Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / 3 quick tips on delegation

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3 quick tips on delegation · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:10
  Welcome back to the pod. Welcome back. How's it going? It's all good here. Beautiful, sunny day in Sydney. How are you? Oh, gorgeous. I'm good. On that note, not to jump straight into weather again, but there was a tornado here at the weekend, which was wild. I'm staying in Lisbon for two months and my parents even called because it was on the news in France. Yeah.
• 0:36
  And I'll send you a video after this. There was a full-on tornado about five minutes away from where we're staying. It's been wild here. Yeah. Weather's going crazy.
• 0:46
  Just very windy and rainy from what I could see from inside with the heating on. Oh, my God. But, yeah, it's going wild. That's full on. So sunny sounds lovely. Yeah. Lol. Oh, my gosh. Okay, let's jump straight into it. What are we talking about today? Yes.
• 1:06
  So today we are going to jump into a topic that comes up all the time. And I think literally everyone listening will relate to, which is the topic of delegation. So I think everyone knows that building your own business from the ground up, you have so many hats that you're wearing, you're completing so many tasks and you're
• 1:26
  It's what makes a job so rewarding because you're doing so many things and it's exciting. It's also that hustle that's kind of glorified, but it's also a huge part of what makes it so exhausting. And I think that's why one of the most effective things that you can do
• 1:42
  from the get go as an entrepreneur is to really effectively be able to delegate some tasks and to identify, you know, this is something I can let go and hand off to someone else. And this is something that I'll take on myself, or this is how I'll free up some more space to be able to keep that kind of visionary role as kind of the CEO and leader of the company.
• 2:04
  And as a super effective delegator yourself, I know, as a subject of your delegation, I wanted to just jump into your process. And I know that you also use VAs for the business, which has been super, super useful. And it's really interesting to see kind of the ins and outs of that. So yeah, we just wanted to jump through your process today and how that's helped you in building Female Startup Club. Yes. Oh my gosh. VAs. I mean...
• 2:34
  Female startup club depends on it. Jane is our go-to gal and she's been with the business since 2021, I think. And yeah, she is absolutely critical in the business. I think VAs and delegation, especially when you're a small lean team, can be such an effective and powerful tool to help take some things off your plate without kind of
• 3:00
  how do I word this properly? It's like when I was back in 2021, I didn't have the budget to hire someone full time. I certainly didn't have, you know, a big budget to kind of do all the things, but I was getting super overwhelmed because I was trying to do all the things. And when we started working with VAs, it just took such a load off me. And I think that,
• 3:25
  If you can kind of get it working for you, it's just, I mean, it's just a game changer. So process, process for me. Well, two things I would say, and I'm not going to go into the Eisenhower box framework because I feel like we covered this in another episode, but...
• 3:42
  The first thing is just understanding that framework and understanding what should be on your list, what should be not on your list, and what should be delegated. I think there's four boxes in the Eisenhower box, but kind of just like as a side note, going away and like looking at that framework and getting like re-familiar with it.
• 3:59
  Then my actual process and what I do, but I guess it's a little different now for me, but if I was someone just starting today to figure this out, the very first step is just writing a really clear list, observing every single task you do in a day, a week, or a
• 4:22
  like every kind of bucket is broken down into very specific line by line tasks. And you want to kind of observe, I've gotten used to this because I guess I do it so frequently now, I don't need to write the list, but I'm good at observing myself and observing the tasks that I start doing or new tasks that come into the workflow. But you want to basically observe every single task that you're doing to pick out the ones that are like repetitive and don't
• 4:51
  They're the kind of tasks that can be turned into really clear step-by-step how-tos and tutorials within the business. So usually, like for me, these tasks are things that don't really require like creative thinking or big decision making.
