Make Delegation Permanent

This is the Momentum podcast. As entrepreneurs, when we start our businesses, we literally have to do everything to get that business off the ground, up and running to the point where it's productive, where it's making money, where it's doing what it needs to do. And then there's a point that as we build the team, our main role, one of the main things that we need to focus on, probably the thing we should be focused on the most is delegating what we have done to get the business to where it is, to a team, to the people around us. And the challenge with delegation from most entrepreneurs, myself included, is that we're not good at it and we stop trusting delegation and we become suspect of delegation and we hold on to too much and we get stuck in the tactics and the day to day of our businesses. And that's why I'm recording this podcast, because over the course of being an entrepreneur for over 30 years and working with entrepreneurs for that same period of time, I've learned a way to make delegation permanent, which changes everything in the way that we take what we do and give it to those around us so that we can move on to more important things and more strategic things and have the freedom and the life we want. I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast made for Empire Builders Game Changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off. And don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy. And we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Should we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will? We don't accept our destiny. We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority. The few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution. And we always will be. Recently we held one of our member events and I get so much out of being at our member events because I want to take you inside the room in this podcast and just give you an impression of what it's like to be there. You know, when you come to one of our events, everyone in the room is working on similar things because the majority, and I mean 90% plus have million dollar plus businesses and there is a percentage of those that have eight figure businesses and businesses that are scaling quickly. And, you know, in a lot of rooms, you don't get that. You get a mix of entrepreneurs. You get some people who are starting out, some people that are in one stage of business, some people that are in another. And you don't get a room where everyone is in that million dollar plus place of how do I start really growing this business? How do I use the leverage of people around me and a team? How do I become the visionary that I want to be and gain the entrepreneurial freedom that I got into this for the reason I got into this, for this work in the first place, how do I get to that place where I have the freedom that we all want as entrepreneurs and. I believe there comes a time as an entrepreneur where when we start building that team, the most important thing that we do is delegate everything we've done to get the business to where it is today so that we can get the business to where we want it to be tomorrow, so that we can get the business to where it grows, to where we we feel and we know when we see that it should be and we can get to the business to where it is giving us the entrepreneurial freedom that we really want. And that is delegation. It's delegating from what we're doing to the people around us. And here's the issue with delegation. Most of us delegate, especially in our early days, without a process. I know I did. When I first got into business, I didn't understand how to delegate. I expected the people around me to see what I was seeing. I expected the people around me to understand what I was understanding. I would delegate and it wouldn't work. I would actually delegate two things to people, and it would come back to me. I call it a boomerang delegation for my Australian friends. It's funny, I've had three or four of my Australian friends bring boomerangs from Australia and give them to me. But you know what I'm saying? What I'm saying is we delegate it and it comes right back and maybe, maybe the whole task doesn't come back. Maybe the whole issue doesn't come back. But we get back involved and we have to answer questions and we have to be involved in the process or we have to be watching the process or micromanaging the process. And all of those do not create confidence in delegation. And here's the issue. When we don't create confidence in delegation, when we try to delegate something simple, when we try to delegate a task and it doesn't work, we don't trust delegation. And that impression, that conditioning of not trusting delegation conditions us to hold on to things rather than to delegate to the people around us. And you've probably been through this. Have you been an entrepreneur for a while? You probably been through trying to take something you're doing and giving it to somebody and having it not work out or having it work out for a period of time and then having it boomerang back to you or having it work out for a period of time, then hearing that there's issues or having it work out for a period of time and then and catching mistakes and seeing issues in it. And I've been through this myself and you know, in my twenties I ran a successful company from the outside, from the inside. It did not feel successful because on a day to day basis, I was trapped in tactics. On a day to day basis, I was running the day to day and involved with checking all the boxes and making sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing. I was in this micromanagement tactical management telling people what they needed to do, checking the got done, telling them what to do again and just felt trapped in my business. And even though it was financially successful, even though it was award winning, even though I made it way more money than the average person my age, especially in my twenties, it didn't feel successful. It felt like a trap. It felt overwhelming. It felt like the pressure and noise went up on a daily basis. And now that I'm 50, I turn 50 this year. Now that I'm 50, I have the perspective to look back and say, yes, the business was financially successful. Yes, we won awards. Yes, we did