Welcome back to the BBG studio. I am here with the beautiful Jill Olish. We are here today to talk about buckets and boom gates. And this week Jill O is the team series still we're carrying on.
Yes. And Kim, thank you for having me be a part of this. You are the fiercest. And wonderful team leader of my sexy business team and community. Um, and an expert in my opinion, experienced leader in delegating. I'll take the
experienced
leader. I
will not take
the
expert. I'm the
expert
of nothing.
You are an experienced leader in delegating and we have lots to talk about. And I think you need to start us off at all. A little bit why we're talking about delegating again.
So the last couple of episodes we've been leading up to a lot of the team series things, and we've talked about how to join a team. We've talked about being on a team. We've talked about to delegate. I really think we need to slow our role a little bit and talk about how to delegate because so much can be riding on whether a business owner. Whether an entrepreneur can delegate.
And I have some confessions to make today about how terrible of a delegator I used to be still learning, by the way, still absolutely learning how to delegate. I think this is a really important conversation, Jill.
It's. Super important for the entrepreneurs out there, especially those beginning who may not even have heard of the word delegate in business. Cause I know it was a new concept for me starting out. Um, and there's a right and a wrong way to do it. And it can have a lot of repercussions or a lot of success. Depending on if you're well versed at it. So I'm glad we're able to talk about it and I can learn more as we keep practicing on the team and in life. So I'm ready to get spicy today.
Oh, it will be spicy, Jill. It will be spicy. One thing I want to say right out of the gate, delegation is never easy. Everybody wants the easy button for delegation and there's not one. So delegating can make or break your business actually, and if you're new to it, I want you to hear me loud and clear that it can cause you the most damage and the most pain to delegate something if you are trying to do it the wrong way. And I do feel like I did it the wrong way.
So I can absolutely speak to this. I've done it the wrong way over and over, like different ways. And that's one of the reasons we're here in this podcast in particular is we want to make things with a shorter learning curve for you and we want to make a, you know, we just want to share that you're not by yourself if you've been messy about your delegation. Let me, let me just say that.
No. Definitely not alone in that. Um, so Kim, with starting off with the question of how do I, how, what is not the right way to delegate to where we want to start?
I think that that would be a great place to start. And I'm kind of giggling because when you delegate the wrong way, it becomes more painful than it was before you delegated. So a lot of business owners will go in thinking that they can be replaced, like, what they're thinking in their mind, what they've been doing to build their business can be replaced instantly with someone who they, they, they may know the person, but they, that person doesn't know what they've been thinking in their head.
So I'll, I'll give the example of one of the worst ways to delegate is to assume someone else knows what you know. It doesn't mean they don't know that. However, you do things a certain way. You have a certain way of doing things, you have a certain process you use, whatever it is. Even if it's a bad process, you have a way of doing something for your business.
The reason to delegate is to gain more time back for you as the owner versus spending all your time doing all the little things in your business. So that's the first place to delegate. But you can't think that someone's going to instantly be able to read your mind, do what you're doing now, and just take off and bazillion dollars. Because I think that's the common thing through so many entrepreneurs that I see.
Is there a moment that comes up as we're talking about this, that you remember being a wrong way of delegating to someone?
I have a whole list. I'll just say that. I have a whole list. In the beginning, I feel like I am probably the poster child for how to do it wrong. So in the beginning, I thought if I knew something, everybody else already knew it because I feel like I'm a slow learner. So if I'm going to delegate something, I can go through a list of humans, like on a service, and I started with a service that is common.
You know, with business owners and with entrepreneurs who are not able to bring someone on full time, let's just say that they're starting out with a task. So maybe they hire a virtual assistant from one of the platforms that offers that per hour you pay goes into like an escrow account, and then someone does the work and then you approve it and they're paid. So, that's a process of something online. And I believe that one of the biggest ones is Upwork.
We are not recommending, we are not saying don't use them or use them. We're not saying either one of those things. But there was a similar one that I used in the beginning. And when I did, I wanted someone who could do certain, like, VA tasks, virtual assistant tasks. I wanted them to do certain things. So, I gave the list of what I wanted them to do. Sounded easy, sounded like they were going to solve the pain. The problem was I didn't realize I didn't have anything set up for them to follow.
So, when I told them to check my email, and this is a true story, when it was a checking my email thing, Well, they can read all my emails. What, what are they supposed to do with them? What are they supposed to tell me is in there? What are they, like what is their job to do to make sure I know what's in my emails? Because the reason I wanted them to check my emails was to give me back time. I was getting hundreds of emails at the time, which now we get thousands, which is like literal.
We get thousands of emails. Every week that we have to sort through well back then I was getting hundreds and I'll be honest dozens to me is overwhelming because email, email is hard, but that was one of the things I saw I could do. I could delegate this, but because I didn't have any kind of process in place, they were reading my emails and I was still reading my emails.
And then I was still deciding what needed to be done and what, and if I asked them to, you know, send a message to someone, they didn't know that someone, so I did have someone who was very literal, very factual in what they were doing. So if I said, hey, can you see if I can move this or reschedule this? That was no problem.
