A Myth about Delegating

Lately, we have been talking a lot about priorities and ensuring that you as a small business owner take time for yourself and your business. If you neglect your personal health, ultimately your business will suffer. At Freedom Makers, we recommend outsourcing to virtual assistants to obtain more freedom in your life thus helping with those personal priorities. Earlier this month, we discussed the different cost structures and types of virtual assistants that exist. Often experts like to use a cost comparison to get business owners to be more open to delegating.

For instance, if you bill $150/hour should you really be spending that hour doing an administrative task? If you delegate it, you could bill more hours at the rate you are worth. Let’s say there is a task, like creating your weekly newsletter. Each week, it takes an hour to do. You could delegate that and pay someone else $30/ hour to complete. While the virtual assistant works on your newsletter for one hour, you will spend that hour working with a client that you bill for $150. Therefore, you have netted $120. When thinking of it this way, if you had done the newsletter yourself, you would not have had time to work with that client. So by trying to save $30, you actually would have lost $120.
This reasoning helps people understand the value of their time and the money they could be making. By delegating simple tasks for a smaller hourly fee to a VA, you can be working on your business that most likely yields more money in the long run for your business. Reframing the issue in this way is to help you see your time in money terms.

But for those grappling with cash flow, this mindset may not be as helpful. If you are a new small business owner, it may not make sense to spend the cash. You may not have the cash and, to be honest, you may not even have the clients yet. Therefore, it would make more sense not to delegate and do the newsletter on your own.

However, as a new business owner, you can start to prepare yourself so that when you reach the stage where you are tight on time but not on cash, you will be ready to delegate. Start thinking now about how to organize your tasks so that you can easily delegate them when you do have the cash.

In the end, many times it is worth it to outsource items on your weekly task list that slow you down. You can spend that time on new or current clients and prioritizing your life. You will earn more money through delegating. But if you are still building a business, it is important to create systems and steps that will someday make it easy to outsource. In the end, you will gain more freedom for yourself as a person and for your business!

For more tips on how to outsource to a virtual assistant, visit our website for help. And for specific help in what tasks you should outsource, take our Task Audit Quiz.