How do you Know What to Delegate and When? – DSP 164

The eternal small business challenge. You can’t be everywhere at once, but how do you decide what to delegate and to whom? Unfortunately, there’s not an easy solution, but there are some philosophies behind how you run your business and operate that may be helpful to review.

If you’re reaching this wall and you’re not sure what to do, think about how your work is laid out and what is required of you. Some things are naturally going to be more repetitive and have more built in redundancy. That’s a good place to start looking for delegating responsibility, but it doesn’t have to end there. It all just takes time.

Graham and Ashkahn get into the Float On way and how it’s come about that they’re the owners, but don’t run the shop and are no longer making the major decisions in running it as a business. Worth a listen even if you’ve never even seen a float center before.

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Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Alright hello everybody.

Ashkahn: Hey there.

Graham: It’s Ashkhan over there.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: And today’s question is.

Ashkahn: We don’t know who you are.

Graham: I thought you were gonna introduce me I sort of give an alley-oop and you kind of wandered off the court you know.

Ashkahn: I was giving both of them to you.

Graham: That’s not how an alley-oop works. I’m Graham. I can see it in the studio I’m gesturing at him madly to try and fill in my name and he’s just scratching his back so.

Okay today’s question is: “We are forever battling what tasks to delegate to our employees, and what should be our duties as an owner.” I hear you on that one. “Obviously basic cleaning, and booking tasks are given to our employee, but I find myself stuck with the brunt of emails, PR, advertising et cetera.

We are very close to gaining an additional employee, but I’m wondering what’s a healthy amount of expectation for your employees? What do you take on as owners, and what do you give out to your staff?”

Ashkahn: Yes, this I mean, so it’s big question every business has to ask.

Graham: Yeah there’s no like answer there’s not a guide book out there of a business owner like here is what thou shall do, and here is what thou staff shall do thine staff.

Ashkahn: You know there are probably some kind of realities of running a float center that you should at least consider with all of this. Not every task is as easy as other things as you know right. Training people up to run the transitions, clean the tanks, check people in, book people out that sort of stuff is obvious because it’s happening day in and day out.

Graham: It has to happen.

Ashkahn: It has to happen yeah.

Graham: It’s like the back bone of your business.

Ashkahn: But also it doesn’t take that long to train someone on how to do that. Getting someone to the point where you feel you would actually feel comfortable having them like run the advertising campaign that you wanted to do or something. That’s a lot longer, and it takes more trust. You probably need a little bit more experience in marketing know how and kind of put more thought into that general world then than just two days of training is gonna teach you.

So I think one thing we just need to be a little bit realistic about is the fact that we are running businesses where we have staff that are typically making a little bit above minimum wage, a lot of float centers have employees who are in college, or just out of college. We are not necessarily hiring a full staff of people who are making this a career to work in your float center. You gotta recognize the fact that people might only be around for like a year before they decide to go sail on a boat like somewhere or do something else, or go to grad school, or whatever it is that they are doing with in the next step of their life.

I think it’s important to realize that spending a ton of time training just anybody or putting a lot of responsibility into just any employee’s court needs to come with the recognition that you are probably hoping this person stays around a little bit, and not just there for six months, or eight months before they jump off to the next thing in their life. So you know this is where having some kind of different levels of employee might come in handy like you might just recognize that you have some employees that really that’s all you are expecting out of them. You just want them to book, make appointments, clean the rooms, hang out with customers, figure that stuff out, and then it’s okay if they happen to leave eight months later with short notice. Your business isn’t gonna fall apart because so many very important critical things were relying on them.

Graham: Yeah I almost say like I think the sane thing to do is to plan on having your staff just run the tanks, and scheduling, and standard maintenance, and everything that goes in to keeping your center operational.

If it happens that one of your staff members is a PR expert, and that’s what they did for three years, and now they happen to be working your float center cuz they love float tanks. For sure take advantage of that expertise you gained along with your staff member, but whenever, and we tried to do this all the time we still do it, we just found some okay systems to make it work, but we try to find people who are multi-talented, and who do have a lot of skills, and have thing they can bring to Float On besides just being able to talk to customers.