They did that, but they did it in such a way that actually was hurting clients feelings and, and causing harm in relationships because, Hey, I need to move this not, not optional. You know, Kim needs to just cut and dry. And it's like, Ooh, you, you need to, you need to at least say hello to them, or at least say, I'm, I'm Kim's assistant, you need to say, you need to frame this in a way. Because I wasn't saying we are moving this time and that's what they were doing.
We are moving this time and no, it was a question. It's a question. So that was a hard experience of, okay, maybe I need to rethink this. I don't know how to delegate. I don't know how to hire a virtual assistant. However, that was not my first thought. My first thought was they don't know what they're doing. My first thought was. They're not, they're not a good VA because they're not doing, they're not managing my emails.
They're not managing my calendar because they are like putting stuff on my calendar. I don't want on my calendar. Well, they don't have the rules. They don't know the process. They don't know how we choose who we put on the calendar because strangers can't get on my calendar. And I was so busy and I, and I was trying to solve that problem with this human that I didn't even know this was somebody, you know, I had never met, never seen, never anything. And they're trying to do this stuff.
Well, then I started getting more uncomfortable because. They're ruining relationships or not really ruining them, but causing harm to them because my client would say, Hey, I can't, I can't reschedule this. You know, I'm busy during this time. And I'm like, yes, I know this, but my VA did not. So it got very, I'm just going to call it very sketchy for a little bit. And so what happened, which is also not a brilliant move on my part is they were still getting paid for doing.
The same thing I was still having to do, but I felt like, okay, well, I told him that I wanted him to do this every month for like the next year. And so I guess I should just keep paying them for doing something that I'm still really having to do. So then suddenly my business has taken me more time. It's taken me money to pay someone who's not helping with my time. And so it got really messy really quick.
And I think that's a great place to kick this conversation off Jill, because I see this happen all the time.
Oh, I'm sure I am sure. Cause I, I, I don't have much experience delegating, but I have started to try. And being on a team, I feel is a little bit different when. There's still someone else still getting to me versus in my own business when I'm the one that has to figure it all out and be able to do this and avoid a situation of learning, like how you just described. Um, so I'm, I'm glad we're having this kind of conversation. We can see those, those ways not to do it.
That is definitely not the way to do it.
So let's fast forward a little bit in this example. I bumped my head repeatedly before I got this right. I'm gonna say that. I bumped my head hard because I ended up replacing that VA with another one who also I didn't give instructions to. And then I realized, you know what? It's not them. It's me. It's me not giving the instructions that I need to have very hard Boundaries around like my calendar. Don't add people to my calendar that I don't know. That's the first thing.
Don't add people to my calendar who haven't been pre approved to add to my calendar. I get a say so in what I do with my time. And so those were the first rules. I know that that sounds very basic and it is, but those were the first rules I set up is I need to check in of the most important things. I need nothing added to my calendar that you don't ask me about first. I need you to be kind to my clients because my clients are what makes our business go round.
And like, so those were some of the first rules I set up. And the funny thing is, is it changed VA because the VA now knows what to do. Now understand some of the pieces. So it took a long time. It took a long time to get there, but I have like, for example, I have one account that gets, I don't know, 15 or 16, 000 emails a month. It's a business one, but I get that many emails a month.
If I didn't have someone to help me manage that, I would never know what comes into that email, into that inbox because it's too much. But having someone who can go in and And say, okay, this is not, we don't even know how you got our address. So this one's deleted. We don't know who you are. This one's deleted because this, this particular email is not for any kind of solicitation. It is only client related.
So if they're not on the, what I'm going to call the approved client list, that there's no, there's no correspondence necessary. Okay. But when someone that is a client SOS's, they send out something, Hey, I really need this. And it's kind of an emergency. I'm in the middle of launch and something's happened, or I'm in the middle of something. And now I don't know what to do about this. That's really important for me to get immediately.
That's not a, this can wait until we do our check in this afternoon. This is a, Hey, you've got an SOS. You need to check. So having the ability to give them. That kind of information, that kind of tournamenting as we call it, they can decide if something is really important or not.
That, that means 16, 000 ish emails a month can boil down to a handful for me because they also have the ability to, if a client asks for, let's say, XYZ, they already have the list that says they're approved to have XYZ.
So
they can send it without asking me. They already knew, know what the rules are and our rule list for that particular inbox is enormous, but the time that it takes off of my calendar and off my plate is, I mean, it's priceless because I don't deal with much on that and that gives me the ability to do other things. So. Is that, is that making sense, Jill? Like, am I putting enough pieces in there to make sure that that's clear? I think so.
Um, and what I'm interested now in knowing a little bit more about is like that process part that you have to figure out and before you even get to that part, cause we may not even have enough time for that in this episode. The, the piece that I think I'd like to ask you is. You're fast forwarded part, you figured out you needed to come up with some instructions.
What happens when you find that you're missing pieces still, because you know the process so well, you know how to, how you two are going to do it. How do you step back and figure out how to tell how to figure out those process steps without skipping any, even if you do like that, that whole bit, I guess.
So every time that I would meet with my VA at the time, I would add something else to the rules because they would ask me a question and I would understand, okay, that's not clear. So let's add this in here. So it became a thing of, they actually trained me in what they needed to know,
right?
