51: Letting Go - 50 Tasks You Should Be Delegating Right Now

I know that you cannot get to where you are going by doing everything yourself. I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite. I'm a mama living in a tiny town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life and experience the same success. This I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast. Today we are going to tackle the topic of the delegating. Delegating is one of those things that's close to the hearts of so many solopreneurs and creative entrepreneurs and small business owners because it's challenging. Some of you love it, some of you hate it. It's a complicated relationship and we're going to talk about it today. Specifically, I'm going to give you 10 things that I delegated. First. It was the first 10 things that I ever delegated that I think you can get up and running with super quickly. And then I'm so excited about today's free download because it's a list of 50 more things for you to consider delegating out of your own hands, out of your business and onto someone else's. And so if you've been feeling like you are doing all of the things, I want you to just be open, be open minded for just a second. Delegation and hiring and outsourcing things always comes with some friction because it stretches us big time. So I just want you to be open minded. Even if you are not struggling with this. I think that I'll give you a bunch of ideas on things that you can outsource and delegate during this episode. Episode. Listen, we wear so many different hats on such a huge wide range of responsibilities in our business. Not to mention our personal lives, which we're going to talk about as well. We take care of our home, we take care of our meals. If you have children, you're parenting as well. And then you're doing everything from designing products to marketing to to shipping to managing your finances to providing customer service. We really find ourselves handling almost every single aspect of everything that we do. And this can make it so incredibly hard to let go of control and start delegating tasks, even when you know that it could benefit you. So we're going to talk about why that is. Why is it so difficult? And one of the reasons is simply because we are so emotionally invested in our businesses. There are babies. We created them from a concept in our minds and we nurtured them from the very beginning. We have raised them and it's our involvement that has made them successful. Right. We want to make sure that everything is done not only to our high standards, but with our specific touch, which is what makes it so uniquely us. Right. I get it. I know that you're probably also worried about finding the right people that you can trust and how do you find them and whether you can even outsource or whether it will be worth the investment as well. However, I know that you cannot get to where you are going by doing everything yourself. We all do everything ourselves. I think at the beginning, this is what's very much considered the stage of hustling. Right. And I know there's this whole anti hustle culture, but, you know, sometimes we just gotta hustle. We have to really light the fire under ourselves to get our, you know, business off the ground. And then I do agree that we have to understand how to rest and rejuvenate. And you can't just hustle forever. And so oftentimes that is because we're wearing all, all of the hats in our business. And so not only is that difficult and it kind of derails from our highest contribution, there's also a lot of task switching in every single day. And this really breaks our flow. So if you think about working in a state of flow, you've felt it. Absolutely. It's kind of when everything kind of falls to the wayside and you become one with the project. You're not tempted by distractions, you're not checking tabs, you're not responding to messages. You are one with the task at hand. You're hyper focused and you're in that flow state, which is so incredible. It's when our best work is done, when you're wearing all of the hats in your business, your task switching so many times in a day that it's really hard to get into a state of flow with any of them, let alone just one or two. And so I know that eventually you'll see the need to start delegating. And so I'm going to give you the tools today to understand, just wrap your minds around what it is that you're doing that you could possibly give away. We're going to talk about some common pitfalls first and why we struggle with this so much. Then I'm going to share with you my 10. Then the free download, like I mentioned, is an additional 50 things for you to consider outsourcing. And then in the next episode. So episode number 52, I'm going to talk to you about, really the art of delegation. It's one thing to decide that you're ready to start tasking things off to someone else. It's a whole entire different thing to do that well. So I've learned a lot of lessons over the years on how to delegate and what that looks like for someone on your team or a contractor or just a friend or neighbor who's helping. And so we'll cover that in episode number 52. So let's talk about some common pitfalls, because I know that you're thinking at least one of these things, maybe all of them. There's four of them. Number one is believing that no one else can do it like me, so I'm going to do it myself. I think that creatives specifically struggle with this because in some way, you're right. It's our creativity and our unique perspective and our. Our very specific touch on things that make it just so. That make it really uniquely ours. But I thought the same thing for many years, and turns out we're not little special snowflakes quite as much as we thought we were. I today have a team of other creatives who work in my business and oftentimes do things better than me. Okay, so there are absolutely people out there who don't want to be the entrepreneur, but have those very highly creative skills, who have the vision, who can wrap their arms around exactly what