach your team members new skills and give them the opportunity to develop themselves and achieve their personal goals as well as those of the company. A good team should be eager for those new challenges and for the opportunity to demonstrate their skills and talents. We had the opportunity to interview Dan Sullivan, entrepreneur and founder of Strategic Coach back on episode 1 58, and here’s an interesting clip from that episode about what he had to say about the power of delegating to build and develop your team.
Speaker 4 (08:29):
We train people for those times when we’re away, and that’s how the team grows. You don’t know how good a team you have until they can’t get in contact with you and they have to deal with the situations and they have to act like leaders. They have to act like owners, and that’s how you grow your team. And if you’re always there to rescue them, they’ll never grow. I would rather my team fail, learn, and get better than for me to rescue them. People do not grow when the owner rescues them. The other thing is that if you rescue somebody, rather than let them experience how to transform a failure, they will learn the wrong lessons from that and it’ll make them a bad employee.
Henry Lopez(09:12):
Powerful words there from Dan Sullivan, and he’s been studying this and helping entrepreneurs learn how to do this for many years, for decades. So this concept of how does our company behave, what happens when you’re not there? This is at the heart I think, of why if for no other reason, you want to learn how to delegate. If the business depends on you to be there every second of the day to make every decision to put out every fire. If nobody on your team has been empowered or trusted or taught how to solve problems, if you, as Dan says, rescue them all of the time, then there’s no way you can grow. Not to mention that you are going to burn out, but your team doesn’t grow. In fact, what you start to do is you start to lose those valuable players because that’s not an environment that they want to be a part of because they can’t grow.
Henry Lopez(10:00):
And so it’s a downward spiral of you always having to make all of the decisions of you always having to do everything. Nobody’s empowered, nobody grows, your business doesn’t grow, and you get stuck working in your business 24 7. So reason number four to get better at delegating is that it allows you to build a business you can sell. Now, you may not even be thinking about selling your business right now, but if you’ve been listening to this podcast for some time, you know that I stress how important it is to build a business as if you’re going to sell it. It will be extremely difficult, however, to sell your business if it depends on you getting everything done. If you are the only person who knows how to operate the business, who knows the secret formula, then potential buyers will understandably worry that the business will suffer If you’re not there after you sell the business, if you develop your business systems and then delegate to others on your team, potential buyers will have confidence that they can continue successfully operating your business because you’ve put the processes, the systems in place, you have a team of people that hopefully some of them or most of them might stay on that know how to operate the business.
Henry Lopez(11:11):
It’s not all in your head and not all because of your ability. So those are the four reasons why I believe that you have to get better and you have to learn and develop this skill of delegation. Again, number one was getting more done with less time, which we all need. Number two was leveraging the skills and strengths and great ideas and input of others. Of course, we talked about number three, developing your team. If you’re going to develop a team, you have to empower them, you have to delegate to them, you have to give them responsibility. And number four is delegating and developing the systems that allow you to delegate is what makes in part a business sellable. If you want to continue being frustrated with too much work and not enough growth, then keep trying to do it all yourself instead. If you want to do great things and grow your business, then learn to delegate effectively.
Henry Lopez(12:03):
As with any other skill though, it takes dedicated effort, patience, and a system, a process to make significant improvements on developing the skills so that you can reap the rewards. I want you to ask yourself these two questions and then begin acting on delegating today. I’m going to give you in a moment some tools to do so, but ask yourself these two questions. What are the real reasons why I’m not good at delegating? Be honest with yourself. And then what task? Maybe it’s a simple repetitive task, an administrative task perhaps. What tasks can I consider delegating today? So I want to summarize here on how to begin to learn how to delegate, where do you start? But again, I would focus on initially at least a three types of tasks to consider. Delegating would include things that you don’t like to do, what you’re not good at, so things that you’re not good at and tasks that don’t move your business forward or are not strategic.
Henry Lopez(12:59):
So think about starting with those types of tasks or projects as a great place to start with delegating. Now, be prepared for and expect that you are not always going to be successful the first time you start delegating tasks. In fact, I would assume that that’s going to be a challenge initially, so that’s okay. Don’t let that be a reason to retrench and say, well, delegating just doesn’t work. I see. I told you I had to do it all myself. Don’t allow yourself to do that. This is not going to be easy, especially if you’re like me, where you’re a control person, you’re a perfectionist, and you do come from that perspective that the reason you’ve gotten to where you are is because you’ve gotten it all done. So it’s not going to be easy. Now, once you delegate a task, be sure to let go.
Henry Lopez(13:48):
Let go of it and don’t take it back unless it’s absolutely necessary. If it’s not being executed correctly or efficiently, then maybe you need to retrain or delegate it to someone else or look at the systems, the tools, the procedures, and improve those, and don’t micromanage the people to whom you delegate tasks. So we have to be ready to let go of these tasks once we delegate them effectively. Now, that doesn’t mean that accountability isn’t important. The person assuming the task must be responsible and they have to be held accountable to owning the task. Now, certainly what comes to mind here as we’re talking about delegation is using virtual assistants. For a lot of us, if we don’t have the staff as employees or maybe even as contractors to delegate these things to, then a great way to do it for small business is to outsource or to hire a virtual assistant, which you can do for a few hours a week till anything between that and full time. I had an opportunity to interview Barbara Turley on the topic of using virtual assistants back on episode 2 38 of the How a Business podcast and listen to what she had to say about delegating and using virtual assistants effectively.