Functionally taking advantage of that has caused us a lot of problems. I really wish that Float On can almost just be run completely internally even for things like getting out press releases, and kind of higher level marketing stuff. The truth is I think it’s almost unfair to require that of your staff when the rest of running a center can be so demanding just in itself.

Ashkahn: You know there is some middle ground I think between these things. There is some space between you doing all of these kind of higher level marketing things, and you putting it entirely onto someone who is one of your employees.

Like a lot of times what we do with someone will work with us on something we’ll be like hey we’re gonna write this thing why don’t you write the first draft, and then we’ll do like an editing pass, and then we’ll kind of explain why we edited in certain ways. And that both is part of a kind of longer term training process, and you know it does save you some work. You didn’t have to sit there, and kind of like gruel through the first draft of something to get the skeletal structure of what you want. So there is that kind of middle ground where you are both saving some leg work on your own, but you are still having oversight, and you are still making sure that it gets released in the quality that you’d like it to do, and you are getting someone trained in the process.

Graham: And another good way to think about it I guess is almost just like using a smaller example. So if one of your customers backs a chair into one of your walls, and punches a big hole in it right. Who is going to fix that? Is it you as the owner, or is it a staff member who you trust for doing repairs or is it a maintenance person you actually call in from an outside source?

And it’s kind of the same for marketing right? Are you gonna be in charge of marketing? Do you want your staff to pick it up because you want it to be so built in to what you are doing on a daily, or monthly basis that it’s really important that you have it all in house? Or is it something that even as you’re delegating you are delegating out to marketing professionals, and the people in your shop are just running the shop, you have a marketing agency that when you need help with marketing jumps in and does a lot of that.

Ashkahn: One thing I think that helps with this, or at least helped us was sit down, and actually just try to break down what is involved in running your float center.

So you can ignore the super routine daily stuff of cleaning, and booking, and all that stuff, but actually be like “okay well I need someone to update my website. I need someone to do advertising. I need someone to do social media”, and go through, even if all these are probably you right now like actually breaking down what you are doing into chunks is a really easy way to have it all in front of you, and be like hey you know I actually think it would be pretty easy to get staff trained up to do these certain things.

Like running payroll. That’s probably something that would only really take like a few hours to train someone up on doing, and then it becomes a routine thing that’s happening every two weeks.

Graham: Yeah if you have a payroll system you are going through not like doing a full in house payroll-

Ashkahn: Doing your own in house payroll is not what I’m talking about, but yeah there are probably a decent handful of kind of administrative slightly more repetitive tasks like that would be on the easier side of turning over to someone else.

And there’s things like I think marketing like higher level marketing like campaign planning which I think is probably some of the hardest stuff to turn over because it just requires like the fact that you maybe done years of research into marketing, and you are thinking about kind of like larger scale, more abstract ideas, in terms of what you want to get accomplished. And the things like that that’s when it’s good to have brainstorming sessions, and involve other people in the process, and kind of slowly start tipping that scale less on you, and more into other people.

Graham: Yeah, and it’s interesting because there is no, there is no assurance anyway. There is no assurance that you are gonna do a good job of marketing. Like certainly we found that out, we’re not experts in everything.

Ashkahn: But we at least feel better about what we’re doing because it’s your idea.

Graham: And same thing like even if your staff has a lot of experience doing something else there is no guarantee they are gonna do a good job with you. You are like just using the marketing example sending out press releases even if that’s what they did for a living they still probably did that for a living, and spent a good amount of time on it for a healthy wage. You know maybe they don’t even have the same motivation to do it for you, or maybe it was years ago, and they haven’t been in the industry for 10 years. And things have changed so much that although they are helpful it’s not as much as you would hope.

And if you hire contractors, or consultants, or an outside agency, I heard tons of stories of people messing up the marketing and not getting any articles or any real response from the marketing efforts that they are putting out there from agencies.

There is no right way to run your business, and there is no one right decision for how to delegate, and who’s doing these tasks as well. Any of them takes both vetting, and if it’s not you doing them some kind of monitoring to make sure that they are actually turning out, and maintaining their quality over time.

