Did you start your business to keep track of the bookkeeping? Or to become a marketing expert? Or write all the copy? Or maybe you looked forward to taking care of the mail and holding meetings?
Probably not.
If I had to guess, I’d say that you started your business because you were passionate about providing a product or service that you love.
But then you discovered that running a business is so much more than just fulfilling the services you offer. And now you may be feeling stuck. You’d like to do more, serve more, make a bigger impact but you feel like you’re on a hamster wheel running faster and faster without getting anywhere.
In this episode, you’ll get:
Why delegation doesn’t work
How changing your perspective to collaboration gives you better results
4 steps to identifying collaboration opportunities in your business
Bonus: A copy of the exact Google spreadsheet I use for the exercise we’ll go through together on the podcast
Why grading your activity is critical to collaboration
The outsourcing option that gets you the biggest ROI
And, you’ll hear how to determine what holding on to these tasks is costing you and how you can change it.
When you grade your activities, here are the ratings you’ll use:
N - NOVICE. These are tasks you don’t do well at all. You’d need to research HOW to do this work. It causes you stress, you feel incompetent, it causes stress and conflict. The learning curve is likely steep. You either avoid these or you judge these purely not worth your time.
S - SKILLED. You can get the task done, you’re proficient especially in a pinch, evaluate yourself as adequate. Others could do this task much better and with less effort. These feel repetitive, monotonous. Overall, feels draining and blocks your growth and that of your business.
E - EXCELS. You have great skill at this. Your team, even your business, counts on you to deliver in this area. You perform these tasks better than most others. Yet, it lacks spark or energy for you. While checking the box has some satisfaction, working in this area is not very rewarding to you and doesn’t support your growth. You may even feel trapped or captive to these tasks, keeping you from doing the fun stuff.
G - GIFTED. Of all of the items on your checklist, these are your favs. If we had heart emojis on the tracker, they’d earn the love. You do these exceedingly well and love to do them. These are the tasks that fuel your passion, accelerate your impact and you feel in your flow or in the Zone. Time flies by when you are doing these. In fact, you love this work so much, you’d do it even without pay. Most importantly, you are fascinated by this and always are striving to grow and improve in this area.
is offset by a moment that you're not doing your work and gifted. And this is where you can really grow the business and more importantly Grow Your satisfaction and being in business. Either multipliers it's been steeper. Welcome back to Episode 77. For love team. This is the podcast where leaders simplify teamwork, helping you surround yourself with teammates doing the work, they love simplifying your business processes so that you can serve more focused on the work that you love. Last time in Episode 76, we talked about striking the word delegation from our leadership dictionary, and instead focusing on collaboration in building a business and team that we love. And we tackled that dreaded D word delegation. And in the context of work you love here's my somewhat irreverent definition of delegation. These are tasks that you're not good performing, you procrastinate about and you dread doing either provide limited instructions and information or you end up micromanaging each little step in the process, we seek and find a person that we can persuade or command to take this on, who may or may not be well suited for this task, so that you can free yourself from the nitty gritty associated with the effort, I believe the delegation and management or grind, it's reminiscent of a factory assembly line style approach to business building, you won't love it, and the people you attract, you will keep you from your best. So instead, think about collaboration, which is a loose grouping of independently talented people or businesses all aligned towards a common goal, aka your special assignment, which ultimately is your desired impact with your business. So today, let's talk about and start to identify your opportunities for collaboration within your business. Now, this approach is going to be especially useful for founders who are in startup mode, there may not even be ready for a team yet, and businesses who are in the early stages of team building. And before we begin, I'd like to offer you a copy of the handy Google Spreadsheet tracker that I use for this exercise. And you can get that right now by texting me at 1-754-800-9461. That's 1-754-800-9461 not repeat this number at the end of the podcast. As we go through the process, you may decide that this, this tracker spreadsheet could really be a big help to you getting started. So this process begins innocently enough with step one inventory. And so for the next week or two, I'd like to invite you to keep an inventory of how you use your business time. So in this process, you're going to record different activities that you do in your business day, and a rough estimate of the time that you spend