you're doing and do it well and oftentimes do it better than you. Now, in the words of Dan Martell, who wrote buy back your time, which I'm a big fan of, Dan says 80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome. That's his line. 80% done by someone else is one hundred percent freaking awesome. So even if someone isn't doing it better than you, even if they're doing it to an 80% mark, if it was done by someone else and you didn't have to do it, then that's a really incredible thing. Dan also talks about something he calls the 1080 10, which is where you really set the Project or set the task in motion. Then you let someone else come in and do the middle 80%, and then you come back and set, like your final finishing touches on the last 10%. So that's a way to get to a 100% right, where you still have those very special touches that you do, but you're coming in at the beginning and the end, not an all of the middle. So I want you to just go ahead and release that. Know that there are plenty of people out there who understand what you're going for, the look you're going for. And there are also a lot of things that you can do to help bring them into your vision. This is really like believing that no one can do it like you is really just a pitfall. It's an excuse to keep doing all of the hard things yourself. And. And it's honestly a little bit lazy because truthfully, it just requires some leadership. Can you train someone else to do it the way that you do? Yes, you absolutely can. You can find them, you can train them. Of course, it's going to take a little bit of effort at the beginning, but then it's going to free you entirely. So that brings me to the next pitfall, which is thinking it's quicker for me to just do it myself, so I'm just going to do it myself. In other words, I don't have time to slow down and train someone else, so I'm just going to do it myself. This is such an interesting thing that we love to believe. I did it for a long time. I don't have time to slow down to bring someone else in. I don't have time to get help. I'm just going to do it myself. Well, really, if you're doing it yourself, then all you need to do is document yourself doing it and then you hand that off to someone else. So I won't go back all over that because we covered What I call SOPs, that's standard operating procedures and episode number 49. And so it's all about how to create processes one time. So basically, the next time you do all of these things that you're going to potentially delegate, you just create a little training around it. You hit a screen record, or you grab your phone and create a video, or you document it in writing, or however it is that you do it, you just create a video and then you create a library of those videos. And so you only have to do that one time. Then you have a library of training to hand off to the next person who's going to help you. And it's the key. It is the key out of doing everything yourself. The third pitfall is feeling like no one will be okay with the inconsistency. That is my business. And I hear you, I know that a lot of you are experiencing inconsistency, meaning income is inconsistent, amount of stuff to do is inconsistent. You know, hours are inconsistent because we are creatives and we do launches and we've got releases and then we've got like these dry spells and dry seasons. And quite frankly, we love being able to set our own rules. So what if I want to take a week off, right? I don't want to have to answer to anyone else or let someone on my team or an employee like know I'm, I'm a free bird, right? And if I have someone else working with me, they're not going to be okay with that. Wrong again. There are so many people in the world who would be just fine. They would actually love to work in a job that was different every week that was inconsistent. So I'm thinking about so many different types of people. Oftentimes these are stay at home moms who are ready to start working in the workforce again. So they're virtual. And all of a sudden their children are school age and they don't necessarily want to go back to or, or start, you know, a 9 to 5, but they would love to have something meaningful to do in their daily work days, like their daily work week. And so they're okay if it's three or four hours one week and 15 to 20 hours the next week because they're just looking to get started back in working a little bit. So that's one example. But there are all types of people. You know, we assume when we go to hire someone that they're going to want all of this stuff, right? Like a consistent 40 hours a week with benefits and all this stuff. And there are so many people in the margins who, who don't necessarily require that, you know, potentially their partner or their spouse might have like the, the stable, the stability of a job and income that pays all the bills and then maybe also benefits that cover that person as well. And so that person is free to be inconsistent with the additional stuff that they're doing. So just put that pitfall to rest. It's not true. There are so many different types of people who are okay with inconsistency. And then pitfall number four is believing that we can't afford it, believing that our business isn't trustworthy. Enough to bring someone into it. And I have felt this is probably why I put off hiring someone for so long at the beginning, because it does feel serious. If, if someone else is relying on the income that my business is creating even a little bit, that's a responsibility. But there is a time where you'll begin to trust your business. And I don't know if you're there yet. It's a pretty special moment when you realize that this thing that might be a couple of lucky breaks turns into something that's actually trustworthy and reliable. So one of the ways that you can really kind of put this on paper and make sense of it is to calculate your hourly rate. So the way that you'll do this is that you'll take your annual revenue and you'll divide that by 2087. 