MBA2019 The 80% Delegation Rule That Will Change Your Life

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. Daily Business truths given to you every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn the 80% delegation rule that will change your life. Seriously, this is a concept that I learned from a friend, Carl Taylor, who is an outsourcing and automation expert. Carl runs automationagency.com and I'm going to share with you a chat that I had with him that totally changed my life. He shared with me his 80% delegation rule that allowed me to see outsourcing in a totally different light. It allowed me to offload a lot of the things that were holding me back from having a better life and having a better business. And I want to share it with you today as well as the first steps of implementing this rule in your own business, in your own life. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

We've all been there. You hold onto a coupon hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money, like by switching to Geico.

Not.

You could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. The first thing I want to establish in today's episode is something that I talk about a lot on this podcast, and that's your time is more valuable than anything else in this world. We only have a limited time on Earth. As much as we don't want to think about it, that minute that just passed is gone forever and we can't get it back. So knowing that, you gotta be really, really careful about how you spend your time. It's a limited resource. So if you're spending your time doing admin work, busy work, work that doesn't really bring in revenue or value to your business, you're unable to do the things that actually move the needle in the business, actually bring in the big bucks that also allows you to enjoy your life. You have those limited hours in the day, you gotta use them wisely. And the only way you can leverage time is. Is to buy time. And the way you buy time is you delegate. You find somebody on your team, or you find somebody that is not on your team yet and hire them and get them to do the tasks that are taking up most of your time. Now, I know that for a lot of people that have not done this already, that haven't made hires or delegated their duties or tasks to somebody else, it could be intimidating because one, you're not really sure how this is done. How do I train them, how to make sure that the job is done at a high level of quality? How do I afford it? Maybe I just can't afford it right now. And you think hiring somebody is going to be really expensive. We're going to address all these concerns in today's episode. So let's start first with what is the 80% delegation rule? A few years back, I was speaking to Carl. We both were at a marketing conference together, and I told him that I started to outsource some of our tasks and some of my duties. And it was really frustrating because as much as I was training people, I was resisting giving them full autonomy and full ownership over the work. Because I would say to him, it's not being done at the same level of quality as if I did it or what I used to do. I needed to be at 100% quality. I needed to be at the level that I was doing it at. And he just stopped me in my tracks. He said, omar, you gotta stop thinking this way because you'll never free yourself of time. You'll never be able to delegate the tasks you need to delegate so you have more time for your business, your life, your hobbies. It's just not going to happen. And he explained to me, you have to come to peace with the idea that when you delegate anything in your business or your life, you got to be happy with 80% of the results. Say, for example, you spend three hours a week doing household chores, laundry, cleaning the house, doing the dishes, whatever it is, and you decide, I'm going to outsource this, I'm going to hire some cleaners that come and do this once a week for three hours. You might find that they don't do exactly as good of a job or they do the job differently than you. And the only question is, is it at 80%? If it's at 80%, these guys are good enough because you just freed up three hours every week where you can do so many other things. Time and opportunity costs are really expensive. Your own time, I mean, the value of it is super, super high. So if you can outsource the time consuming tasks for reasonable price and you are happy up to 80%, they're doing 80% of what you would do, that's a no brainer. You keep doing that. The same thing goes with your business. You might hire somebody to do your graphic design, or maintain your website, or schedule your meetings, or even clean up your inbox. You might not like exactly how they do it. They might answer questions differently. They might design things a little bit, not as, let's say, to your taste or liking, but if it's close enough, if it's 80% there, just be happy with it because you just bought yourself some more time. So the 80% rule is basically be happy with 80%. You'll never get 100%. In fact, when I said they're not going to do it as good as I will, when I was talking about outsourcing my tasks and he said, you're absolutely right, I was like, what? Carl's like, Yep, you are 100% right. They will not do the job exactly like you do it. That's impossible. They're not you. But if they do it 80% or more, that's how you get things done. Because think about it. Let's say you take sales calls and you do five sales calls a day and you decide to outsource it. And this new person can't do five sales calls a day. They're not as efficient, they do four. But you are able now to be freed up to not do the sales calls, bring in more revenue so you can hire more salespeople. And now you hire three people because your time is expensive and now you're doing 16 sales calls instead of five. We all have to look at the big picture now. What are the first steps of implementing this, of starting to outsource things? Well, I talked about this before, but your first task is to list down everything you do every day and then you're gonna highlight the most time consuming tasks, the things that suck as much time from your day. So like answering emails, answering customer support messages, maybe tinkering with the website, maybe it's social media, whatever it is, that is the most time consuming task. You need to get those off your plate as much as possible. And trust me, you can train anybody to do anything. Now that you've identified what you need to get off your plate and in what order, now it's time to start finding some help. Now you might think this is going to be expensive. I can't hire anybody. I don't have any kind of employee packaging or insurance. You don't need to worry about any of that. You can outsource, you can contract. In fact, Carl Taylor, my buddy who gave me this Advice, his website, automationagency.com specializes in this. If you need help with graphic design or websites or funnels or email automation or any of those types of tasks, he has services and plans as low as $425 a month. You can make an extra $425 a month to afford this. If you need other specialties or other types of professionals, outsourcing to countries like the Philippines or Vietnam or Sri Lanka or India are good options. One of my favorite sites to find great talent is onlinejobs Ph it's based in the Philippines. You can find engineers, you can find executive assistants, you can find customer support agents, you can find designers, you can find all kinds of people and you can get them started even part time for a few hundred dollars a month. Now my advice is start with one hire. Whether you go with an agency like automationagency.com or you go with a freelancer like on onlinejobs ph, start with your most heavy tasks that are taking all your time for many people it's just managing their social media as well as their emails they're getting or customer service requests. This is what keeps you glued to your computer or your phone. My recommendation is you're going to spend about a week training. You're a new hire. You're going to walk them through how you want things done. You're going to record these as videos so they can then watch them later on. And then the first task is not to do the task is to actually create. The playbook is to create what's called the sop, the standard Operating Procedure. It's a documentation in Google Docs, and they just basically create the handbook for their position. This is how you do all the tasks that they're doing. They're going to write it up for you so that they can just follow the playbook. And then of course, they can train other people to. If they start to do other tasks or you start growing your team or they leave and they hand it over to somebody else, this can be done. You just need to be okay with the fact that it's not going to be exactly the way you want it, but it's going to be close enough. 80%, we've all been there.

