Mastering Delegation: How to Align Time, Prioritize Roles, and Scale Your Business Like a Pro

Entrepreneurship is hard, but the process can be simplified. You can achieve success faster, sooner, and easier. I'm Mike Michalowicz and I'm on a mission to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. My goal for this episode and every episode is to serve you on your journey. Let's start right now on entrepreneurship Simplified.

I have a question for you.

What's that?

What's your social media appetite these days?

Oh, you know, it's changed dramatically.

Yeah.

So I was all into Facebook. That was my primary thing. And I was checking it, I think every day, particularly when going to bed or something. And then I saw my daughter about six months ago. She's like, yeah, I don't do this stuff anymore. At all.

Yeah, I think that's really popular among the 20 year olds and teenagers.

I hope so. So I stopped. I removed Facebook. This is my phone that's recording this. I removed Facebook from my phone, from my iPad. I deleted everything. Everything. Instagram, all this stuff.

Right. All your personal stuff. Yeah, yeah.

And didn't. I don't miss it at all.

No, no.

I did have a funny situation though. I was as sadly at a funeral for a friend who died way too early in life and it was like a high school reunion I was telling you about. This one person came, I was like, hey, it's good to see you. I'm like, I do not know who this person is. And once I ultimately found out who they were, I never really knew them anyway.

Right. You didn't have a real connection.

And she goes, oh, I Facebooked you. I'm like, oh, I haven't. Or Facebook book message. You haven't been on Facebook in six months now.

Yeah.

So I said, sorry if I didn't. I didn't respond because I haven't seen it. So I went on there and it was one blessing because I now I know what her name is.

Yeah.

And I didn't know her. And there's these queue of all these messages on there.

Did you go down the rabbit hole into these messages?

That one is like, no.

Yeah.

No. And then the other thing was interesting was there's still posts on my page when someone tags you.

Yeah.

So there were still posts like in the last week or so.

That's crazy. So they're still coming. I'm noticing too though that my appetite for it is definitely diminished. I always loved it as sort of like a family journal, especially Facebook. Like, I love going back to the memories and like, oh, this is what we were doing a year ago. This is what we're doing four Years ago. This is what we're doing eight years ago.

I like that too.

I love that. But yeah, I'm kind of losing the energy for it. But the thing that keeps me on there is connections to people who I genuinely love but I can't see regularly. And you kind of wouldn't be in the know about what's going on in their lives or their kids lives if you weren't on there.

Yeah.

Or I feel guilty for not like wishing that person who I went to high school with happy birthday on their birthday.

That's. Yeah. Cause you're so socially connected and that's who you are.

And that's like the kindness and that's the connection. That's like, how do you, how do you not do that? But I am also feeling like, well.

I wonder, is Chris on there ever?

Chris just got an Instagram account and he's, you know, he checks it maybe once a day and he's pretty good actually about, you know, commenting on things. But I find like Instagram, I, I scroll sometimes if I'm in a mood to, or if I'm in a waiting room kind of a thing. I'll see myself scrolling, but I don't follow a lot. And I don't, you know, I don't.

Get myself not on Instagram. I don't know how to work. I don't know how to be like, I'll message you on Instagram, like you can. I didn't know that.

But I won't find it.

But the irony is they say, but Mike, I see you all the time because we have a social media team. And that's why I don't think, think most many people might recognize.

Right.

So Jenna, Andrea and the team are facilitating that. So there's constant content. Yeah, but I'm not using it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I hear you, I hear you. Speaking of social media.

Yes.

I saw a post on Instagram from Sir Richard Branson and it said, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you've got to learn to delegate.

Yes.

So that's not brand new news, but definitely falls into the category of easier said than done.

You know what's interesting about Richard Branson is I think he's grown over, started over 100 businesses. I think it's, it's maybe over 200, I don't know.

Incredible, incredible, incredible.

And it becomes so obvious this one person can't be running all these businesses. Technically, if he was, if he has, say, a hundred businesses, that means he don't have three days per business. You know or four days per business that he can work on these businesses. So clearly he can't. And yet I think so many entrepreneurs think that they have to and should do everything. And that's a big mistake.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, today I want to ask, I want to dig in and find out, you know, how do you not only figure out how to delegate, but know what to delegate. But before we do that, I want to introduce you to our audience. Mike, you are our business author guy and something people don't know about you is that you have owned or invested in 17 companies.