2087 is based on a 40 hour work week for 52 weeks out of the year. So you'll take your annual revenue and then you'll divide that by 2087, and that's how much your time is worth. So theoretically, anything that you could hire out for that rate or less makes 100% sense on paper, right? It makes complete sense on paper because you'll be able to use that time that you just bought back, right, in order to do a higher contribution to the business. So arguably at the beginning, it may even be worth it to pay someone a little bit more than that because it frees up your time to create more impactful work like marketing or products or really do the things that only you can do. Maybe it's a new piece of education in your business that you're working on. It's, it's content, it's creation, right? And so for those of you who have a low number for that, maybe you're just getting started and you think, well, I can't find anybody to do anything for seven bucks bucks an hour, right? Ask for help. Pull mom and dad in, pull a friend in. Pull, you know, a college intern in to come help you. Just start getting started getting help. Just begin getting started getting help. There is affordable help. There's oftentimes free help. If, if someone is looking to learn what you're doing or train with you in some capacity, if they're a student somewhere or if it's someone who loves you much, like a mom or a dad or a sibling or friend, who could just come in and start giving you some help, it's great to flex this muscle and just begin utilizing it. The goal for you should be to eventually make your way to where you're doing only the things that only you can do. Delegating tasks and getting them off of your plate, I know, is tricky. It's difficult to wrap our heads around, but it is crucial for your sustainable growth and your subsequent success. It is just part of it. In fact, I would say the number one difference between the business owners that I know that are making under six figures and those that are making multi six and multi seven figures is that they do less and less and they do more and more of only the things that only they can do because our time is our most valuable asset. And so by delegating we can free up more of that time to focus on the things that actually move the needle forward and align with our unique skills and talents. Delegation is also really cool because you can also align what you're giving out with other people's unique skills and talents. And that's where some real magic begins to happen. Delegation is also going to make sure that you create balance in your business life, in your work life. It's going to help you avoid burnout. It's gonna help you maintain that healthy balance and ultimately achieve your business goals more quickly and more efficiently. Are you tired of spending hours crafting the perfect email only to be met with crickets in your inbox? Or worse, having your emails end up in your subscribers spam folders? I know that feeling, which is why I switched to ConvertKit as my email service provider many years ago. ConvertKit is the email marketing platform built by creators for creators. With ConvertKit you can easily create and send beautiful personalized emails that your subscribers are not only going to open, but also love. They have a drag and drop email editor that makes it easy to design emails that look and feel professional without any coding. Plus, their powerful automation tools make it easy to send the right message to the right person at the right time. But that's really not all. Convertkit's tagging and segmenting tools make it so easy to send targeted messages to your subscribers based on their interests and behaviors. So, for example, you can imagine that on my email list I have people who are interested in buying my fabric to use in their projects, and then also people who want to learn how to design their own fabric. And so through ConvertKit's tagging system, I can communicate to those two different groups of people so that I don't ever have to worry if I'm bugging the other group with something that they're not interested in. You can also use ConvertKit to actually build out a page and a form so that you can easily grow your email list and turn subscribers into customers. So you know that we always want you to be growing your email list. And I can tell you that if you dive into ConvertKit, you can start adding subscribers to your email list within a day of of focused effort. It's not that difficult. It's super easy to set up, build a landing page, put an opt in, and then start getting people on your list. So if you are ready to take your email marketing to the next level, I want you to head over to BonnieCristine.comResources and sign up for a free trial on ConvertKit today. You can go ahead and dive in and get familiar with the program. Their support is amazing and see what you think. This is truly an email service provider who can grow with you from one subscriber to 500,000. So again, head on over to bonniecristine.com resources and check out ConvertKit today. So I promised that I would tell you some of the first things so the 10 most simple tasks that you could start getting help with today. And I also promised that I would include some life stuff as well. And so the very first thing that I started getting help with this was probably in 2017 was a little bit of help with my house because I remember someone else teaching this as well that oftentimes we start by thinking about help with our business, but that does require some training. It requires creating SOPs or bringing someone in and working with them and training them on what we're doing. And so if you can get help elsewhere that has a lower barrier to entry, like less training, then it'll free up some of your time so that you can do more of all of the things in your business until you're ready to pull someone into the business. And so the first three are things that were crucially beneficial to me before I was ready to actually get help with my business. And the first one was help with my house. I was spending so much time just maintaining my house that it was pulling away from potential