You hold onto a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now, you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to Geico. Here's the bottom line. You need to be okay with the fact that the work will get done, but not at the hundred percent level. Now, I'm not saying it's impossible to be 100%. I've had hires that do the job better than I did. But the point of the 80% rule is to say be okay with anything that's 80% or more. It doesn't have to be 100%. Your perfectionism is holding you back, is keeping you from growing your company, your team, and leveraging your resources to buy back your time. That wraps up today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to the 100 MBA show. If you want to get our episodes automatically, if you want to get access to our archived episodes, hit subscribe hit follow on your favorite podcast app. Do that right now so you don't miss a beat and you have access to over 2,000 episodes in our archives. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I work with a lot of coaches, a lot of trainers, a lot of course, creators that run really successful businesses, seven and eight figure businesses. And they have a outsourced team. They have a team and it's not huge.

Okay?

A lot of these creators run teams of three, four, five people. They keep things lean, they keep things tight, but at the same time they leverage other people's time to buy back their own time so that they can be able to live a little bit more stress free life and enjoy the business. The worst thing you can do as an entrepreneur is to burn yourself out and fall out of love with your business. Okay? It's very easy to start hating what you do when you grind yourself to 100 hours a week and you just keep pushing, pushing, pushing. There's limits. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care.

We've all been there. You hold on to a coupon, hoping to cash it in at the store, but then you forget about it and suddenly you've got a mountain of useless expired coupons.

Do you think this one's still good? Free milk.

Oh, mate, that expired in 1993.

Dang it.

Fortunately, there are better ways to save money. Like by switching to Geico, you could save about $900 on car insurance without ever touching a coupon.

Ooh, how about this one? Half off floppy disks.

Now you should try a bit of spring cleaning.

It feels good to save big. It feels good to geico.