Even if you do get a nice system set up with a marketing agency, and it’s working for six months you might see the effects start to die off after that as they focus on other clients too. Any system that you are not in charge of has these extra components you also need to bake in for making sure that they carry on

Ashkahn: And one thing I think is worthwhile to be careful of is I think it’s really easy to hire people who want to work at a float center within a few weeks they are really gung-ho about doing all sorts of other stuff. You hire them, and like they tell you that they used to do PR stuff, and they are super into it, and they really want to do your PR things. I would just be careful, and put some brakes on when you are in situations like that, because it’s happened to us a lot where someone is really into something super early and we’re like okay cool let’s do it, and we get together with them.

Graham: We are easily excitable too.

Ashkahn: Yeah our tails start wagging. And you know we do start putting responsibilities on their shoulder, and getting things set up, and then pretty much within three, four weeks they realize that they are way busier than they thought and like running their actual normal day job in the shop is a lot more work than they thought. They don’t have the spare time during their shifts like they thought they would, and then two months later they are off doing another job or something. So it’s just really easy to get wrapped up in that, and people you hire are typically real excited to work at a float center and, they think it’s really cool, and they are really genuinely into the idea of contributing more.

Graham: I think floating just gives you crazy ideas like you give me energy-

Ashkahn: How excited most people are.

Graham: -in a float tank, where it’s like oh my God it’s an amazing thing.  

Ashkahn: So we pretty much have a rule set for us where we don’t even allow people to take on more responsibilities than the basic day to day shop operations until they been with us for a certain amount of time, and get kind of elevated to a higher wage in a certain position in our place. We very carefully make sure we are not getting ourselves into something too fast to watch it kind of just fall apart a few weeks later.

Graham: Yeah we wouldn’t even let them talk to customers for seven years. They have to just observe. Be learners-

Ashkahn: It was a float tank in the back we just locked them in there until they were ready.

Graham: So now I mean it’s really important, and delegation in general. Once you realize that you immediately come to the conclusion that it’s also not easy. So I assume that’s where this question is stemming from. A lot of this is probably just reiterating that especially if it’s your first time delegating out a lot of these things it will probably take some time. If you are trying to delegate out a new responsibility it might take anywhere from a couple of months to half a year or something to really feel like the person you are delegating to will do things up to the standards that you want and you are able to fully duck off. So it’s not something where you can just decide you are delegating and the next day you are not doing something either.

There’s almost this period where it’s more inefficient, because you have to be doing the work alongside someone to make sure they are trained up to whatever it is you are doing, and trying to delegate as well.

Ashkahn: And people are just really never gonna do things the way that you do. And like that’s-

Graham: For better or worse-

Ashkahn: That’s not like a bad thing, but it is hard to realize at first, because in your head everything you do is the right and appropriate way of doing it. So when someone does it a different way you are like “I don’t understand why are people just doing it how I would have done it.” And it’s because you just it make it up your way you know. And that’s, it’s tough, it’s a tough thing you have to deal with in the beginning. When someone gives you back something, and you are just like “oh I should have just done this myself.” That’s a very frustrating thing that you have to train yourself out of.

Graham: Yeah some people who are more organized than we are say you should fully document any process, and be able to run through it yourself before you start delegating that at least for the non high level professional type things. I think that’s probably true too. Documentation is definitely a great way to feel comfortable either with staff doing things, or bringing on external consultants or agencies to do it.

Ashkahn: Yeah. And it’s a good thing to do while you are training people. If you are like “okay I’m gonna try to get somebody else to do this” make it part of the process of you teaching to them what you are doing to just like document it as you go along. Then that’s the easiest way of like actually realizing everything there is that you need to tell to somebody else is like you are just in the moment where you are like “oh yeah I gotta tell you this too huh.” So just write that stuff down as you go through it. Even if it doesn’t work out with that person it’s gonna make the next person you try to go through that with a lot easier.

Graham: So it’s interesting because at this point I think we actually delegated just about everything except really really high level decisions at Float On.

Ashkahn: Yeah and it’s almost less work that we are doing now in the shop as much as like consultation. Like something comes up and we’re kind of there to have complex conversations about tricky decisions, and then the actual implementation of those decisions is much less kind of us doing the work involved.

