Every action starts with a thought.
And once upon a time, your Business started as a thought, and if you were the instigator of that thought it is likely your journey from start to here today has been somewhat different to the idea you originally had of how that journey would unfold.
Put another way, the day to day reality of business life can be different to the dream.
The entrepreneurial journey has so many attractive connotations to it, but it also comes with a heavy toll. No-one sets out on the journey thinking they want to spend their days doing admin, paperwork, batting off unwanted emails, collecting taxes on behalf of HMRC, like some form of contractor, trying to handle staff problems or having to worry about whether or not every rule and regulation is being met.
The entrepreneur wants to create, to build, to sell, to negotiate, to innovate and to have fun.
In my experience, things slip over time, and as the business develops it is all too common for the hassles to take hold and for the fun to stop, and that affects the time left for those things that really make a difference, such as creating and selling, marketing and innovating.
So, the normal response to this is “delegate”!
That, though, has its own set of problems and challenges. Delegation is another concept which is great in principle, but for some it can seem as if the work to delegate (i.e. manage) can be just as hard as doing it yourself.
What I find is there is often another way altogether, depending on where the business is, what the goals and objectives are, and that is to offload.
What’s the difference between delegation and offloading?
I suggest it is a question of the degree to which you work with someone. If you delegate this normally implies handing down to someone else, and that process requires oversight and management. Hence, you can create just as much work for yourself in these cases. Or you still have to do the work to some extent.
Offloading is where you give someone direction and say “I need this done” or “I need this fixed” and then you let them do it.
It’s a question of what it is you want.
If you want someone to come into your business and you say to them “organise for me to be free of the hassles” and then you allow them (supposing they know how) to get on with it, that is – arguably – not delegation, but full-scale offloading.
So, your task then is to identify what it is you want to happen and then find the best person you can to work with to meet the objective. And if that person is any good, it should be cost free, indeed it should make the business money.
