Question of Delegation

After sending out last week the reasons why we don’t delegate our social media content, I received several emails asking what is good to delegate.

We all have different needs so it’s hard to say what can be delegated. But for me, I follow this set of rules. I will delegate if:

→ it’s more of a back-office function
→ it’s not related to the business or work
→ my rate is significantly higher than that of the service provider
→ there is absolutely no pleasure in doing the task.

There are tasks that meet all those criteria or just meet a couple. For example, I delegated (and still delegate)

→ Designing my book: I could do that but my rate was 5 times higher than the book designer I found to do the work.
→ Accounting and bookkeeping: There’s minor reconciliation and invoicing (mostly automated) I have to do but the rest (Business Activity Statements etc for the tax department) is done by someone else.
→ Grocery shopping: I don’t usually go out shopping (for anything). The food shopping is done exclusively by my husband 

And the rest of my business is either done by me or mainly automated (which I set up progressively).

As I mentioned before, there’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to what we delegate. A lot of times, it’s purely practical (a result of lacking the requisite skills), or time-saving (as experts are faster at achieving results), or simply emotional (it’s insanely tedious and I just don’t want to do it!)

At the same time, when we bootstrap our business at the beginning, there is really no reason to delegate anything because the aim is to increase revenue and reduce costs before extending operational costs.

So tell me, what are you thinking of delegating now after reading this?