Hi there, Ashley here with We Make Systems Sexy. Let’s talk about how you can save yourself 5 hours a week (or more) and still grow your business through delegation and an SOP Manual.
5 hours a week… let’s talk about that because I really think that this number is the minimum of what you can possibly save yourself by getting together an SOP manual and figuring out what you can delegate.
Some people have asked, where do I even start? How is this possible and how can I save myself time? This is what I’ve heard from a lot of business owners that are at the point of hiring or have hired, but feel like they’re kind of just stuck in this tiny space. Like, “Yes, I’ve hired out, but I feel like I’ve caused myself more work.” This is not how this was supposed to be, to be able to delegate work, right?
This is exactly what happens when you don’t have an SOP Manual in place.
Have some SOPs created for your most common tasks, at least to start out with, otherwise you’ll find yourself in this perpetual circle of assigning a task to your new admin, VA or whoever it might be that you’ve hired, and then it comes back around to you because they have questions and they don’t understand the instructions that you just jotted down for them really quickly, or the document that you threw together, or they can’t find the document again because it’s not in a place that makes sense or we’re in a place that’s unorganized because we’re doing everything…
Phew, that was a lot 😓😵💫
Because of this, when the moment of necessity comes, everything is on fire and nothing is planned out. Nothing is recorded. Nothing is documented the way that it should be for following an actual standard operating procedure. And it all burns down to the ground. 🔥🔥🔥
So let’s put that flame out. 👩🚒🚒🧯
How can you delegate? Let’s start off by talking about what to delegate.
You might even be at the point where you really need to hire, but you’re saying to yourself, “I don’t even know what I would give to someone else. I’m desperate for help, but what would I give them?”
Just start by thinking about the recurring tasks that you complete on a regular basis. If you need help with this, download my free delegation exercise. I made this for business owners like you that need to get all those things out of your head and onto paper in order to sort it out.
It’s designed to help you actually work through the process.
Think about what you do on a daily basis, what do you do on a weekly basis? Biweekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, etc. We all have tasks that we are repeating. We might not even realize it because we’re just on repeat. But once you really start to sit down and dissect those repeating tasks, those can be the first things that you hand off to someone else because you know how often you do them. You know what you have to do for those tasks and it’s not going to be a whole lot of guesswork.
You don’t need to be the ONLY person doing those tasks. You can have somebody come in and help you to actually take that work off your plate. Now thinking about those one-off or one-time tasks, maybe it’s not a set recurrence, but it is something that you do with every client or an every-so-often kind of task, right?
Start writing down what those one-off kinds of tasks are and then write down what you think can be automated. And if you don’t know what can be automated, reach out to me [LINK] and we can actually work through that *together*. We can have a consulting call and talk about what can be automated because truly you need to start with what can be automated before being delegated.
You’ll save yourself a lot of time and money by automating first and then seeing what can be delegated to a person afterward. If the automation can do it in place of a person, you’re saving yourself hours of paying somebody to do something that could just be done with actual tech or software, right?
So you need to sit down, and just document what those items are, your recurring tasks by the daily, by monthly, by quarterly, by annually, etcetera.
What about those one-off kinds of random tasks? Throw them all onto that document (see our delegation exercise), get your ideas together and then start working on going through that list. And the next time you do that task, make a loom recording yourself doing it. It’s not that challenging. Just record yourself when you’re actually doing it, store it in a folder in Google Drive, and then when the time comes, it can be documented as an actual SOP.
Remember, videos can be outdated really quickly, so it’s important that a video is not your only form of an SOP. You need to have a written form that can easily be updated. This is the way to get started on that path of creating your SOPs and your SOP manual. It’s the most simple way, especially if you’re confused and sitting here like, “How do I even get started?”
Start with our Delegation Exercise. Document those things. Then start picking off that list of items that you made. Every time you go to do that process, make that recording, dump it into the Google Drive folder, label it, and then you’re going to be ready to start actually documenting those things and hiring the person to take those items off of your plate.
Boom, 5 hours saved per week.
