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Last week I spoke about the two primary ways to grow your business, the first being freeing up your time and resources, and the second being finding the leverage points that you can work on that will make the biggest difference in your business, and how these two work hand in hand because you need to free up your time in order to work on the highest leverage tasks.

I also went into a bit more detail about identifying those leverage points and some of the impacts you can make.

Today I want to talk more about freeing up your time. How do you do this?

 

The first step is to identify what tasks you are doing on a daily basis. This requires some patience and some diligence to stick to the process.

In the book Traction by Gino Wickman, he talks about “Delegate and Elevate”. I love this concept. In the book, Gino states you need to be aware of your capacity, and the capacity of each of your team. Everyone only has 100 percent capacity. If you or your team members are operating at say 120 percent capacity, you’re actually holding the business back.

You need to find that 20% that you can let go of. Mostly this would be by delegating, but sometimes you could just stop doing it.

The idea with Delegate and Elevate is to draw up a grid with 4 quadrants. List the things that you love and are great at, the things you like and are good at, the things you don’t like but are good at, and the things you don’t like and are not good at.

Once you have these identified, you could go about handing off tasks to your team members, starting with the items you don’t like or are not good at.

As you delegate, you want to elevate your team members by training and empowering them to take these tasks off your plate.

Doing this periodically will help you focus on your highest-leverage tasks, and keep delegating more and more as your business grows.

Another really useful tool, which I find a little easier to work with, is a variation of an activity inventory review. Cameron Herold, founder of the COO Alliance and Second in Command Podcast, has a great example of this activity inventory worksheet.

The idea is to note down all the tasks that you do in your role in a typical day, week, or quarter.

For each task, you want to categorize it by your level of skill in this task. You want to rank your ability and skill for this task according to the following options, I C E, or U

That is to say, are you Incompetent, Competent, Excellent, or U for this being part of your Unique Ability.

Then you want to note the hourly value of this task in dollars (or whatever your currency is). For example, checking your emails might be worth $15-20 per hour, whereas closing new deals could be a $200 per hour value.

Once you have the rating by skill and the value per hour, what you want to then do is decide what to do with this task. You could decide to keep doing it, but for each task, you want to take a hard look at it and decide if you could Stop doing it, Delegate it, or Outsource it. S, D, or O.

Ok so once you’ve gone through and listed all the stuff you’re doing, whether you use the 4 quadrant EOS version, the Activity Inventory model, or even your own variation of this, what you want to do is identify all the items you want to delegate.

You can then go to one or more of your team and delegate these tasks, or you can use the task list to create a job spec that you can then outsource or hire a new team member to take on.

You can also use the list to be specific in training, setting expectations, and measuring on outcomes.

You’ll want to review this regularly, probably at least once every quarter, and then keep applying the process of delegating or outsourcing tasks so that you’re constantly working on your highest-leverage tasks.

Here’s an example of what the EOS Delegate and Elevate TM model looks like:

 

And here’s an example of what the Activity Inventory model looks like:

 

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Stephen Fourie
Post by Stephen Fourie
December 12, 2022
Results-driven COO turned Consultant & Investor | Scaling $500K-$3M revenue businesses to $10M+ | Expert in AI, tech, automation & growth strategy | Building a portfolio of companies through strategic acquisitions