Why You’ll Never Get Better at Delegating Until You Hire Someone

Most of the advice out there is, oh, you need to practice delegating. Oh really? How do you practice delegating? Like, oh well, think through something and give someone else that work. Oh really? How do I just give someone else that work? You have to have someone else there to give someone the work. You wanna get better at delegating? Force yourself into a situation where you have to delegate, which you're already in that situation. You're already overworked and too busy and you need to get some things off of your plate. You don't have the way to get those things off of your plate. You want to get better at delegating? Hire someone. Force yourself to delegate some work because you now have a responsibility towards that person to employ them, to keep them busy, and to pay them. Now you can practice delegating because you have to. Because if you don't delegate, that person's not working and you're just wasting time and money. Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing Podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with virtual assistants from the Philippines. This is episode 473. How to get better at delegating? So, I got asked this question on a podcast where I was a guest recently. Like, "What about people who are scared? They're not very good at delegating or they don't think someone else can do the work." And my answer was like, "Sorry, too bad. You're not good at delegating? Delegating is a skill. Figure your crap out." You have to get better at it. Otherwise, your other option is to continue doing exactly what you're doing. You're just stuck with your head down in your business and you're you're too busy to delegate. Like, dude, oh, I really want to work the 4-Hour Workweek. Well, what are you doing towards working that? Are you doing something about it or are you just saying, oh, I really hope? Like, dude, that's not going to happen by hoping. Just not at all how success works. I don't want to hope. And when I got off the podcast, I started thinking about it. I actually have some, I had, I gave some other advice that I have for you. And I started thinking about like, how did I, get better at delegating? What are the things that I have done towards this? So let me start with kind of a reasoning behind this, because I think that not delegating is what causes a business to be stuck. This is what causes you as the business owner or the freelancer or even just an employee to be stuck where you are because there's only so much time in a day. And that, in the end, time is the only limiting factor. Money's a limiting factor sometimes, but money will change. Time doesn't change. The only way you get time back is by delegating. You can make money all kinds of ways. Time, not the case. And a lot of people think like, "Oh, but I'm the only one who can do this really well." Like, that's fine, but that's irrelevant. A lot of people think, "Oh, I'm the only one who can do this thing," or like, "Someone else that I hire can't do this as well as I can," which that was me. I thought that same thing before I started outsourcing to the Philippines. I got a reference, I could hire someone full-time, and I was like, "Oh man, I don't know if," if they can actually do good work or if they can do as good of a job as me, or maybe they're gonna mess something up. And now I realize, oh, that's completely irrelevant. That fear is silly and irrelevant. It doesn't matter if they can't do it as well as you. You're not doing it. You're not getting done all the things you need to get done. So it completely does not matter if they don't do it as well as you. And then later I learned, oh yeah, getting it done super, super well isn't even the thing. Like getting it done 70%, 80%, 90% as well as you is just as good as getting it done exactly perfectly. And the reality is, at least with my team of people in the Philippines, they usually do it better than me. I have 60 people in the Philippines. I started with one, right? I started with one person. I had him do something. He didn't do as well as I would have done, but he did it 4 times and I could only handle doing it once in a day. He did it 4 times. So his thing was like 85% of what I would have done, which means that he did like 3 times better than what I would do. Because he did it 4 times and I can only do it once. Who cares if they can't do it as well as you? Maybe they can do it more than you. Or maybe— I mean, now in so many situations in my business, they're doing it better than me. So like, you're the only one who can do it? Well, you know, unless you're the only person in the world doing it, my guess is someone else can do it and can probably do it better than you. But you don't know that until you try it. So, how do you actually get better at delegating? Oh, you practice. No, wait. That's terrible advice. But that's the advice I've seen. Oh, you practice delegating. Practice. Start with something small. No, that's not how this works at all. And you've seen this yourself. Okay, think about Google. There are 2 shifts that have happened over the last 20 years. People would ask a question and be like, uh, how many whatever whatever? And someone would send back a link to Google like, uh, here, I just Googled that for you. And this happened so much that like someone created a website called let me Google that for you, LMGTFY. And you could send them a link of lmgtfy.com/the-question-that-they-just-asked-you, and you would do it for them, right? And people really only needed to see that happen to them once when they realize, oh, okay, I can actually Google for myself. I could do this. And here's the shift recently that you've probably just seen. I've seen it. The fear wasn't Googling the question. The fear was, what are you going to do after you Google it? Now you have to go read all kinds of crazy stuff and like, ah, I want to know the answer to this thing, but I don't want to go and read all this stuff, right? Well, now you have ChatGPT. ChatGPT will answer it. Claude will answer it for you, right? It'll do all the research and summarize it for you. But how many times have you used ChatGPT and you know that it'll do this, But how many times have you still been like, oh, I should figure out that thing, but you haven't done it. But then after you've asked ChatGPT that a couple times, you stop thinking, oh, I should, and you're like, oh, I know how to do that. That's super easy. And what it really took was initially you had to recognize there was Google. People just didn't recognize