Yeah, currently I'm in 17 businesses. Yeah. So I think people know our author business. That's a business prep First Professionals some have absolutely heard of. Then I also have run like clockwork. That's with Adrian, the all in company with Danielle Pumpkin plan your biz with Donna. These are businesses that I have a interest in through a licensing agreement. And then I started Prosper Group about a year ago where we started investing in businesses. And instead of infusing money into these businesses is usually they simply need a new perspective, new ability. And so what we do is we hire those people, we pay for it in return for a share in the success and profitability. But we only do it for a short period, about five years in that business. We have right now I think active 15 companies. So maybe it's actually now over 17 companies cumulatively.

Wow.

Yeah, wow.

It's great.

And it's a little bit for me like a Richard Branson thing is that I. You can't be involved in that many things and be actually actively running, operating all those things.

Right.

Forget it.

Right.

I would argue more than one business you start to lose yourself. So in each business there is a full time operator. In Prosper Group there's Greg Eckler who's overseeing those relationships. In Prop First Professionals, there's Ron Sahari and there's also Billy and Greg who are the operators and integrators, you know, and that's how I've been able to, to do that.

Right.

So yeah, it's a little known fact.

Right, right. Well, a couple episodes ago we talked about the Queen bee role.

Yes.

Right. So we have to define the QBR in order to be to most effectively deliver on our big promise. So my question is how do we align our time to reflect our qbr?

Mm. Yeah. So the qbr. So going back to the episode we were talking about the queen bee role, which is a role designated in the organization. Do you remember what the QBR is for?

Our company, the QBR for our company is to simplify entrepreneur. Well, that's the promise.

Well done.

Yes, that's the promise to simplify entrepreneurship. Yeah.

And what's the activity that most simplifies entrepreneurship?

Our books. Books.

Bingo. Nailed it, Amy.

Thanks. A plus.

Yeah, that was a pop quiz too.

I hate those. I hate those. That was horrible.

Remember those in school? Oh, my God. Yeah, that's exactly it. So we. We promise to simplify entrepreneurship. How we deliver on it most, that's the qbr, is by writing books that I intend to be extraordinary. It's always the determination of the client. If it is or isn't, I can't say they are, but that's my intention and commitment.

Right.

The QBR does not need to and should not necessarily be served by an individual, single person, because that person becomes a linchpin. If. If I leave this planet, the books are done right, unless we build redundancy. And what we've done is we. We've introduced AJ So she's a co writer with me. But we also have derivative authors. I think a collective now of maybe about 20 other authors. So when I leave this planet, there's an opportunity that the message continues on. And that's what a QBR is. The more I extract myself as the owner, originator of doing the QBR and put more individuals and more capabilities in place to do it, the healthier the business is. So we have to realize it's not an individual and shouldn't be if it is. Right now, the first thing you need to do is start determining how can you bring about other individuals supporting it. So there's no dependency on a single person. Some businesses are easier than others. Like if you're in manufacturing and your QBR is the quality of the. Your promise of the quality of the product and the thing that most represents that is the assembly. You don't have one person assembling, you know, in. In something that's more creative, like books or painting. It's more difficult. But I wrote a story about this guy named Peter Lely from the, I think 1600s. He was a painter. He's painted portraits. Like if you go to those old medieval dungeons, castles, and you see on the wall that portrait that's like 18ft tall of a person. Most painters painted that by themselves. Peter Lely would sketch the. The elements and then go back to his studio. Studio, thank you very much. Filling in the blanks. And his colleagues would finish it. He became prolific. He painted thousands of paintings, whereas contemporaries did maybe a hundred in their lifetime. Even in these kind of artistic, creative spaces, you can build a qbr. So devoting time is the question. Step one is remove yourself or having a single person do it. Step two is it has to be the primary function. And, and so for most businesses, we first assign those tasks and then assign other tasks around it.

You're giving me an example now because I need one. Right. Okay. Okay.

So let's talk about manufacturing. We make, I got markers here, right. So we make these markers and it goes through a sequence of things and what our big promises to our customers that we have the highest quality marker that it is. Maybe we'll, we'll say to an extreme of ruggedness. So this is military applications. You can waterproof. Run a truck over it.

