Automate, Delegate, or Drown
How therapy, stress, and a one-minute-a-day strategy taught me the power of delegation
Today’s post is going to be a shorter one. I spent a couple days this week on the road giving a presentation to the Jacksonville NARPM chapter, so my free days this week were a little more packed and I needed to save some time, so we’ll keep this one a little more condensed.
That said, it may be more condensed but it’s definitely not less important. In fact, the lesson in this article is one of the most important lessons you can learn in business. That lesson: the necessity of delegation.
This has been a very difficult lesson for me to learn. In fact, it tooks thousands of dollars of therapy. Yes, really. I spent several years in therapy, especially after I was diagnosed with clinical depression back during the pandemic, and while I never started attending to improve my business, it did end up serving that purpose.
Probably my second therapy session, my therapist asked me a simple question: how stressed are you? I’ve never felt stressed, so I told him I wasn’t at all. Then he started digging, and I started talking about my workload, my hours, how every decision flowed through me, etc. His conclusion: “yeah, all of that is called stress and anxiety.” That was a bit of shock to me. I had always thought of anxiety as people who have panic attacks and worry about things they have no control over, and that’s never been me. But from a clinical perspective, if you’re having difficulty sleeping because you’ve got so much work to do, or your days are so filled that you don’t have time to relax and wind down, that’s called stress and anxiety, and I was knee-deep in it.
Psychological Resistance to Delegation
Business owners are notoriously bad at delegating. If you’ve been successful at all in business, it’s likely because you’ve put everything into your business. You have controlled every minute detail of it, and you’ve been a complete perfectionist. And that’s fine when you’re starting up and there’s literally no one else to help, but that doesn’t scale, and not many people are in business to never scale.
Business owners have a tendency to think that “no one will do it as good as I do.” There are two problems with this:
It’s almost certainly not true. The idea that you are literally the best person on earth for a specific task is already extremely unlikely, but the idea that you’re the best person on earth for EVERY task in your business is downright impossible. Someone else can do it better. You certainly have your strong suits that you should focus on, but a whole lot of what you do will likely be done better by someone else.
Even if was true, it doesn’t matter, because it can’t be sustained. So you have to learn how to accept someone else doing it and doing it almost as good as you. The best rule of thumb is that if someone else can do it at least 80% as well as you can, then have them do it. Your time as the leader of the organization is better devoted to other tasks.
The Cost of Control
Failure to delegate is costing you. It is costing you growth because you are pulled in too many directions to focus on sales and marketing. It is costing you in operations because you can’t devote your time to it while also worrying about growth. It is costing you employee turnover because your failure to let go is making work impossible for your employees and hurting morale.
But most importantly, it is costing you enormously in operating cost. Everything that you’re doing that should be the job of someone else is costing you the time opportunity to just sit down and think. Some of the most valuable work you can do is just sitting down and imagining things you can innovate. But since you’re always in the weeds on day-to-day operations since you won’t delegate, all of those possibilities are lost.
Forcing the Shift
So here’s what my therapist told me to do that worked wonders for me. At the beginning, I was basically working 12 hour days. I got to the office at 9am and didn’t stop working until 9pm most days, sometimes later. And keep in mind, this was years ago before I had a consulting company, before I was doing public speaking, before I was writing this newsletter. I didn’t even have a wife and kid at the time. All I had to do was work, and that is all I did. Every day, seven days a week.
So my therapist told me to just start cutting back one minute a day. That’s it. One minute. It doesn’t sound like a lot until you do the math and realize that it adds up to 6 hours over the course of a year. So if I followed this plan, I would take my work day from 12 hours down to 6 in just a year. So I set an alarm on my watch for 8:59pm the first day and kept bumping it back one minute a day.
The reason this works is that it doesn’t give you any other option but making it work. If you live by the alarm and stop when you’re supposed to stop, then literally the only way to make sure the work gets done is to either automate it or delegate it. So every single day I got something off my plate to make sure that one minute less of time available in my work day didn’t negatively impact the business. That’s when my obsession with automation began, and along with it I started delegating like a madman. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t easy. The same psychological barriers were still there telling me that I was handing off work to someone who wouldn’t do it as well as I did. But I had no choice, so I did it anyway. And you know what? It worked out just fine.
Not only did I get my work day down to a normal number of hours, but I ended up having extra time in my day. Which, of course, is how I ended up starting a consulting/training company which eventually led to this newsletter.
Full disclosure, though, I made the same mistake again. I took on too many consulting clients, started doing too much content creation, etc., and my day worked itself back up to 12 hours. Now I’m going through the same exercise today to fix it. I have blocked off 45 minutes at the start of each day where I do nothing but delegate or automate to start reducing my workload, and I’ve cut back on the number of consulting hours I’ll take on for consulting clients. Even once you figure out the secret to fixing the problem, no guarantee you won’t fall back into the same bad habit again. You just have to recognize it and go through the exercise to fix it once more.
One Hour That Changes Everything
If you have more than a six hour work day, I want you to go right now and block off one hour a day on your calendar, every day, recurring until the end of time, You aren’t allowed to remove that recurring calendar event until you’ve got your work day down to under 6 hours. During that one hour, you will do nothing but automate or write SOPs to delegate tasks to someone else in your organization.
“But Todd, how will I get my other work done if I’m taking away an hour of my time each day?!” The problem solves itself. By taking that hour each day to delegate and automate, you are reducing the amount of work you’ll have for every single day in the future. Every day it gets better and better and better. So yes, those first few days you might get a little behind. But then you’ll find that it’s getting easier and easier, and you can actually devote more of your day to automation and delegation to speed up the process. Before you know it, you’re barely even necessary for your own company to function!
Don’t limit your business and your own happiness. Take the plunge with me. Automate and delegate.
We’re Hiring!
My property management company is looking for another BDM! If you have PM experience, and you either live in Atlanta or are willing to move here, please send me a resume. The position offers a combination of salary and per-door commission (with a heavy emphasis on commission), so we’re looking for go-getters who will put in the work to close leads. You would start off with 40+ leads from day one, so plenty of opportunity. Georgia real estate license required, or must be willing to get it prior to starting. If interested, email me a copy of your resume to toddo@revolutionrm.com
Open to Work
Are you an experienced PM industry employee looking for work? Or are you a PM company or vendor seeking the best talent? Send me your info and I’ll feature it here! And look forward to future editions where we’ll be featuring some of the best RTMs available!
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Debate Me
Disagree with my take here? Have a different perspective? There’s nothing I love more than a good debate or even just an intelligent conversation. If you’d like to jump on a podcast recording with me to discuss this topic, please let me know!
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