there was Google. To get over the second hurdle, you had to find the resource, which was ChatGPT. ChatGPT didn't exist. So like you couldn't just go get all of the research summarized for you. Not until that existed. Well, now it exists and you just have to change your pattern. The question of how do I get better at delegating? Well, you practice. It's a terrible answer. You can't just practice. You have to have the resource available to you like ChatGPT where you can actually delegate and then once you've done it a few times you start to get into a different pattern. Here's what I've seen. Unless you have someone in the Philippines working for you, you'll think, "Oh, I should do this thing for my business. I just saw this article." about LinkedIn lead generation and how it's working and I should do that. I can't do that. I don't have time to do that. That's your response. And that was my response. I saw this thing that it was this product teaching how to do whatever this marketing thing was. I don't remember what this was. This is like 18 years ago. And I was like, "Oh, I can't do that. I don't have time to do that." And then I thought, "Wait a minute. I have someone that works for me." that maybe could do that. And I sent an email, said, "Hey, could you do this? Like, I just bought this thing that teaches how to do this thing. Could you do this?" And the next day, he had read it and he had tried it and he had failed at it. But he had tried it and was like, "Yeah." He could do this just as well as I could do this. And I learned right then, "Oh, wait a minute. I can delegate. I can delegate this thing to someone else." Recently after that, I needed to get my passport renewed and I was putting it off. I was like, "Ugh, I have to go figure out how to renew my passport. What a pain in the butt." Well, now I would just go ask Chat like, "Chat, how do I renew my passport?" Well, back then you had to like go and do all the research and then I thought, "Wait a minute, I don't have to do this." And I sent an email to someone in the Philippines and said, "Hey, will you tell me how to renew my passport? And if you can renew it for me." And they sent me back the next day a link to the correct page where I would renew my passport. And he said, "If your passport's expired, then do this." If your passport's existing, do this. Here's the link for each of them. And was like, whoa, dude, I just delegated that research. But the only reason I was able to do the delegation was because I had someone working for me. I had to have the resource in order to do it. Now, delegation is not about doing research anymore, right? Like you can research with chat. It's so simple. Delegation is about getting something done that you would otherwise have to spend a whole bunch of time on. So for my neighbor, I have a neighbor that came to me one day and he was like, hey John, I have a question about using VAs. He said, I have this system and we get all this data in this system, and then we have to take certain pieces of it out of this system and put it into this system over here, and the two don't talk to each other. Could I have someone do this for me? I was like, uh, yeah, you could do that. Well, what if they make a mistake? What if they don't do it as well as I do it? Well, you're not doing it. Like, you get to spend your time on a higher value opportunity because that's a low-value thing that you're doing. He hired someone, he came back to me a couple weeks later, he was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. I delegated this thing to someone else and now they're doing it for me and they're better than I am at it. Like, wow, I mean, that's how delegation works. Like, sometimes they're not as good as you, sometimes they're better than you. Then he comes back to me, but maybe a year later, I mean, this is a neighbor that lives down the street from me, he sends me a text and he says, John, I'm just letting you know, I just hired my 5th person person in the Philippines. We're giving all this work to them. So how did he get better at delegating? Well, he hired someone. He hired the first person and handed off that task that he thought, oh, I don't know if someone else could do this. Yeah, they could do it. Then once he had done it once, he was like, oh, wait a minute. What about the next thing? Could I also hand that off? But you're thinking, oh, but what if, like, this is like financial data, like bookkeeping. What if they make a mistake? Well, yeah, you're right. What if? It could certainly happen. Mistakes happen. What's the alternative to not delegating? The alternative is you're stuck doing it yourself forever. Or the alternative is you gotta pay someone in the US $75 an hour or $150 an hour, whatever it is, for that thing that can be done in the Philippines at, well, you know, $4 an hour. Can you delegate it one way or the other? Yep, you can delegate it at $100 an hour. Are they less likely to make a mistake? Well, maybe. Like, you know, like they and they're pretty busy and they're rushing through things. Can you delegate it at $4 an hour? Yeah. Are they going to make a mistake? Yeah, probably at some point. What's the cost? The trade-off is pretty low. But you're asking, "Oh, but what if they steal from me? Like I delegate to somebody and they steal from me." So, look, the reality is it happens. The other reality is it doesn't happen very much. It's not very common. Especially if you just Treat the person well. They don't want to steal from you. Not in the Philippines. They don't want to steal from you. In India, yeah, they want to steal from you. In the Philippines, they don't want to steal your crap. They don't want to steal your data. There's not some black market that they all know of that they're going to sell your stuff to. That's not a thing. Okay, so now let me give you a couple other things that I've noticed in myself and in my business as I have delegated. Kind of a progression of delegation. The first thing I did was delegate a task. And I was like, "Look, I want you to write these articles." I'm writing these articles. Here's how you write the articles. And I gave some specific instructions. And he didn't do it right. Fortunately, because that person works for me or for you, you get to make corrections. And this is a really magic thing about delegation is you don't have to be great at it when that person works for you. Because they can make a mistake and you can correct it. And now, you go back and you're like, "Well, actually my instructions weren't that great and you didn't follow them