• 5:08
  For me, it's, and for our business with Female Startup Club, it's much more to do with things like administrative tasks or things to do with how we, you know, we have so many different channels. We have the podcast, we have the newsletter, we have blog, we have a million different socials, we have YouTube. We have all these things that require a lot of just finicky admin on the back end. And so for us,
• 5:33
  those kind of tasks are absolutely what gets delegated away from me, especially because, you know, my personality is much more like ideation. And I mean, you know, there's about me big picture thinking and, and kind of like going off in a million directions. And I'm not great with doing those kind of day to day tasks. So I've had to get really good at delegating because otherwise it just doesn't happen and it doesn't get done. Yeah.
• 6:00
  So basically, once you kind of identify like, okay, here's, for example, uploading the podcast, that's a really simple one for us. You know, you identify that this needs to happen, then the process of kind of offboarding or onboarding, I guess, that to, you know, a VA would be, in my case, what I do is I record a loom of myself doing the task. So... Which is a kind of screen recording of your laptop and whatever you're doing on there,
• 6:29
  right? Yes, exactly. Loom basically takes a screen recording and it can either take in like your, you know, voice, you can have your face on the screen as well, or it can just be like screen recording. But it's just like a super simple, I think it's like a Chrome extension. You plug it into your thing, you just press the little button and start a screen record.
• 6:47
  So I record a loom of myself doing it and then I send it to Jane and she turns it into more like a written SOP, standard operating procedure, which is very much like a clear how-to step-by-step, which gets uploaded to our Google Drive kind of like how-to bank of tasks so that we always...
• 7:09
  document the things that we're doing in case all of a sudden we need to onboard someone new or someone new comes into the business and needs to know how to do something. Instead of me having to show it again, Jane is actually able to take that on and show someone else. And so you basically record a loom and then you pass it on. The person working for you in that capacity then turns it into an SOP, uploads it, and then they just like...
• 7:34
  start doing the task themselves ongoing. And like, for me, I try to get tasks just totally off my plate. So like once it's, you know, onboarded or off-boarded, whatever it is to, to Jane, I just don't like, it's out of my mind and I'm not doing that anymore. And it's just like in a rolling process that's consistently happening day after day or, you know, weekly or monthly or whatever it could be.
• 7:57
  When you're doing the loom, I guess you could also like transcribe it. Maybe that would make it easier. I don't personally do that, but you could. And I also don't actually use chat GPT for this. And now that I'm thinking this out loud, we should start doing this. But you could also use chat GPT to kind of like
• 8:14
  finesse the SOP or to figure out like how you could even improve the workflow one step further. I'm sure that would be like really, really useful. And obviously, chat GPT now, you know, for me, I have it open at all times, just asking different kinds of questions. And so if you kind of like have that in your workflow, I feel like it could also improve the process.
• 8:34
  But yeah, that's pretty much it. I record a loom of me doing the task. I observe tasks that I need to like delegate away from myself. And I, you know, delegate it to someone else. And then that's it. I basically am kind of like done, done with that.
• 8:49
  Yeah, you touched upon such an important thing there, which is that the brain space is gone. Like the moment you've done that and it's been delegated, you don't ever have to think about that thing anymore. And I think that's such a key thing in delegation because we can all kind of fall into the trap of thinking, hey, this thing just takes two minutes. I can just do that myself.
• 9:08
  Or, hey, this is just two seconds out of my day. Why don't I just do this? Or da-da-da-da-da. And these things build up and they all take up brain space because you're constantly reminding yourself like, oh, I need to remember that thing. I need to remember that thing. Even if it just takes one minute. Totally. The mental load you're giving yourself, the mental relief you're giving yourself by offloading this is huge. Okay, amazing. Absolutely.
• 9:31
  My next question, how do you go about finding a Jane? I think everyone would love a Jane. How do you find Jane? Everyone needs a Jane. Jane is so great. Okay, so for me, I personally use an agency. They are Australian-based and they specifically, you know, kind of –
• 9:47
  look at what you need and look at the tasks that you have and then they go out and find the right person for you. So again, I kind of like delegated that job to someone else because I didn't want to go through the hiring process myself. And then, you know, the way that the agency handles it is they kind of like bring a candidate or bring multiple candidates, you interview and then you choose.