well, but I was doing so much and it wasn't sustainable and it wouldn't have been sustainable and it was wearing me down and wearing me out. And I was by the time I got out of that business, I was almost £300. I walk around at about 215 now. I didn't have the muscle mass I have now, so I had way more body fat then than I would if I put on that weight today. I was not healthy. I was on prescription drugs, I was having tons of health issues. I was cortisol down and having trouble sleeping and not feeling well and and just overall challenged as an entrepreneur. But I would say, you know, when we're challenged as an entrepreneur, we're actually challenged as a human being. And I was in that place. And so much of it with perspective when I look back I know is because I didn't have a process for delegation, I would find things that I was doing and try and get other people to do them. But I didn't really understand how to make it stick, how to make it permanent, how do I hand this off so it never comes back to me? How do I end the boomerang of delegation? And I also know with perspective, looking back, that that had far reaching implications. It made it so I felt like there were things that only I could do, and I'm talking about mundane things like bookkeeping and other things that I did. I just held on to like crazy in that business. It made it so that I didn't trust the people around me and, you know, I didn't trust human beings when what was really missing was a process. And because I didn't trust human beings, I did more and I didn't trust my team. I did more than I should. I worried more than I should. I had many late nights that I shouldn't have had. I had many sleepless nights that I shouldn't have had. So the implications were massive and damaging and challenging, and I feel good that I got out of it. You know, I feel lucky that I got out of it. And I feel even luckier that over time I had the insights and the space and the coaching and the growth so that I could create a delegation process that actually works and a delegation process that actually moves. Stuff from my plate to somebody else's plate, stuff from my responsibilities in somebody else's responsibilities. And it does so permanently. So today I want to share with you exactly what I shared with our members. The process I shared with our members in our event to help them permanently delegate so that we start trusting delegation. So that delegation actually works so that we see delegation as a tool, that we can do more and we can grow our business and we can stop doing everything and we can have the time and space we want for our family, for ourselves, for our health, for that concept of freedom that we're all chasing. And so let me share with you the process that I shared with everybody who was in our event and this process that I got incredible feedback on after the event. I had so many people come up to me and say, Man, you know what? The way that you explain delegation this week, I have so much more confidence that I can do it. I even had somebody come up to me and say, You know, ever since I've been in your program, you've said delegate the things that you're good at. And it's always scared me because when you say that, I'm like, But I'm the one who's good at it. And if I delegate things, I'm good at them. We won't be good at it anymore. And today, when you explained delegation and you gave us the process, it made me feel like I could delegate anything. So let me share with you. I want to take you through this process. So first, the first step to delegation, I believe, is understanding what you should be delegating right now, because in order for you to trust delegation, in order for you to feel the effects of delegation, we should be taking the right thing off of your plate. We should be taking pressure and noise off of your plate and handing it to somebody who eventually is going to be better at it than you. I want you to understand that this process for delegation will create an environment, a system, a process where no matter how good you are at something, somebody else will eventually be better at it than you. And I say that with confidence because of the experience I have with myself and the experience I have with entrepreneurs. I have seen this process work over and over again. And here's the other reason why, as visionaries, the main role we play is we get up every morning, we go into the future, we create a new reality, we come back to the present, and we demand that reality becomes real. And that process takes time, it takes energy, it takes focus. It draws us away from the current day. It draws us away from the present. It draws us away from the day to day, minute to minute activities that we're doing. And it makes it so that other people who don't do that as often or don't do that as much as we do, I believe everybody on your team is a visionary. They all do that in some way. We just do it a lot more than others. And so the people who don't do it as much as we do, the people who stay more in the present, the people who execute better in the present will always be better than us when we have a process for delegation. So step one to determine what you should be delegating is you do a two week time study and that means for two weeks you carry around sheets of paper. Don't do this in an app, don't do this in your phone, don't do this in your calendar. It just doesn't have the same effect. There's something psychological about writing things down. There's something about actually putting it down with pen and paper that physiologically connects you to what's really happening and makes a bigger impression on you. I know because I've had people tell me I did the written time study that I tried to do in an app and it just was dramatically different. And I've tried to do it in an app. Believe me, I thought it would be so much easier and I did it in an app and I'm like, Wow, this just didn't have the same effect. I immediately started another two week time study and writing it down had a massive effect. And if you aren't familiar with the concept of a time study, you can look up the podcast that I recorded called Double Your Productivity in two weeks. Or you can go to my website, go to Charfen dot com my last name dot com forward slash podcast and search the two words time study. And