super great." And Hey, let's change how you write this article, which is what I did. And he did it and was like, oh yeah, that's definitely way better. Now let's add this to it. I didn't have to add everything all at once perfectly SOP, everything's flawless, and otherwise I would never get it done. No, I got it done. It just took me more steps, but I didn't have to spend all the time writing the SOP, right? So that feedback loop is a really, really easy way to start delegating. Ask them to do the task. They're not going to do it right. Well, maybe they are. But if they don't, you get to give feedback and you get to correct. And that correcting, the reality is for me, it takes 1 minute to do that correction. You use a video screen recorder like Loom or Snagit. You record the video and send it to them and you're done. That's it. That's how you correct it, right? So, you've delegated this 1 task and then you're going to add to that task. And this is the progression. You're going to add to that task. Like, okay, Now you're also gonna write this kind of a headline, and I want you to learn about writing headlines, 'cause headline writing is an art and a science. And I want you to read about this, like how do we craft compelling headlines for these things? Okay, that's not a great headline, that's not a great headline, but this is a really good one, good job. Correct these things. Now you're getting better at delegating. Now you're getting better at having someone else do this thing. Now add to it again. Let's add links to this. Learn about linking, learn about anchor text. All of this, you can have them do this, this learning, right? You don't have to be the instructor. I used to have to be the instructor. Now there's so many things that you can do to have someone learn. But you've done a progression of delegation from a single small task to like you've delegated a full system. Now here's the next progression of this. Instead of delegating a single task, you're gonna delegate an outcome. Like, hey, I want you to write these articles with the purpose of doing SEO so they're gonna have links and good headlines. And I want you to do this to these sites, right? You're going to post this on whatever it is. Or here's a good one that I've delegated. I want you to participate in forums that are relevant to our business. I want you to contribute to the forums. I don't want you to be a troll. I want you to be active and offer good stuff to this forum. Occasionally, you can talk about us. The delegation wasn't I want you to go post links to our website or go market our website. The goal was I want you to participate. I don't care how you do it other than I want you to add value. So I delegated a role almost, which is the next thing after delegating a process would be to delegate an outcome and a role. The next role is you are in charge of social media marketing. Here are our goals. We want to increase engagement or we want to increase followers, or we want to increase sales. Well, those are 3 different goals, right? And so you're in charge of how you do this. Now, here's the mistake that people make. When something goes wrong, you take it back and you do it yourself. You correct it instead of providing feedback and letting them fix it and be in charge. And I made this mistake a lot, uh, which the outcome of you doing it is them not correcting their mistakes in the future, them relying on you to correct mistakes. So So if you want to continually correct mistakes, then go ahead, correct mistakes and take the work back and be like, oh, I'll just do it. Here you go. After you doing it. Next time they do it, they're going to be like, well, I mean, he's going to redo it anyway. So I'm just going to do it and let him redo it. And I did that for a long time until finally I was like, no, actually, look, I put you in charge of this thing and you're in charge. If you already know, like if I don't like the way you've done it, then I'm probably going to say something, but I'm not going to fix it for you. And that was very, very effective. Towards getting work completely done by other people, towards learning how to delegate better. So then here are the takeaways from this video about how to learn to delegate better. Number 1, you can't learn to delegate if you don't have someone to delegate to. You're not going to learn to delegate and then hire someone to help you in your business. You have to hire someone first which then forces you to learn to delegate. Once you've made the commitment to that person that you're going to have them work for you, they're going to work for you full-time or part-time, whatever it is. But you have to fill their hours.. And when you give them a task that you think is going to take them 3 days and they come back to you 4 hours later and they're like, "Oh, I'm done. What do you want me to do now?" Which happened to me. You have to delegate something else. And now you're practicing it. You can't practice without having that resource there to delegate to. Next takeaway is there's a progression. You're going to give a single thing and then you're going to iterate on that thing. Like, you're going to give them this small task and then you're going to add on to it and you're going to add on to it and you're going to add on to it. It would be nice if you had a full SOP done, but you don't, and I don't, and that's really hard. So instead of making a full standard operating procedure or handbook, start with that small thing and then improve upon it and improve upon it and improve upon it. The last thing is delegate a role with an outcome. You're gonna offer them to be in charge of a whole thing, and you're gonna outline what is the outcome that we want from this and let them do it how they want. The key here is do not take work back and fix it on your own. When you do that, you create future problems. Delegating is a skill. You can get better at it. If you don't get better at it, the alternative is you stay stuck. And not delegating is what I see that keeps businesses from going from where they are to the next level, from going from 6 figures to 7 figures. If you want to grow like that, you have to get better at delegating things. You want to hire your first virtual assistant in the Philippines? OnlineJobs.ph is where you're going to hire them. If you have questions about it, check out OFSGuide.com where I'll answer the top 9 questions that most people have about taxes and time zones and how to find someone good and can you trust them. All these questions answered in a 4-minute read. OFSGuide.com.