hours that I could give to my business and also my family. And so we began getting help there and then very similarly. But I think it just adds a whole nother level of depth to this is help with the laundry, especially if you have young kids or kids that are in sports and all of that. Specifically when our house help was able to turn into laundry help, our lives changed completely. It alleviated this thing that was happening with me and David so much with things piling up. And so if you can start with getting a little bit of help with your house and then eventually also include laundry with that. It's going to free up more time for you to do the things that only you can do in your business. The next one is help with food. So either grocery shopping or meal prep or meal delivery. So in the very early years we did something called Blue Apron. And so they would kind of deliver the ingredients for a meal for an entire week. And so you still cook and everything, but all the ingredients are pre measured and the recipes are amazing. So we did Blue Apron for many years. Since then we've kind of transitioned to help with grocery shopping and meal prep. And so I still do all of the cooking. I love it. I love to cook. If you don't love to cook, you could also have help with actually, you know, meal cooking. But this just again, it gives you hours back to your week because you're not the one having to really do all of that shopping and meal prep, prep. So it's an incredible way to buy back some of your time. And again, I'm, I'm referencing that phrase from buy back your time by Dan Martell. We'll link that in the show notes today in case you want to read it. It's amazing and it'll buy back some of your time in a week to focus on your business. Okay, so that was number three. Number four is bookkeeping and accounting. This was specific to me. Again, when you do these things, I suggest you also consider whether you enjoy them. And so I enjoy cooking. I absolutely want to do that. I do not enjoy bookkeeping or accounting. And so it was the very next thing that we delegated. I would just end up in tears. Every year when it was time to do our accounting and our taxes, it always seemed like we did something like we moved states or we, you know, moved houses or we had a baby. I was like, and then we started a business or whatever and I just could not with it. And so our bookkeeping, our monthly bookkeeping was an incredible thing to outsource. And then our accounting was another incredible thing to outsource. The next one is packaging and shipping. I spoke about this a little bit in the last episode, number 51. But this packaging your products and shipping them, if you have a product based business is one of the easiest things to hand off to someone else. The training is low and it saves you so much time. So by the time you process the order, you handle the customer service, you print the label, you package the product, you, you know, get it all Taped up and then you take it to the post office, then that's significant time that could have been handed off to someone else, and you could have been marketing your products or developing a new product, like really doing only the things that only you can do with the product. Number six is community management. So this may not be applicable to all of you, but for me, it was. One of the very first team hires that I made was a community manager, because I was having a lot of communities. So we had a community for my membership, we had a community for my course. And then I had a couple of free communities like Fate on Facebook. I don't even have it anymore, but at the time I did. And I remember feeling like I could spend my entire day doing nothing but responding to messages and responding to questions in the community. And while I could do that, that would mean that I could never create more content that is meant to serve these very people. So my highest contribution is actually in the content creation. Now, of course, I always spend a little bit of time in the communities, but I was really needing someone to make sure that nothing was falling through the cracks that we were really getting back to and seeing and listening to every single member in every single community. And so a community manager came on the team, and I was actually hired her from within my community. So they already very much understood what the tone was, what our mission was. They were a big fan, meaning like they loved the community themselves already. And then we were able to develop something called a voice guide. And so this is, you know, an. An interesting thing to hire off is anyone who's kind of speaking in, you know, on your behalf, not as you like. They're. They're working as themselves and signing off as themselves. But still, they're an extension of the brand, right? And they must be brand because your people in customer service and community and things like that, they very much have to represent you the face of the brand. And so there is a little bit of training to be done around that. I'm going to do an episode soon on our voice guide, but we created a voice guide so that they could very much understand how we, you know, operate in the types of language that we use and our core values and emojis and all of the things, things like that. Number seven is video processing, editing, and post creation. I used to do all of this myself. And so I don't know if you're doing anything like this in your business, but I create a video like a video training, or you could even think about this from a perspective. Of social media content. And then I would edit the video myself and then I would upload it to our platform. So for me, it's Kajabi. And then we also run everything through Searchie. You can see both of those@bonniechristine.com resources searchy makes everything searchable by keyword and transcribed. And then we place a little code from Searchie into Kajabi so that it plays correctly there. And then, you know, I actually make the post. So if it's a lesson, we're creating the post, putting the video there, and