• 10:08
  And then they, why I love working with an agency and I've worked with the same agency since 2021. Also happy to give anyone an intro. Feel free to slide into my DMs. But you have someone in the middle. So if there is ever a problem or if there is ever something, you know, someone needs to leave and someone new needs to start just having someone else part of that process,
• 10:30
  really helps. But having said that, of course, you pay a premium because you have an additional fee kind of in there. So you could go directly to somewhere like Upwork and source talent through Upwork. But you could also ask people in your network for recommendations, especially if you have
• 10:50
  you know, friends who are in the same kind of business models as you, or you kind of know people in that niche or in that industry, they might have a really great recommendation where they can be like, yes, I absolutely recommend this person. And this person, you know, is going to be gold, basically.
• 11:08
  Mm-hmm. I love that. So you walked through in the beginning kind of a couple of things that we use Jane for. What else could you use VAs for as a small business owner? Yes. Oh my gosh. You can use VAs for so many things. The really obvious kind of ones that we, like the tasks that we off-board, on-board, I don't know what to say here, off-board or on-board, but both. Yeah.
• 11:32
  It really is both. Yeah, it really is both. We have so many different channels and we have so much content. We're really a content business. So we have so much content going out across all these channels. So it's very admin heavy to do with scheduling or creating blog posts or uploading content somewhere or whatever it might be. But if you're in the e-commerce space, there are so many things that you can kind of have help with. And
• 11:59
  I have plenty of friends who use VAs for these kinds of things, but it's everything from, you know, customer service and having that whole process kind of templated and only escalating to you if there's something really serious that you need to kind of jump into. It can be to do with auto processing and management and kind of updating and coordinating things.
• 12:21
  that piece of the puzzle. It can be data entry. It can be product uploads to the website. And that might be things like, you know, going through and saving and resaving or editing product images, saving out different file types, you know, renaming things, all that kind of finicky stuff
• 12:38
  stuff that is key so that it doesn't all become a shambles, but that you don't necessarily need to be doing. It can also be website maintenance. It can be research for, you know, again, creating lists of different product development ideas or content ideas for social media or retailers to pitch to or, you know, SEO keyword research. Yeah. Yeah.
• 13:01
  can be to do with content creation and getting someone who does specialize in that side of things to, you know, create the templates and keep them updated in Canva and then schedule everything in, for example. It can also just be things like managing your calendar, scheduling appointments, that type of stuff. And then bookkeeping, accounting. Honestly, there's so many things. And what I would recommend here is...
• 13:22
  If you're, I mean, everyone should be using ChatGPT at the moment, but if you haven't yet, get on ChatGPT, put in a bit of a prompt of what you do and what your business is and the kinds of tasks you're doing and ask it, what could I be delegating and how could I free up my time with the use of a VA?
• 13:42
  Mm hmm. I'm just curious as a side note, how often do you and Jane chat on kind of a weekly or a monthly basis? Is that a kind of do you talk often back and forth to go over these things or is that very much more of a hands off process at this point? We chat often, like definitely every week. Mm hmm.
• 14:04
  But really, like, it's only if something comes up where there's a question that needs to be answered or something like that. It's not really about the step-by-step task that's been passed on. Because basically, once Jane takes over a workflow or, like, the events that trigger her tasks that she needs to complete, it's really just, like...
• 14:23
  the ball is rolling. I don't need to do anything. But of course, things come up where she needs to check in and confirm something or ask my opinion or whatever it might be. So we still do talk frequently, but I would say it's honestly just such a smooth process when you're able to get those tasks up and running.
• 14:40
  And I would also say, you know, the last thing on the topic of VAs is like, even for me, like, I obviously rely heavily on Jane, but also now you're able to use Jane too. And so when you're in a small team, again, thinking about how you could kind of lighten the load of your employees by delegating some of their admin tasks that they don't need to be doing either. Again, freeing up their kind of like...
• 15:09
  time and like brain energy to think on, you know, creative pieces of the business or the things that shift the needle forward, you know, when it comes to their tasks and KPIs and things like that. But you basically want people to be working in their zone of genius and focusing on, you know, big picture tasks. And for me personally, the things that bring me energy rather than take my energy and delegate everything else. Yeah. Yeah.
