How To Delegate and Outsource Your Business

If you are looking to make your business an asset, delegation and outsourcing is one of the most crucial pieces that you get to master as you come through your business creation career. Delegation and outsourcing is something that, if you are not good at it, you will probably never have a great systematized business. When you are delegating and outsourcing any particular project to an employee, to a contractor, or to anyone, here are steps for you to be able to get them successfully aligned with your project.

First, decide exactly what you want to accomplish. Get a clear idea in your mind what you want the result to look like. Oddly enough, most people do not have a clear vision of what the success of the project or task is. Because of this, their communication is vague, their language is ‘fluffy,’ and everyone gets frustrated. Decide what the ideal outcome of the project or task actually looks like. You have an image in your mind about what this thing is and what you want to accomplish. But you now need to bring other people in to understanding exactly what this thing looks like, feels like, smells like, how wonderful it is, and just as many tactical descriptors that you can find for this particular project or this particular outcome. Be descriptive.

Secondly, convince yourself and others why the project is important. If you cannot justify the purpose of the project to yourself, you cannot justify it to anybody else.

I have seen business owners outsource and delegate tasks they do not want to do, that are not necessarily worthy of somebody else doing either. Do not delegate things that you feel are just not good work. If you feel something is not important or worthy, you will not be able to convince someone else why it is important to do it and have them do it well.

A business owner must sell why that work is important to the business, and why the person who gets to do it, gets to do a great job at it. When you begin to reclassify and reengage the work that needs to be done in your business and honor it appropriately, amazing things begin to happen, and amazing people begin to surface to do the work.

Thirdly, imagine what the best and worst things are that can happen in your business. For the worst thing, you want to scare yourself. You want to imagine the worst-case scenarios that can happen if you fall down on the job and do not do a good job getting the project done appropriately. For the best, imagine all the wonderful things that will happen in your business and world if the delegation of this task were successful.

Spend time explaining to the person who will do this work for you, how important it is for them to get it done right and what can happen if it goes really well. Tell them what will happen if it goes really badly, and how their actions affect your bottom line and your business. If you explain why they should care, they have a better chance of caring about your business and doing an excellent job.

Every time I have done this, I have had better responses from my contractors. Whether they have been an internal employee or contractors, I bring them into my vision of what I want to get done. It creates for less unnecessary conversation, and usually the project bids come in cheaper because they have a clear understanding of what it is I want. If you want to cost yourself less on your bid specs, be incredibly clear as to exactly what you want and bring the other person into this vision so that they can see themselves as a part of your success. And describing what the best and worst case scenarios are in each case helps get that done.
Finally, you want to discuss about 5 to 8 facts that need to be true about the project when it is done, so that they understand what makes you happy. Many times contractors will fail us because they began doing something and we needed something completely different. It is part of our responsibility in providing a great project scope to make sure that we give the contractor, or the person being delegated to, lots of guidance on exactly how to make us happy.

Need more help understanding outsourcing and delegating efficiently? We have a free workbook available to show people how to communicate effectively with employees and contractors. It goes into more detail, explaining how to create great project scopes for the people that you are delegating to. It will also help you get a better and clearer idea of what it is you want to accomplish when you undertake any kind of project.