Gotcha.

Right. So not your ordinary marker. Well, then we have to ask ourselves, of all the things we do in our manufacturing process, what makes it the most rugged? Is it the ink and its ability to be waterproof? Is it the encasement around it? All those things are important. We have to pick of those things what one is the most important. So a technique I use is I'll put a sticky note out for each element I think is of critical importance. The ink quality, the encasement or packaging strength. Right, right. And maybe some other elements. Then through deductive logic, I say, if I, if, if I could only have five items here and say only four could be the most important, which one would I remove for now? And I delete it and I have four left and I go that same process until there's one left over. So it's deductive logic. And maybe I'll say it's the casing that's most important because, you know, it's got to withstand a truck rolling over it and soldiers running around the field and falling on it. And so all that stuff is important, but, but the casing is the most important. So when I look at my manufacturing sequence, I focus in on the casing and saying is that is the sequence allowing it to be the best encasement? And for example, one thing I may notice is that, you know, prior we were the case for the pen would come, we would spray paint it in our spray paint machine, bake it nice and hot, and then we'd insert the ink. But we've noticed that by baking it, it reduces the strength of the encasement. So then I say, well, we're going to maybe change the sequence first, assemble it, and then we spray spray paint. But we can't heat dry it. And we have to consider every element of the sequence once we know what the most important thing is. So step two is what is the most important thing? I'm not saying the other things aren't important. I'm just saying they can't be the most important. The definition of most is one. Then we revolve our sequencing around it to make sure it's protected first. As an author, the most important thing is writing. Aaron is my assistant. She does my schedule. One thing she knows her God bless her.

God bless.

Because you're handling interactions.

Yeah.

Sheesh. She knows when she's scheduling me that there has to be book time, particularly during the in season. And that gets scheduled first. There was an old analogy that supposedly happened at some college professor went in front of the students and said he had rocks. Maybe you've heard this before. Pebbles and sand. And he, he fills the bucket with sand. He goes, sand represents all the day to day stuff. Pebbles represent the bigger elements of life and the rocks are the most critical. He goes, let's talk about the daily elements. And he pours into this jar all the sand. Then he tries to add the rocks and pebbles. And you can't because it's filled with sand. And he goes, this is how most people live their lives. They prioritize every small issue.

All the minutia.

All the minutia. And the big things will never fit in. He goes instead and he puts a new jar. He says, the biggest elements of life are these rocks. He puts them in and they fill in. And then he takes the pebbles and they fill in the crevices in between. And then he adds the sand last and it fills in perfectly. And he goes, now everything's been addressed. So what are the big rocks? That's what the QBR is. It has to be prioritized first in scheduling or in sequences so it's cared for most. And the other things fill in the crevices around it.

Cool.

That's how you do it.

Okay, now I want to move on to the four D's you talk about. Yes, please. Can you tell us what they are?

Yeah.

And what, what they mean.

Yeah. I wrote about this in Clockwork and I enhanced it in the Clockwork revised expanded edition, which is the current edition. Now what I discovered is businesses have four functions effectively that go on. And this is true for the holistic the entire business. So at our company we have doing activities. That's the first D. And doing is anything that is a deliverable to the client or is administrative or some kind of support to deliverable so the work you do, like special projects, gifts and books, those aren't a deliverable on an invoice, something that we build for, but it does support the client experience. So any of that stuff is what we call doing the next D is what's called deciding. And it's necessary on a very limited basis. But it's ultimately the biggest trap. Deciding is where if you and I are just working together. Just me and you.

Yeah.

And you come to me, I'm the boss man, you say, mike, what should I do next? I say, oh, you know what, can you go please ship those books? I've made the decision on your activity. So deciding is where a person in a superior titled position is assigning out work through what I call task rabbiting. I'll tell you to do. You don't really think, you just do.

And then you come back.

Yeah, gotcha. And so a lot of people, businesses get hamstrung by this.

Yeah.

Because imagine you're the boss, I'm the employee, and we have tons of employees. Now you're in your office trying to work on the project and I'm like, hey Amy, what should I do now? Go package the books. And the next person walks in, hey, Amy, what should I do? Go wash our vehicles? Like all you can do is be stuck in these decision making for everyone else.

Right.

