Three things every day to build your company

Updated Monday, January 18, 2010

The following is describes the only way to possibly grow your company. The “doing” is very straight forward. Everyone knows they need to work hard, plan and delegate. The stick is “when” and “how much”. Knowing that will keep the company growing gracefully most of the time.

From just about any startup or management book, we know the following is involved:

1. Skilled labor
2. Planning
3. Delegation (We will call it Delegation Engineering)

Skilled Labor

Remember spending all day learning about and practicing your professional skill? It gave you excitement to think about doing it so well for your company. Now you are doing it all day, but it doesn’t seem the same as what you dreamed. You are under pressure and stressed. That’s ok. It’s a stage you are about to get out of, which this article will help you with.

It’s difficult for you to focus on your skill right now, so let’s first talk about something that’s needed so you can calmly concentrate on your skilled labor. Staring at a pile of tasks? That will kill your productivity. They need to be broken down and planed for.

The Plan

Planning takes a little thought, and a little time. It’s fairly straight forward. Weigh your tasks (in your head mostly) on the following categories: cost, value, time, difficulty. For example, if the task is very easy to do, costs almost nothing, and offers great value, it goes right to the top. If a task is high value, expensive, but not very difficult to do (becoming BBB accredited) then weigh the task accordingly. For all those achievers, check out the Wiegers Weighting spreadsheet.

Next of course is to break down the tasks into segments. Break your tasks up like this:

• Tomorrow – What can I accomplish tomorrow?
• This week – What needs to be done this week? This is a higher level view. Don’t worry about every detail
• This month – What do we need to accomplish this month?

It’s good to keep each segment between 5-10 entries long. Any more detail, and you might be taking to long to plan, at least in my type of business (Software development/consulting). Remember, this is not a map for every ones productivity, just yours.

So, let’s say you have done all this but you can’t get anything on your lists done. The weeks and days are always full of tasks, and the months, forget about it! Lucky you! You are an entrepreneur and are ready to hire. If you don’t have enough guaranteed work for you new employee/contractor and refuse to hire, then you have to calculate. Ask yourself: If I don’t hire this team member, can I close tasks on my list at a decent rate, and therefore grow my company? If the answer is no, then you have to hire – or get a job.

Delegation Engineering

The traditional term “delegation” doesn’t cut it. Authorize someone to do some tasks? Geez. That part takes 10 seconds. “Ok, do it, here’s the login” or whatever. What happens before and after delegation is what matters.

It has to be considered often, if not daily. Engineering the next role to delegate is a long processes that justifies a little work each day. Do it right by having a role defined before you hire the new me ember, and make sure their tasks are well documented. If an employee or contractor steps in and already has good knowledge of their work (through knowledge standardization and/or training) knows what to do (straight forward for low skill work), you have made huge advances for your company.

Outsource this work if you can’t pay for it to be done in house. Consider various applicants and make a decision.

The important thing to know is when to delegate. You delegate when:

• Your budget almost allows for it
• You can’t seem to catch up with your tasks
• You know how to define the work process, and/or hire for it

Back to skilled labor

You have already been doing this? Great! Now you know something the rest of us learned the hard way. You know that having a great trigger for delegation allows us to keep a clean plan. Since our work load has been minimized we have more time to focus on what we love to do. The tasks are melting away from our plans now, and we are running out of things to do! It’s a great thing to sick back and have time to work at this company with excellence, since we are now longer stressed about our ever growing task backlog.

What’s next? Well, on a weekly basis we have our company strategy meetings where we go over our 5 year goals, and constantly adjust things. Doing this keeps the plans full with optional company-growing tasks..

About the author. I'm Adam Temple. After a degree in religion I ended up in the business world and just love it. Sermonspice.com was my first big splash as it's now a multi-million dollar company (which I love saying!). Bixly.com is the next notable effort. Expert programming seriously low prices. It came about as a last ditch effort to avoid working security detail. Bixly reminds me of adolescence: thriving with health and potential, but still learning.