👨‍🎓 SIBG Pt. 2.3 - The three psychological pillars of delegation and outsourcing

Trainings >> Stages and Ingredients of Business Growth >> 2.3 The three psychological pillars of delegation and outsourcing`

There's a pernicious - but very popular - notion that in order for your business to grow and thrive, you need to constantly optimise and improve the self, and become ever more efficient and productive.

It's called hustle culture, and it gives us all the wrong instructions:

Sleep less, but better!

Useanti-stress wearable devices!

Take supplements to improve your gut health and brain power!

Hustle, grind, crush it, sleep when you're dead!

Sacrifice a decade, and retire on passive income!

More more more! Faster better stronger!

Forgive me while I stop and smell the flowers, but:

You people are doing it wrong.

Supplements or improving sleep and so on aren't necessarily bad, but consider the following:

I don't care how fast you can screw in a lightbulb, because:

Unless you learn to do it with your feet, you're limited to - counts fingers - about 2 lightbulbs at any one time.

(Unless you get a third arm like Zaphod Beeblebrox did in the Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but I digress.)

Point is:

There's a hard limit to how much you can personally do. Working harder, more efficiently, can only get to the limit of your capabilities, and that's a hard limit.

So if you want your business to scale up, you'll reach a point where you'll either need a clone, or...

You need to outsource and delegate.

So in today's section of the SIBG mini-training:

The three fundamental principles you need in order to delegate and scale up your business

1. Your Zone of Genius
2. Your Effective Hourly Rate
3. Urgent things vs important things

Before we dive into how to make these things works for you, be aware that scaling a business comes down to adding leverage to an asset, so that the asset produces more results.

Example: your sales page is an asset. If you buy Google ads and drive traffic, you add leverage to it, and the increased results are "more sales."

Where it comes to outsourcing and delegating, the asset is you and your time, and we're looking to leverage the limited time you have in each day.

For that, you want to:

1. Always maximise the time you spend in your Zone of Genius

Coined by Gay Hendrix in The Big Leap, the Zone of Genius refers to those activities that nobody could do quite the way you do it.

It's the things that you just couldn't outsource, because there's no way to train someone to do it like you.

How could you train anyone on them? These are the things that set you apart, it's the things that are uniquely yours... you can't hire for that.

So the more you fire yourself from activities that are not in your ZOG, the more you are able to work on those things that are, and those are the ones that bring the biggest results.

There's four zones, in Hendrix' model:

1. Zone of incompetence

If you suck at it, don't do it. Otherwise, you're wasting time for no good reason.

2. Zone of competence

Maybe you're capable of doing taxes, but you're not great at it. So, hire someone to do your taxes for you.

3. Zone of excellence

Maybe you're good at interviewing job candidates - but so is Jane over there. Oh and also: did you write that proposal yet? It's got to be you - there's no one who writes proposals the way you do it. So in this example: Don't interview job candidates.

4. Zone of Genius

Go ahead, I dare you: Try and find someone who can do your work, and who can excel above and beyond your level of skill and expertise.

Your job: Do only that last type of work, and outsource whatever else you can.

2. Your Effective Hourly Rate

A concept I learned from James Schramko, your EHR is a simple yet powerful tool to help you decide which projects, tasks and activities should require your time, and which absolutely should not.

You calculate your EHR by dividing your revenue over the last quarter, or year, by the total number of hours you've spent working on or in your business.

All the hours, whatever the activity or the returns they got you.

Maybe you earned $10.000, and you worked 100 hours, then your effective hourly rate is $100:

$10,000/100hrs = $100 EHR.

With that knowledge, you now have a very nice decision razor:

Anything that someone else can do for less than $100 is something you absolutely should not do, if there's any way you can avoid it.

Because if you spend an hour fixing a printer, and your next-door neighbour kid would have done it for $15...

Then you might think you saved yourself $15, but you didn't.

Instead, you've cost your business anything from $15 up to $100, by not spending that hour on an activity that earns you money.

3. Urgent vs Important

Well-known in hustle-bro circles, the distinction between urgent and important things is nevertheless a very useful razor.

Important things make a big difference, but they tend to be large, or complex, or lengthy, and therefore they often get put off for later.

Building a new website, creating a flagship product or service, starting a podcast, opening new markets...

These are all important things that really make a difference.

But every day, there's eleventy thousand urgent things that scream for your attention.

And you can easily spend your every day doing nothing but getting the urgent things checked off.

If that's how your days go, you might want to stop, and think about this particular part of SIBG, and whether or not your deploying the asset called 'you' to its fullest capacity.

Because while you're urgently writing and scheduling social media posts or fixing that optin form on your site, your new channel partner is waiting for you to finish that brochure, so that they can finally start pitching you to their high-value network.

Summing it up

In order to efficiently outsource, hire or delegate, remember these principles:

1: Seek to maximise the time you spend in your Zone of Genius

2: Avoid any activities that are below your Effective Hourly Rate

3: Prioritise activities that are both urgent, and important, and strive to get rid of everything else.

Once you have your systems, metrics and delegation in place, you get to go to where the big bucks are:

👨‍🎓 SIBG Pt. 3.0 - The Scale Up Stage