Graham: And the ownership over the decisions too. I mean it really does feel we are consultants at this point. We come in we are able to have ideas bounced off of us. We give feedback back, and I end most of those conversations with Marshall our shop manager just saying “hey make your own decision based on this. We trust what you decide it’s ultimately kind of up to you, because you are in charge of the shop.”

Ashkahn: And you have to give people that actual autonomy too. You can’t give people the responsibility, and then get really upset when they do things in a way that you didn’t want. You have to accept that they are their own person making their own decisions. With that responsibility comes the right to make those decisions. Otherwise, it just seems like not a fun job to have when you have all the responsibility, but none of the actual authority or decision making power.

Graham: And I guess we could put our feet down at some point, but so far at least I just found that explaining things and the logic behind them and where you are coming from with what you think is an approach to an important situation, is often respected, and that’s the direction you end up running. It’s not like we butt heads with our manager, and then they just do something that we totally disapprove of, and he’s gonna ruin the shop and we let that happen. It’s still your business, but it’s way easier to give people that power and at least if you found a good manager, someone you trust, and have developed over the years, they probably won’t betray that.

But that’s like the highest level, you are getting to a point where even kind of big decisions about your business are not being made by you, or at least solely by you. So it is totally possible like this process of delegating bit by bit and ending up where you are more outside and able to not just work on your business as opposed to in it, but really be around to guide it as opposed to even working on it as directly.

Ashkahn: I mean this is a hard question, and not just for float centers. This is one of the toughest parts about running a business is you have a vision and you maybe and most likely have more training in what you are trying to do than the people that you are hiring, otherwise they would be running their own businesses. It’s the idea of delegating-

Graham: Or you are just the crazy one. It’s the sane ones who are pulling in a regular pay cheque.

Ashkahn: Yeah this is legitimately one of the biggest difficulties in running a business, and requires a lot of work, and we done it well for certain things even in our business, and we haven’t for other things because it’s hard. You gotta find the right people, and it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of planning and work. It takes a lot of work to not have to work.

Graham: Yeah keep trying to find someone else to come in record my half of these podcasts episodes, but no luck so far.

Okay last few tips. Well I really just had one so I was hoping that you could come up with number two you can start bouncing them off lightning round style. So the one tip that I thought of so far was just don’t do things alone. Whatever it is that you want to delegate out, or whatever tasks you feel like are in your court that staff or anyone else aren’t doing right now. Just make sure you always have someone around doing them. This is like we used we used this especially with pump equipment. If you are cleaning the UV bulb or replacing it, or if you are taking out the impeller and cleaning it from here and putting it back in, kind of dismantling your pump, and rebolting it. Having someone else around during that process means that now you are not the only one who knows how to do it.

The same goes for working on marketing things, and pretty much anything you are doing. You are paying for that time so in a sense you are using both your time, and paying for someone else’s time to accomplish something that you could by yourself. But that is how just in a very simple way if you have a rule where whenever possible don’t be the only one engaging in an activity. People will just slowly, and very naturally learn everything that there is to do in your shop.

Ashkahn: Alright my tip is just remember to have some flexibility. If we were a giant business with hundreds of employees it will be a little easier for us to come up with very specific job descriptions, and then fill those job descriptions, but we are not. We are a small business, we don’t have that many employees. So for us it’s like we have these 20 something roles that need to be filled to keep our shop going. As we maybe lose a manager, and bring on a new one we kind of scramble all those roles up again for who’s doing what, because it’s kind of weird to say like okay manager 1 no matter who it is is in charge of this thing, this thing, this thing, this thing, and that thing. It makes a lot more sense to be like hey what’s your skill set? Okay maybe you should take this one, and you should take this one, and you kind of actually assign those positions, and roles, and tasks based off of what someone is already both interested in, and good at. That seems to function a lot better than having some artificial rigidity.

Graham: Yeah for sure. Okay I got another one too.

Ashkahn: Alright.

Graham: I was just gonna say too I guess a really good example of that is we actually went from having two managers who had division of labor down to a single manager, and kind of some like co-managers, or sub-managers.

Ashkahn: Baby managers.