I have it in my head, but how do you know client A? Is needing something that they can't have. How do you know client A needs to come through before any of the other clients? How do you know what the queue is? Because we operate in a queue around here of, you know, if you're in the queue to be published, let's say we're doing a publishing project for you. We have a publishing queue. So there's an order to it.
If someone's asking a question and they're not in the queue, there's a different response they get then, then, Hey, it's going to be Tuesday of next week that you're going to get this message or it, it just, it empowers them to be able to be you and gives you the ability not to deal with some of the minutiae, some of the things that. You know, there's a phrase that, that we all like to use, but this is in practice of working on your business instead of in your business.
If I continue to do all the things in the queue, if I continue to do all of my own Brazilian emails, if I continue to do all those things, I'm going to, that's all I'm going to get done. I'm not going to have the ability to, Step back and look at the big view of the business and say, how can we make the whole business better? How can we add to the team? How can we do some of these big things? Because I'm too busy answering 16, 000 emails.
So an assistant of any kind is for the purpose of delegating to them something that takes something off you as the owner's plate. Delegating because we don't like something is a great place to start, but it may be the hardest place to start when you start delegating because if you hate it, you don't have the process figured out. And if you don't have the process figured out, and then you try to give it to somebody else, then they may not understand the process either.
So, And I will say, I know we're tapping into a lot of pieces, but when you start out to delegate, it's very hard to want to pay a lot of money to delegate something when you're not sure if it's going to help you or not.
So a
lot of people will take the shortcut of hiring someone very cheaply who doesn't actually know what questions to ask you. So one of the people that I hired way, way back, I recognize I still was the problem. Let me be clear. I was the problem, but they didn't even know enough about emails to be able to ask me questions about clients. They, they were still trying to figure out the difference between the inbox and the spam folder.
And like, so you've got to be very careful that you're not trying to cut, cut the cost in the wrong place.
And
one of the best things I ever did was hire someone who was so versed in email. They actually taught me things about my email. I didn't even know like that, but that was a very amazing thing that happened because they literally trained me as I was training what I wanted in my list of rules and things to follow. They literally trained me in what they needed. Because they had done it so long, they understood, you know, do you have a client roster that needs to be, you know, the priority?
These are the questions they were asking me. And I'm like, Holy moly, that helps so much. So the cost of that assistant was quite a lot more than the other one. But the value of my time was exponentially increased. Changed because I then had someone who helped me get a list together, who helped me put things in an order that someone could follow. Right. So,
Ooh, I have one last question based off of that. Cause it sounds like it would almost be too much time spent on the business owners side to figure out a lot of those. pieces that they would need to tell someone or that they'd have to keep coming back to give more instructions. So is delegating the right way really worth our time to figuring it out?
I'm going to say a resounding yes because if I didn't have others I could delegate to, if I didn't have team Like members in place. I wouldn't even have time for the clients we have. I would never have grown any in any way. I'd still probably have the one or two clients in the very beginning because that's all my time would allow. But now I have the benefit of the team being there to support my calendar. Cause that's what it boils down to.
They support my calendar so that the business can run without me. And I think it's really, really important when you are hanging out with us. And let me just put this out there. There are lots of people who will teach you how to make a lot of money and do it the really hard way. And then you get to the, you know, end of your life. You're not healthy. You're, you know, you might have made a lot of money, but you don't have the health that you could have had by not having the stress.
You don't have the relationships with your family that you could have had. By spending some time with them. So our community, let's be very open and clear about this. Our community is about building things to support our lives and not take our lives. So it's about building a business. We own that does not own us without delegating deal there. It's not possible to have a business that doesn't own you. It, it owns you because you can't delegate.
Okay. So delegation to me is the key to setting things in motion. It's just knowing how to delegate, when to delegate. It's those pieces.
And maybe in our next episode, we'll talk about those pieces and yeah, have a lot more fun with some of the delegating stuff.
Here's some more confessions. I think that's what I hear the most. We do want to invite everybody though. We don't want to like close out this podcast without inviting everyone to, we have an open house every month for Groundwork Brigade Mastermind that you are welcome to come, you know, message us, come head over to mysexybusiness. com. The link will be in the show notes, but we do want to invite you to come and check out the community.
Because we have a community of entrepreneurs that we feel like we're the home for where they can learn, especially if they don't know how to do a lot of things. Like if, if they're learning and we're all learning, let me make that clear. We're all learning, but we'd love to invite you to the open house. So you can come and check out a community who is learning together, who are implementing the things we talk about on this podcast.
And. Lots of experience in the group, lots of new people in the group. So it's, it's a mixed, I think that that's a really important thing to say too. Some people have been in business for decades and some people are brand new. And it's a great, great place for support, for community, for learning, for rocking your business. That's what I'm going to say.
Yep. Really having that business that doesn't own you. That you own.
Yes. Yes. And yes. So thank you for being with us today in the BBG studio, Jill. Thank you for being here with me and asking great questions.
Thanks, Kim. And thank you listening today and in the future. And we'll see you in the studio next time. Love y'all.