on each one of these tasks. And by the way, the more granular you do this, the better. So I'm gonna give you some examples here. Let's look at email. As we record our rough time periods per day that we spend an email you might decide to put buckets together that are like email, scheduling, email, problem solving emails to clients replies to teams and contractors. How about meetings, you might want to break it out into meetings with clients meetings with prospective clients, meetings with contractors and team members. Maybe you look at marketing activities, like creating and posting content in your Facebook group moderating or connecting with members in your Facebook group, creating social media content engaging on social media, how about creating email newsletters? Well, you get the idea. Also, don't forget about sales, like responding to text or dmws. outreach to prospects. Maybe there are discovery calls, or follow ups proposals enrollment. And don't forget your direct fulfillment services like coaching clients or group coaching or consulting anything that's something you do one or more times per month, capture the activity and the approximate time commitment per week. Step two is now to evaluate. And if you decide you want to grab my Google Spreadsheet tracker, now I have a special bonus for you a complimentary one to one session to do this evaluation together for the tracker and the one to one evaluation session, text me at 1-754-800-9461. That's 1-754-800-9461 Can you tell I really love to connect, I'd love to help you through this process. And so at this point, you probably have quite a list of activities that you're involved in on a regular basis and an estimate of the time devoted to each per week. Now here comes the fun part. We're going to grade these activities and place them into one of four categories or buckets. On my spreadsheet, I've created a separate column for each category. This is going to give us a real great visual aid as we begin to do this work together. So the first category is in for novice. These are tasks that you Don't do well at all you need to research how to do this work. Think of the DUI entrepreneurs we talked about in a previous episode, these cause you stress you feeling competent causes conflict learning curves, probably little steep. And by default, we either try to avoid these or you judge. Ultimately, these aren't worth your time. second category is skilled, you can get the task done, and you're proficient, especially in a pinch, you may even evaluate yourself as adequate, but others can do this task much better. And with lots less effort, sometimes these activities feel repetitive or monotonous. Overall, I'd say that these tasks feel draining to you blocks your growth, and potentially that of your business. The third category is excels at this is an area where you have great skill your team, even your business counseling you to deliver in this area, you perform these tasks better than most others, you probably can even teach how to do this these tasks. Yet, there's something off with these tasks, they lack spark or energy for you. And while checking the box and getting them done gives you some level of satisfaction. Ultimately, working in this area is not very rewarding to you, it doesn't support your growth, you may even feel trapped or captive to these tasks, keeping you from doing the fun stuff. Finally, gee, the fun stuff I called gifted. And if all the items on your checklist, these are your faves, if I had heart emojis on the tracker, they'd earned the love you do these exceedingly well, and you love to do them, they fuel your passion, accelerate your impact, these would be in your flow in your zone, your zone of genius. There's lots of terms you've heard about this. But ultimately, time flies by when you're doing them. In fact, you love them so much even consider doing this without pay. Most importantly, you're fascinated by these activities, and always striving to grow and improve in this area. So the four categories, again, novice skilled, excels and gifted and take this as almost like climbing a ladder, you're going to your higher and highest use of your time with each one of these categories. And so the way I do these are really two different ways. I think either one is really effective, you can go through each action in turn, or one of the things I've done is I'd look at each bucket one at a time, starting with novice and I work my way up and I rate all the items that are novice and I rate all the things that are skilled, then I rate all the things that are excelled and I rate all the things that are gifted. And again, the key difference between excels and gifted, they're pretty much the same things from a proficiency perspective, or skill perspective or ability perspective, the differences, the passion and the juice, one fuels your passion, the other one can drain and make you feel captive. So gifted is really the area where you feel like you're in the zone, and excels are things you do really, really well. But hey, they don't really make you all that excited to come to work the next day. So you rate all these items, either one at a time or by the buckets. And then after you've completed all of them. Take a look again at the distribution of all of these and reread the descriptions. By the way, I'll put all these descriptions in the show notes