there is a ton of podcasts that I've recorded on this concept to give you a deeper dove at the end of two weeks when you've done your time study, look at where are you spending time? That is tactical and that means where are you spending time that you can have somebody else do something for you right now? And it's going to be revealing when you do the two week time setting, when you write it down, not in an app, when you use your your pen and paper to write it down, you will look at it and say, you know what, there is a ton of stuff here that I'm doing that somebody else could do, and it will reveal to you where you can get your time back most easily and where you can get your time back so that you can do other things. And so first you do the time study and it's going to show you what you should delegate right now. Now, second, you determine who you are going to delegate this item to the stuff that is in that time study and. You have a meeting with that person. You know, one of the myths in the entrepreneurial world is that you're going to delegate somebody and build a process. You have to build the process. You have to make it clear. You have to put it all together. You have to give them the checklist, man. You know, if that's the way you're going to delegate, it will slow everything down. I love the book The E-Myth because it encourages people to put systems in their business. But then The E-Myth, it tells you to do it all. And man, you know, when I read The E-Myth for the first time, I thought I would have to shut my company down for a month in order to make it work. It did not increase my confidence in delegation. It actually increased my frustration around ‘how do I get this done?’ and this process will help you do that. You have a meeting with the person that you're going to delegate everything to, and this is a conversation you recorded. If you do it on Zoom, you record it. If you have them sitting in front of you, have them recorded on your phone and you go through the process as you see it and you have a conversation with them and you take the item that you're delegating, you say, Okay, well, here's the first thing I do and this is why I do it. Here's the second thing I do and this is why I do it. Here's the third thing I do, and you have that person on your team create a simple flow chart. Now, it doesn't have to be with all the flowchart, you know, rules and documentation, the different shapes and all those I'm talking box on a page that has an arrow to the next step and an arrow to the next step. And if there's a decision you make in the process, you're delegating. Then you say the decision, you know, one arrow that goes to the decision, if it's a yes and what are the goals in the decision? If there's a no and if the decision has multiple outcomes, you have arrows that go to each one of those to it to another subsequent box on a flowchart. And here's why I recommend a visual flowchart and not a process document for everything you delegate, especially initially, about 70% of the population is visual, and the 30% of the population that's not primary visual can use visuals to understand a process, and flow charts are so easy to make and use. You can use programs like Google Draw or we use Lucid Chart. There's tons of them out there and flowcharts are so effective because visually you can see the process and you have the team member go and build a flow chart around the discussion that you had. If you're doing this a lot, you create a standard for flowcharts like we want the boxes to look like this and the arrows to look like this, and you just create a sample flowchart that everybody uses. And so you have a meeting, you have that person take the recording and they go and create a flowchart for exactly how you delegate the item. Right? Sorry, not delegate exactly how you execute the item that you're delegating. And they go do that work. Then they come back and you have another meeting with them to review the flow chart and you go through it and you take some time and space with that person. Like this is something that you should actually take a couple of deep breaths, put yourself in the moment of trying to execute this process and really think of every step in this flowchart. And what you'll find and I want you to know this upfront is that you miss things or they miss things. The beautiful thing about a flow chart instead of a process document is that instead of having to type in more or add a paragraph or change the formatting of a process document with a flow chart, you just add another box and you move everything over and you, you put in whatever step you miss. You make sure it gets in that flow chart. And as you do this with team members, as you create flow charts with team members, they'll get better at it and you get better at reviewing it, which makes you, like, supercharge your delegation. So now you have this process where not only are you delegating, you're getting better at delegating. So you review the flow chart with that, that team member, you make the updates in the meeting in that second meeting to make sure that you have all of the steps in the process. And you might even have some steps that you're like, You know what? I've never done this before, but I really think we need to do this too. And so you add that to the flow chart and then you have them go use it, and they use the flow chart and you tell them as you're going through this process, you use this flow chart, you work through it box by box. And if there's anything that comes up, if there's any issues you either added to the flow chart or you come and talk to me about it and we figure out how we work it into this process. And now you have a visual representation of something that only you knew how to do in the business that was created by one of your team members that they can use over and over again. And if something happens with that team member, if they get busy and they have to do other things, if they have to delegated to somebody else, if they end up leaving your team for any reason, if they're out of the office for any reason, you now have a visual representation of exactly how this process works, and you instruct them and anybody else who's doing this with you that if they make any updates to the process, that they should let you know so you can review them