• 15:34
  Yeah, I love that. I even found the exercise super useful in kind of walking through all of your tasks and all the things that you do and what could possibly be handed over. I think everyone in any job in any role could really benefit from that kind of action.
• 15:49
  We have one more question, which actually came from our community, and I think it's a great one. So with this, also a good reminder to people listening that you can always pop into the Facebook group and we'll ask you if you have any questions for these kind of sessions and these co-hosted episodes.
• 16:07
  And the question goes, so how can you let go of perfectionism when you're delegating work? I think this is so difficult for anyone. It's probably the main hurdle that people have in mind when it first comes to delegating or outsourcing anything is, you know, I want it done my way. And I think my way is the best way. And how can you let go that sense of perfectionism and also still make sure that, you know, the standard is maintained properly?
• 16:34
  Totally. I mean, it's a muscle that you have to flex, right? Like you get used to it. It gets easier over time. Certainly in the beginning when you've been doing all the things and you've had so much more control over the business, it's harder to like let go. But again, perfection just, it cripples you and it keeps you kind of doing too many things that you don't need to be doing. And so for me, and you probably know this better than anyone, I'm,
• 17:02
  I know when I'm being a blocker in the business and I really try to remove myself when I can immediately observe that, oh, shit, I'm going to hold up the process here. I know that even though I really want to be involved in that and I know that I want to put my creative finesse on something, at some point I have to be like, you know what?
• 17:21
  it's better to just keep moving forward and get this off my plate because otherwise I'm just getting stuck on it and stalling. And it's really easy for me to observe that behavior now because I can tell when I start delaying on something that it just means that it shouldn't be on my task list because I'm not going to do it. And it's just better to like move on from it. And instead of trying to control, you know, so many things about that specific thing, it's just better to delegate and be like, you know what, it's
• 17:46
  you know, it doesn't matter in the, in the, you know, at the end of the day, like some things do matter, of course, but like,
• 17:53
  kind of being just pragmatic and being like, you know what, this actually doesn't matter. This isn't a big deal. I just need to like off board that or onboard that task to someone else so we can move forward consistently without me. And I think, again, it gets easier over time because I definitely used to be, and you probably also agree with this, I used to be more of a perfectionist, whereas now I'm like, you know what, like, let's just keep moving fast and keep taking action in
• 18:23
  if you do a good job of that loom and that step-by-step process and really communicating what is important to you and the things that like why something might matter or not matter, the more you can communicate and provide like really clear instructions and really clear step-by-step kind of like what you need and why it's important so someone else understands, then of course you're able to get great results.
• 18:50
  Whereas I think for me, if I've rushed something and I haven't given proper instructions, then of course, that's when you're like, shit, you know what? Actually, there's something that I forgot to tell you here that I need to like add into the mix and you didn't know. So now that's why we're going back again, but back and forth. But when you're able to just give a really clear set of instructions and kind of like communication around what's important to you and what matters, it makes the process easier.
• 19:17
  Yeah. And there's also, there's no shortcut to this, but I think time is also such a huge benefit. Like you said, Jane's been with you since 2021. We've worked together for a long time. I think the longer someone knows you, your brand, your tone of voice, that process gets easier and easier, which is such a good case for kind of starting to delegate in the early days. So you learn to flex that muscle. You get someone on board who kind of knows your brand and
• 19:43
  Yeah, there's no shortcut to that. So the longer they'll be with you, the easier that process that will be. Yes, absolutely. Great. Thank you so much. Loved this. Well, yeah, very great. For more of these kinds of episodes, pop into the Facebook group. Yes, absolutely. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week. That's the pod. That's the pod. That's the pod.
• 20:12
  Hey, it's June here. Thanks for listening to this amazing episode of the Female Startup Club podcast. If you're a fan of the show and want even more of the good stuff, I'd recommend checking out femalestartupclub.com where you can subscribe to our free newsletter. We send it out weekly covering female founder business news, insights and learnings in D2C, and interesting business resources.
• 20:37
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• 20:59
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