It's a trap because A, you can't do the most critical zone of genius work that you can't capable of. Secondly, the employees aren't empowered to think on our own. And in fact, I'm served better by coming to you and simply asking for instructions and then following instructions. Because if the instructions don't get the outcome that you wanted, not my fault.

Right?

You told me you said shift the books. I did. Amy, if it does get the outcome you want, I'm the hero because I can follow instructions. So it becomes this trap where employees are served by by following the instructions set and the owners serve through ego. So it's a trap. It's necessary, but in small tastes. The next level is delegation. Delegation is not the assignment of tasks, it's the assignment of outcomes.

This was really interesting to me. The assignment of outcomes. Yeah, big shift there. From assignment of tasks to assignment of outcomes.

Yeah. And I ain't perfect at this. And we have challenges with it. But an example is we have a client that who a customer who bought a hundred bucks and we want to thank them for it. The assignment of an outcome would be me meeting with you and say, hey Amy, we have a client that just bought a hundred books, we want to thank them in some way. Do you. Do you think that makes sense? And you say yes or no and say, great, would you please be of service to that? Giving you the freedom to determine how to do it right. As opposed to saying, amy, this person bought a hundred bucks. What I want you to do is buy this gift, do this thank you note, and so forth, which is common for me to do. That's my default. But. But the better mechanism is just for you to take it on.

Right. Own it.

Own it. What this does is a. It alleviates me, the boss man, from controlling scenarios so I can focus on things that I need to focus on. It gives you a sense of empowerment. You get a determined direction, so forth. Now, the risk, of course, is, what if I do it wrong?

Yeah. Or what if. Right. Or what if it doesn't get carried out the way you would really like if you really wanted a ribbon around that, and that wasn't even in her, you know, mindset to do so you. That's a tricky.

It's very tricky. And it's. It's the onus of the boss man I'm just using as a person in the superior role is you achieved outcome that you've determined is the best outcome, and that is the best outcome. Just because one person, the owner, thinks this is the way we should do things. It's just one person's opinion.

Right.

And many business owners say, well, my opinion is the best opinion. No, it's just your opinion. And if you think it's the best opinion, you. You've now again hamstrung the business to be a clone of you. It's not a representation of the holistic community. So the right approach is for the owner to bite their tongue and say, good job, no ribbon. Not because that was right or wrong. It was simply the way that you saw it best served. And if I stop that correcting of you, because it's not really a correction, it's just my opinion, you'll be more empowered, say, good.

Yeah.

And you'll be. You'll be more likely to repeat and continue forward.

Right. I know there's more to do, but, like, how hard is that to do?

Like, stinking hard for both of us because we've lived this, right?

Yes. Yeah.

It's hard for you not to say, is it my doing this? Right. Because you're expecting the affirmation. You've been trained and raised on that. It's hard for me not to say, this is the way to do it, because I've been trained and raised on that. But it links us on forever. It simply says we have to repeat this process again and again. And it doesn't break that freedom or bring that freedom.

What about something like in this instance, something like a form. Say we had a form and every time you needed me to ship something, there was a form and it had all the checkboxes. So I knew exactly what you were looking for. That kind of is a little bit of a crutch though, right?

It is the right also approach. Because if I simply said, let's free wheel at every single time. Now we've anarchy and we don't know. So there is best practices. So here's the best approach for delegation. I go to you and say, Amy, we have a customer support 100 books and I want to thank them. What do you think? So you know what? We should thank them. And I think gifts is the best way to do it. Great. Then I can say we do have a best practice. Historically, we've given gifts. And here's the sequence. I'm going to give this to you. And if you find that there's a better way, as you move along this path, follow the different way. Use this as a guiding, just to know our history, but not necessarily the proven way. And when you find a better way, I want you to document it next. So now we have a best practice that's evolving and improving.

Yeah.

Here's a great example. We had Stella Grizzant. She's a fellow author who by happenstance moved into a neighboring town. Like literally.

So such a small world.

Yeah. Biking different. A distance from here. And so. And she's been such a great supporter of us from. From 15, 20 years ago. So when I heard she was moving to town, I said, hey, we were a great friend, a great ally as a company. Let's do something. And I had just a theme and we kind of agreed to it. And you modified the theme because some of the stuff that I was thinking like, I can't do this, but here's a better way of doing it. And it became a better outcome. What it was was all this gear for the town she moved into. I was thinking, including other stuff when she saw it, broke down in tears. Husband came running over. He's like, this is amazing.

