5 Myths and Truths About Delegating Your Work

Taking things off your plate can be hard.

You want your work to be excellent, and you’ve probably been burned before by VA’s or employees who don’t even come close to meeting your standards.

So if you’re like a lot of business owners, you have a usual excuse for why you hold certain projects close to your vest.

Here are the five I see most commonly, and the truths about them. It’s just like they say: the truth will set you free.

Myth: “I’d love for someone to take things off my plate, but no one can do what needs to get done as well as I can.”

Truth: It’s not that you’re the only one who can do all of the important things you do everyday, it’s that you haven’t found the VA or OBM who can do it up to your standards yet.

Myth: “I don’t have time to train someone to take over all of these tasks, so I just do them myself.”

Truth: It feels like a huge upfront investment of time and energy taken away from other things to train someone, but if you don’t make that upfront investment, you’ll do many times that much work in just the near future alone.

Take two minutes to plot out how much time a task takes you each week, and how many weeks it would take to make up for training time. Chances are, it would pay off in just a few weeks.

Myth: “My clients expect me to do this work. If I delegate it, I’m deceiving them.”

Truth: There are some cases where this would be true, if you agreed to do something for a client yourself and outsourced it without their knowledge. But otherwise, this is an excuse that doesn’t hold up. Think of it this way: do you expect CEO’s of big companies to write their own blog posts? No one expects that you do either. Delegating is just part of playing a bigger game.

Myth: “I don’t want to delegate this because I want to be in control.”

Truth: It’s great that you have such high standards, but your business won’t be able to grow if you need to control everything. Trust that your team is trained well enough to get the job done up to your specifications, and then add your unique touches. That takes far less time and energy than doing the entire project yourself.

Myth: “I would delegate this, but they already have too much on their plates.”

Truth: If this is the case, it’s time to expand the team. The great thing about working with an Online Business Manager like me is that you never have to worry about the workload. We can always handle it, no matter how much you throw at us and it’s my job to figure that out.