THE LIFESTYLE ENTREPRENEUR

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The Delegate and Elevate Tool™

Delegation is an essential skill for anyone seeking a career that increases in value over time.

It’s not just for entrepreneurs, it’s for all career paths:

• An attorney needs to learn to properly leverage paralegals, newer attorneys, assistants, in order to rise through the ranks and become a functioning partner in her firm.

• A solopreneur needs to consistently delegate lower level tasks in order to spend more and more time on the work that creates the most value for their clients.

• A real estate agent needs to spend less time on the administrative work and spend more time working with new clients, if he wants to earn higher commissions each year.

The entrepreneurial world that I live in highlights how difficult delegation can be:

• There are 33.2 million small businesses in the US.

• 98% employee fewer than 100 employees, and 89% fewer than 20

• 86.3% of small business owners earn less than $100,000 per year, and the median income is $50,347

Flip these numbers upside down and you get the sobering reality - only 11% of business grow past 20 employees, and only 2% grow past 100.

As someone who’s spent my entire entrepreneurial career building companies from zero to the 100 employee range, and now advises leadership teams in this range - I can attest to how difficult it is to break through this phase.

While there are many factors that create a barrier for almost all companies to break through, access to capital being the top one sited, people issues are the primary cause.

Here’s what People Issues sounds like from most entrepreneurs:

• It’s impossible to find good people

• If you want something done the right way, do it yourself

• I’ll never find people who are as good as me

Have you heard that before? If you’re a founder, have you said it before?

I have.

All those issues are a symptom of a root issue - inability to delegate and elevate.

The Delegate and Elevate Tool

Created and trademarked by EOS founder Gino Wickman, this tool is a simple 2x2 matrix, most similar to the Eisenhower Matrix, of all the tools I’ve seen.

This simple tool is taught in the third session of EOS implementations with small businesses around the world - right at the time when the team has agreed that they have properly laid out their organizational structure (accountability chart), and are making a collective decision on how much capacity they want their teammates to have on the average.

When someone on the team inevitably is identified as not having the capacity to do the job, we introduce this tool.

Here’s how it works:

1. List everything you do as part of your role

2. Decide how much time it takes to do everything well

3. Decide how much time you will work in a week

4. Subtract available work hours from how much time it takes to do the job well

5. That gets you how much time needs to be delegated in order to consistently do your job well

Then we get into what do delegate:

1. Place each thing you do each week into a quadrant:

2. Bottom right - everything you don’t like and aren’t good at

3. Bottom left - everything you don’t like but are good at

4. Top-right - everything you like to do and are good at

5. Top-left - everything you love to do and are great at

From this point your job is to delegate stuff in the bottom two quadrants.

The bottom right is first - everything you hate doing and are bad at, you should delegate as fast as humanly possible.

Doing this stuff on a daily basis is not only wasting your time, it’s hurting your company because you’re bad at it. There are people in the world who are good at and like this work.

How can you delegate?

You can delegate in a number of ways:

1. Hand off to a person

2. Automate the task

3. Simplify the task

4. Eliminate the task

This is where work comes in. The problem is, most people don’t ever get to this point in understanding what they should delegate, and how they should delegate it.

Just going through the exercise once a quarter is a powerful way to drive planning in business and in life.

My history with delegating

I’ve successfully delegated in business from 0 to 100 employees. It’s gone really well at times, it’s also gone painfully wrong.

Going wrong usually looks like mixed results, frustration on the employer & employee’s side without clear knowledge how to improve things. This is the standard.

Going wrong in the worst way looks like having to terminate employees because they’re a bad core value fit, or are in the wrong seat.

I’ve made all those mistakes. Over time though, I’ve gotten significantly better at delegating every year I’ve been in business.

My most recent business - Wandertest Rapid Covid Testing at MSP Airport - successfully scaled from 0 to 25 employees in 6 months with massive revenue and profit growth - we made $5MM in revenues in our first year.

My role within that company went from owning all the seats on day 1, to sitting only in the visionary and marketing seats by the sixth month. How did I do this?

The delegation and elevation tool.

Along with a decade of trial and error building companies.

How I’m using it now

I teach this tool to all my clients - so I would say I’m working on developing mastery around the tool. Ask me in 2 years whether I’ve achieved mastery - I bet I’ll still say no.

In my solo coaching business I’m right at the phase of preparing to start delegating tasks to people.

This will be an iterative process of:

1. Laying out all my weekly activities in the tool

2. Identifying which processes need to be better established - e.g. my daily content creation process is currently being completely overhauled with the guidance of my coach, Semir.

3. Identifying which processes can be automated, or eliminated

4. Hiring my first VA in Q1 2024 and beginning the process of handing off processes.

The above process is continual - meaning by the time I’ve gotten through a quarter of working with my VA and delegating enough tasks to feel like we’re progressing and her time is being appropriately allocated, it will be time to review all my weekly tasks again and critically looking at everything I can do.

This cadence feels appropriate quarterly for me, and I believe that’s the right timeline for almost all people.

In the excellent book “The EOS Life” by Gino Wickman, he also claims that for visionaries running companies, delegating 1 task per quarter is a reasonable and realistic goal.

Because of that, the Delegation and Elevation tool is part of my personal and business quarterly planning process.

Which is going to be the subject of next week’s The Lifestyle Entrepreneur.

So stay tuned.

(Speaking of which - do you know someone who would like to read this content? Please forward it to them, thank you so much :)

And in the meantime, if you have some downtime over the next week, i’d recommend taking a first pass at the Delegation & Elevation Tool.

I hope you and your family have the most wonderful holiday season, and I wish you blessings in 2024.

I’ll talk to you next week,

Mike

Thanks for reading The Lifestyle Entrepreneur

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Whenever you’re ready, here’s how I can help you:

I’m a Professional EOS® Implementer. That means I’m a teacher, coach, and facilitator who works with entrepreneurial leadership teams (typically growth oriented business leaders with 10-250 employees) to develop three things:

• Vision - getting teams 100% on the same page with where the company is going and how to get there

• Traction - Applying discipline and accountability to achieve that vision

• Healthy - Creating healthy, functional, cohesive leadership teams

If you or a business owner you know would like to hear more about EOS®,

Please click here for to schedule a free intro meeting.