Her.

She had her daughter there and said, we filmed a op, what they call unboxing video. She was blown away. If we followed my strict rules, like, this is the way we're going to do it. And Amy, don't do what you're thinking, just do exactly. I'm thinking it wouldn't have been as impactful. So it's proof that expanded. Now the opportunity, of course, is for us to record this and now to spend an hour recording the step by step stuff for something that happens once every eon is ridiculous. But record in our mind that, that there is at least a. A better way to. To do this. So the next time this comes up, we can do it again.

Gotcha.

The last thing I want to share on this subject is there will be a day that you choose not to work with us any longer, including myself. There'll be a day I choose not. We're going to finish the business a hundred years from now or five, I don't know. But the day will come. The risk is you're going to leave the organization with all this knowledge, including how to wow someone like Stella, and that's going to walk out the door. So our job is to capture that, to record it in some capacity. So as we evolve and new people come on board and people transition on that, we can continue that unabated as a best practice and they can improve on it.

Gotcha.

So that's delegation.

Okay, what's our fourth D?

Okay, so we did doing which is the activity. Deciding which is a control. Delegating is the assignment outcome. So it's a subtle but significant difference. It's empowerment versus a control scenario.

Gotcha.

The last one is designing. And designing is the. As former first president George Bush was a strategy, which I'm sure he never even said that, but. But it's. It's the strategic thinking and envisioning for the company. It's the intentional and deliberate extraction of yourself from doing the activity and envisioning the outcomes and then empowering your team. And your team is maybe it's individuals, but it's also technology, it's vendors. It's the collective to achieve that outcome that you envision. Most entrepreneurs who start a business spend a lot of time working in the design leading up to and including the day before starting the business. Like I'm going to, I can see this. And it's going to be amazing. And the day they start the business, they're throwing the fire. They go to the doing level themselves and they stay there for the eternity of the business. And they never again really envision. It's a lost dream.

Right.

So that design is. Is seeing the dream, but it's seeing it in a dynamic way. Because where we are today, we have a lot more Information of about the business than we did the day prior. And the day prior, it's more fic. Things change and we need to, as leaders for organizations, understand how are things changing? When we started our business, the author business, 12 or 15 years ago, I don't remember we started. You weren't here yet. Kelsey wasn't here yet. I didn't exist yet. But now we look at today and the skills we have with yourself on board and Kelsey's on board and Andrea, who just joined us in the last two years or so. And these, the towns, the vision of the business changes. There's external influences and internal. And so part of the job, of the design capacity that. That I serve and Kelsey served is seeing where we are. And then how do we take the clay we have today and morphing.

Right. And what's the next best step?

Yeah.

With that. Yeah.

Yeah. And the best way to do that is through, I call jawbone time.

Okay.

Where is just, you know, Kelsey and I'll grab lunch. Andrew will come and it's just. Let's just talk through what we're facing.

Gotcha. Yeah.

Sometimes it's. It's us. Those quarterly retreats, which I think are at the best.

Yeah. The brainstorming sessions, dumping out ideas.

There were some genius thoughts that came out of that last meeting we had at Jenna's. Yeah. And I'm not even sure who voiced them, but it's because we were together just talking about the future.

Yeah.

That future thinking came out.

Yeah. That ping ponging off of each other.

Yes. That's all design time.

Yeah.

And you got, you got to schedule it.

Right.

Ironically, I'd say at the end of the day, the what? That big rock we're putting in the jar is design time. One thing I want everyone to understand, though, listening in, is that we don't just become these thinkers and dreamers and that's a go nowhere. There has to be action. The kind of the dispersion or the waiting is businesses I see optimized around this spend about 80% of the business time doing. So if I'm a solopreneur, 80% of my time better be delivering to clients or supporting the work that delivers the clients. If I have a few colleagues and I look at our collective input and time, maybe all of your time is in doing, and maybe 70% of my time is in doing. But it balances out that collectively it's 80%. So we want to target that 80% of the company is doing, doing okay. And maybe even upwards of 90%, the design time should be about 10%. So if we look at a year of an organization, that there's about 2,000 work hours per person, about 200 hours. If you divide that by days, that's roughly.