Barbara Turley (15:07):
VAs are a great, they’re very cost effective because you can go offshore, so you can get highly leveraged staff because of the cost effectivity audit, but the only way that you’re going to make it work is if you have a real commitment to building systems and processes in your business and becoming the master delegator, which is like the conductor of the business. So you can’t just say, well, I have systems and processes, and then throw your hands in the air, hire someone and never speak to them or have no reporting lines or no structure around. How are you going to get results reported to you? How are you going to tweak things so you know what I mean? People just think, I’ll get a VA, and that solves everything, but it doesn’t. You’ve got to do a lot of work first, but the dividends that it pays if you get this right are absolutely enormous. I just can’t stress how enormous they are, but only for those who put the work in.
Henry Lopez(16:00):
So great insights from Barbara Turley on using VAs or virtual assistants, but what she’s talking about applies to anybody that you delegate to, whether it is a virtual assistant or it’s a freelancer or a subcontractor or an employee, it still applies. You have to have the process to procedure the systems in place to do it effectively so that it can be done effectively by someone else. Here’s another tip on delegating that I’ve applied and has worked well for me, and that is that I will usually outline maybe using the tool like the delegation worksheet, which I’ll introduce here in a moment. I will have a discussion with the person I’m delegating to about what I want done, walk them through it, maybe create a video, so we might meet on Zoom so we can record it. But then what I have them do as we’re working to delegate that task is I’ll have them finish documenting the process, whether it’s creating a checklist or a procedure or some sort of document that has the instructions I delegate, as well as the task I delegate to that person to document that task or that process.
Henry Lopez(17:05):
This applies, of course, not so much in the case of a project, but for something that’s repetitive, it’s a real good approach. So what it does is it alleviates and takes off of my plate to have to create the documentation to create the procedure. Maybe I’m not good at that or I don’t want to spend time on that. I do have to, of course, explain what it is that we want to achieve, what the consequences are, what the objectives are, what the deliverables are, but then I can let that person, the person I delegated to actually document it. So think about that as a tip to begin documenting, especially repetitive tasks. So now let’s talk about tools. One tool in particular that you can download for free at the show notes page for this episode at the how of business.com is the delegation worksheet. If you want to go and download it now as I talked through this briefly, that’s great, but certainly be sure to go back and get this tool.
Henry Lopez(17:58):
This will really help you in particular, if you’re new to the process of delegating, it gives you a structure to do so, and it’s broken down by different sections. It’ll help you clearly describe what it is that you’re delegating, and then it’ll help you walk through the process and document the process of transitioning that task to that person who’s going to take it on. So it reminds you and walks you through making sure that it’s clearly defined, that you’ve trained a person properly, that you’ve given them the tools or the resources that they need to complete this task, that you’ve clearly defined what the deliverable is. What is it that happens when this task is completed? Who are the other people that are perhaps dependent and involved in this particular task? So all of this gets documented in this two page worksheet. Actually, it’s one page, and the second page is instructions, so that it’s a tool that helps you begin to delegate.
Henry Lopez(18:54):
And then a very important part of it that I’ve touched on, the ability to track on this same worksheet that you’ve checked in, that you’ve followed up to audit and to make sure that the task is being executed consistently and correctly and that someone has completely taken over that task. So that’s the delegation worksheet. I encourage you to download that, use that free tool. It may not apply for everything, but it’s a great place to start, especially if you’re challenged with how do I even begin to delegate a task to someone else? And then another download that will be available on the show notes page for this episode is the document, the Four Reasons to Delegate. It’s a summary of what I’ve talked about here, but it’s another great reading tool or something you might want to share with others on your teams, perhaps a manager or a supervisor who you’re helping develop their delegation skills.
Henry Lopez(19:50):
That’s a great download that you can share or read yourself to learn more about the four reasons why you have to get better at delegating. Let me summarize my key takeaway for you. If you want to grow your business, if you want to perhaps even sell your business someday, then learning how to let go and delegate is crucial to achieving your goals. As a small business owner, it’s not easy for most of us. It’s a skill we have to develop, but if you agree that it’s critical to the success of your business, and if you agree to allowing you to begin realizing the benefits of being your own boss, the reason you got into business to begin with, then I encourage you to begin to apply these methods and tools that I’ve shared with you today so that you can get started on learning how to delegate and growing your business, developing your staff, and building a business that you can step away from when you want to and that you can also sell perhaps in the This is Henry Lopez, and thanks for joining me for this episode of The How of Business. We release new episodes every Monday morning. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and at our website, the how of business.com. Thanks for listening.