Graham: Yeah under them. We call them yeah tacos, and tacos supremes. We went from two taco supremes down to one taco supreme. And with that ability of just having roles written out and shuffle them. The ability to shuffle them around. We can totally push off things that he wasn’t an expert in down to some other people who can take them on. That kind of idea of restructuring can be as vast as turning two roles into a single one, and delineating some responsibility down a little bit. Okay my-

Ashkahn: You are gonna give another tip.

Graham: I know but now this is exactly why I was gonna launch into my tip without saying that, but then I really wanted to get it out. So what I was gonna say was for things that are done I think yeah daily, weekly, monthly, and especially things that relate to equipment in your shop like maintaining the float tanks things like that. Those are all great things to really try, and delegate make sure a lot of at least two other staff members in your shop know how to do things like treat the UV bulbs, and deal with the pump, and even change it. Do full water switch overs, and things like that.

We found that for really skilled labor, so things like, for example writing press releases, or doing website updates, or even as kind of in depth as legal advice, or financial advice. It’s harder to get that in house, and often it’s even not as tempting to hire on a single person, because they can leave or run off and get busy with their own thing. I guess if you are thinking about going with agencies for some things the things that have made the most sense for us to consider running with an agency with, or try to contact someone that’s a bigger group of people almost rather than individual is for those high level specialized technical tasks, where when you want someone who can do this you want them. That means often having an agency where they have access to a dozen, or a couple dozen people so you know that agency is not going to quit on you, or that agency is not going to be on vacation during a couple of hours when you need them or something like that.

Yeah I guess that’s a little tip for how to decide what you are delegating to staff versus externally.

Ashkahn: Yeah it’s kind of like usually in business you like to have some form of redundancy so that if someone does leave, or just sick randomly or something you are not totally screwed. But it’s just really hard to do that with the number of staff that we have. So that’s kind of one way of having a much more comfortable form of redundancies is hiring out instead of trying to train someone up within your business.

Graham: Yeah so it’s like running your marketing, social media might be a good example of that. Having an agency where even if one person leaves like your web designer is like, “Oh I decided I’m not doing web design anymore I’m doing culinary school.” And it’s like that’s it, that’s the person who designed your entire website, and they had their hands on everything and now they are gone and you need to find someone else. Often times hiring a replacement is hard, and if you went with an agency and one of their staff decides to go to culinary school great David you have all of Jame’s notes. Come on swing in here, and it’s from your perspective it’s uninterrupted.

Ashkahn: Alright my final tip is –

Graham: I thought we were just gonna keep rolling with this.

Ashkahn: There’s been a lot of tips so far you know.

Just remember to talk to people. I think it’s very natural for us as business owners to assume that everybody wants more responsibilities and to move up in the company, and to take that sort of stuff on, and like that’s not really the case. You might in your mind be like oh man I’m gonna totally nurture this person in becoming this thing.

Graham: I’m gonna totally nurture you.

Ashkahn: Groom, that was the word I was looking for. I’m gonna groom, I’m gonna totally groom this person to take on this role. You might talk to them and they might just say they don’t want to do that at all. They are happy just working at the front desk, and doing bookings, and that’s not up to them, or they don’t want to take on that higher level of work and responsibility. Having those conversations early and just being honest. “Listen I kind of want to move you into this position, but it’s gonna take some time, and I’m hoping that you won’t just like leave in six months,” and even if they do end up leaving in six months they are more likely to give you a lot of warning, and try to help make a smooth transition if you had that conversation to begin with.

Graham: That was a good last tip. It’s very charming the first time that happened it totally shocked me too. I absolutely thought that people wanted more responsibility and have ownership over what they are doing and autonomy. The first time someone’s like “can you just tell me what to do so I can show up between my hours, and not think about it outside of work”. I’m like, what?

Ashkahn: I don’t understand.

Graham: People think differently than I do as human being what is going on here? Okay well this-

Ashkahn: There’s a lot of answers.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: I don’t know if any of them were any good, but you know there you go.

Graham: You know sift through it select some verbs, and nouns that work for you, and string them together.

Ashkahn: Alright well if you guys have other questions you can go to floattanksolution.com/podcast.

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