and that they always, always update the flow chart. And what happens is if you go through this process and I'll just summarize it really quick for you. You do a time setting, you figure out what's most important. You figure out who you're going to delegate to, who you're going to delegate. The most important things that you figured out in that time setting to you have a meeting with them where you talk through the process, which is recorded. I'm giving you details here that are really crucially important, really many of these out. It'll slow down the process. You have them create a flow chart based on the meeting that you had where they show each step of the process in succession and if any decision trees that are necessary, then you review the chart with them before they try and use it. You review the chart with them, you update that chart as necessary. In that review meeting, you have them start using it and then you make sure they are updating it as they use it and they let you know what they're changing or updating so that you can always verify and have a visual reference for that process. Now what I sometimes say in my coaching, you have to slow down to go fast. Here's what I mean. This is one of those times. This is one of those incidents, because I've had people say, you know how whenever you say, slow down to go fast, I just don't understand it. And I, I reflect and I think, you know, when in my twenties, I probably wouldn't have heard that either. I'm like, I'm going to go fast to go fast. But here's what I mean by slowing down to go fast. If you just tell somebody, Hey, I need you to go do this thing and here's how you do it and go get it done. It's going to boomerang. It's coming right back to you. But if you slow down and you have the meaning, you create the flowchart, you review the chart with them, you make any updates that you need to. You have them use it. They make updates. You stay with this. You know, if you keep this visual representation in your company, you will create a permanent delegation. And as you work through this process multiple times, you will actually create permanent delegations. That increases confidence in delegation. And you will get to the place where so many successful entrepreneurs are, where they can believe, where they believe, where I believe that I can delegate anything. I don't and I don't believe any longer that there's anything that I'm so good at or anything that I'm so important in or any process that is so vital to have me included that I'm the only one that can do it. And when you get to that place of understanding that over time, you can delegate anything, you get to the place where understanding that there's nothing you have to do, that there's always a way you can delegate it to somebody. And when you have that belief system start to actually become real for you, you start seeing that there's nothing your company can't do. You start seeing a different world of possibilities around you in what you can do and what outcomes you can create in the world. And you start having this completely different perspective of what's possible. Permanent delegation doesn't just free up our time. Permanent delegation indelibly changes the way we look at the world and our beliefs around what is and isn't possible completely shift. This is one of those processes that has completely and totally changed my life. And I've watched it change so many entrepreneurs' lives. And the difference between someone who doesn't believe they can delegate and someone who has confidence in delegation that they can delegate anything is night and day. Because when we have this belief system, a whole new world of possibilities open up to us as entrepreneurs. So when you're willing to slow down and go through this process, what really happens is you go super fast. This is like going from the go karts to an F1 car. When it comes to really slowing down to go fast, you will create an entirely new speed. That's possible because you can now sit down with multiple team members a week and delegate multiple items and end up with multiple flow charts and end up with multiple revision meetings and end up with tons of stuff coming off your plate. Not just one or two things where you have to show the person step by step how to do it, not just one or two things where you have to walk them through physically how to do it. This actually creates this process, this culture of delegation for you as an entrepreneur, and this culture of taking on responsibility for your team in a way that creates permanence and a way that makes it stick and in a way that will absolutely change your life as an entrepreneur. Thanks for being with me here today and for letting me share this with you, because I think if you are willing to take this to heart and go through this process, it will absolutely change your career as an entrepreneur and give you back time, give you back focus, give you back your life. And if you learn how to do this over time, it will give you the freedom you have always wanted as an entrepreneur. Make delegation permanent and everything in your life will change. If you're interested in helping with building a team and delegating and building the infrastructure of your company and really understanding how to make more money in your organization and grow your business faster and go from 7 to 8 figures and eight figures to multiple eight figures and beyond. Reach out to us. Go to simple operations dot com. You should be in the room at our next event. If you have $1,000,000 plus business. If you have a business where you're building a team, if you have a business where it is now about how you can get the help of a team fully utilize that team so that you can grow the business. Let's jump on a call, go to Simple Operations dot com, click the button on the homepage, answer a few questions for my team. One of us will jump on a call with you and we will help you understand how you grow your business faster, how you get out of the day to day tactics, and how you really gain entrepreneurial freedom. What you want while you create all the influence and the affluence, the success, the money, the income, the revenue, the profitability that you've always wanted. Simple Operations Icon. I appreciate you listening to the podcast and I'll talk to you on the next episode.