so that you have the definitions right at hand and make sure that your intuition agrees with your ratings. This is an important step that you can't rush. So step three, decide. Now normally when people begin to think about collaboration, they gravitate to the items that novice and skilled, they're obvious opportunities for collaboration. And yes, we need to find a better home for them and not be performed by you. yet. Here's the irony. here's the here's the thing that's really impressive to me, as I've done this multiple times my own business, the biggest ROI return on your investment for you personally, for collaboration comes from the items you've listed as excels. Why is that? Well, these are big consequential items in your business life, yet you lack the passion and drive to make them happen. And ultimately, these are the barrier between you and the items in the gifted category, which is your jam, which is your juice, which are also consequential to you but every moment that you spend in excels is offset by a moment that you're not doing your work and gifted and this is where you can really grow the business and more importantly Grow Your satisfaction of being in business. It's the ultimate Win win. Here's the thing that a lot of people are reluctant to put excels task on the table for evaluation for collaboration. But here's the good news. There are hundreds of people in businesses that love those Excel task and are gifted in them. And because this is their gifting, they'll be much more effective and much more efficient and delivering those items than you will ever be and frankly are goal in business and I do this exercise again, maybe every four to six months, because I'm continuing to level up as a leader. And I'm sure you're doing the same in your business. But everything that's not in your gifting is a candidate for future collaboration. And our responsibilities as leaders and founders is to inspect a higher and higher percentage of our time as we grow in our gifting. And here's the real kicker, we should be encouraging our team members, our collaborators to do the same by placing them in responsibilities, where they're spending a greater percentage of their time in their gifting. This is the multiplier effect of love 14. And this is the key to building a team that you love. Now, step four, this is where a lot of processes and this kind of evaluation of inventory, and then evaluating and then deciding, but there's a fourth step, and this is something I only do when I'm is really only possible through a coaching conversation. And again, this is why I'm offering the one to one because this is like the extra special sauce to the recipe. And I call this count cost. And this is a step in a process that's unique to my for love of team method, where we will work together through a process to help you understand the opportunity cost of you continuing to do these non gifted tasks versus working with a potential collaborator. And this is a step by step review of your weekly commitments, your desired work life balance, and then a tactical review of each of these items by category. And looking at the cost benefit opportunity for each of these buckets. It's a process, it's an evaluation tool. But more importantly, it's a fresh set of eyes and perspective, asking provocative questions, adjusting the spreadsheet in real time with you to help you make an informed and not just an intuitive decision. I believe this is a directionally sound and a very high level review of your opportunities. And for my listeners to you, you're a dedicated listener to this podcast, I'm offering to take you through all four steps for free. And this is exactly the pre work assignment, I give everyone attending one of our four level team retreats, I'm doing this for free, in part because I really want to help people get past this chicken or egg dilemma in terms of a no I need a team. But I'm not quite sure how I'm going to get started. And there's so many misbeliefs there's so many mistaken beliefs that keep us from taking this first initial step. So I'm passionate about helping you get past that. And if I can be of service to you and get you to that point and you run with it and you move forward in your business, I feel so rewarded by that. And yet, if you also are interested in going deeper at a retreat, this is where we'll run you through several more processes just like this so that you leave the retreat equipped and confident with a start a roadmap to building a team that you love. I'm excited to offer this, I can't wait to hop on a call with you and help you through these four steps. Again, in this process of building collaboration, we're going to inventory evaluate the side and count the cost to help you build a business you love supported by a team that you love. What could be better than that. So once more if you'd like to see the tracking spreadsheet and to book a complimentary evaluation after completing that spreadsheet, that number again, my text number is 1-754-800-9461 that's my personal text number. No bots of autoresponders just me 1-754-800-9461 This is a limited time offer. There's only so many of these I can do. But I'd love to help you. And finally remember my friends leader simplify teamwork, multiplying your impact, income margin and freedom and business be blessed. I'll catch you on the next episode.