kind of recapping it beneath. And then if it's social media, of course we're creating the post there too. So I used to do all of that and I realized how amazing would it be if all I did was create the video and then I was done with content creation and so immediately started working on a process of handing that off to someone else to edit, upload, process, create the post, and be done with it. And so now all I have to do is show up and create the content and then step away for someone else to do the rest of the work. So that is an incredible thing to outsource if you're doing anything like that in your business. Now, number nine is data processing. I cannot tell you how many pieces of data, like how many spreadsheets we have in my creative business is actually quite impressive. We are always doing things like summarizing results, how many people want this type of content versus how many people want that type of content. We're pulling questions for Q and A sessions. We are creating all of these different types of data points. And a lot of times I'm the one processing. So I'm sorting the spreadsheet, I'm making duplicates of it. I'm doing all of that. And that's one of the best things to hand off is can you take the results from this survey, summarize them for me in a way that I can easily digest them? Or for instance, for a Q and A session, I'll have Nikita, who's my program manager, go in and pull the questions in advance. Now, I like to read through all of them and choose the ones that I'm going to answer that day. But she'll go in and kind of bold different sentences that are like the concept, like the key question in each question because sometimes they, they get a little lengthy and then organize them for me. And it's so incredibly helpful. She'll even put links to anything that I might want to referen difference beside the question super, super helpful. And so that data processing, summarizing anything like that that you're doing that is kind of techie in your business is a great thing to outsource. And then number 10 is social media. But I want to talk about this a little bit because I still am the one doing my social media and I don't think that I'll ever change that. The Bonnie Christine brand specifically, because that's kind of the point, right, is that it's me. But there is some work that could be kind of batched in advance. So one of the things that we do is use planoly for planning out our Instagram posts. And so typically we'll kind of dump all of our best photos or what we want to share in Planoly. We'll arrange the grid and then I'll go in and kind of pluck out what I want to say today and write the caption. And so there are some things like, like that that make it really easy to get help with. They can batch and organize photographs, they can also kind of repurpose material. So if you've said something somewhere else, they can create like a summarized version for that for you to share on social media. And so you can absolutely have help with social media even if you still want to be the one posting in real time. So those are the first 10 things that I had help with. But don't, don't forget, we have a list of 50 more things that you're likely doing in your business that you can absolutely hand off to someone else. And so if this is getting you excited and you want to really wrap your mind around all of the potential tasks that you could get help with, hop on over to the show notes@profropriationalcreative.com to get this list. Your time is so valuable and your energy is, is so valuable that you have to learn how to delegate. It's not only essential for your growth of your business, but it also contributes to your well being and your work life balance and feeling like you're doing the best work of your life. Now, I know that it can feel a little overwhelming at first, but the benefits far outweigh the initial discomfort. And so I'm going to give you some steps, action steps for you to embrace today. And then I want you to tune in to our next episode, number 52 to learn how, once you're ready, once you've wrapped your mind around being ready to begin delegating, let me tell you how to delegate with ease. So to wrap up today's session, step Number one is to really assess your current workload. You've got to start writing down and thinking about all of the tasks that you're doing that are taking up your time. And then once you've got that list, you can start start picking out things that you could easily delegate. So I want you to just start with a list of three or five tasks, probably from our list of 50, that you feel comfortable just beginning to get help with. Next, I want you to start asking around for help in finding someone. So you could, of course, put together a proper application and post it on job description sites or maybe share that you're hiring on social media or in your email. But you can also just start asking around, ask your friends, maybe you're in a Facebook group that you could make a post with, let people know that you're looking for help, and then you can follow up from there. You can absolutely start small. You can delegate just one or two things at a time. And then as you become more and more comfortable with it, you can gradually increase and you. And that will also help build your trust with anybody that you're working with. And then you'll see what positive impact it has on your business and you'll be more and more willing to do it. If you will put this into motion, I know that you will feel more empowered and more in control of your creative business. You do not have to do everything on your own. In fact, you can't do everything on your own. Delegation is so powerful, and it can help you focus on your strengths and your passions and what makes you uniquely you. Thank you for joining me for today's episode. I hope that you found this discussion helpful. I hope that you're inspired. Here's to embracing delegation, reclaiming your time, and taking your creative business to new heights. Until next time, create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you.