Tasks brand founders should delegate from the start

Tim Ferris was only able to become successful and famous for his 4-hour work week because he delegates his daily tasks to subordinates who handle everything for him. He doesn’t do the nitty-gritty of everyday operations himself and you don’t have to, either.

In fact, the sooner you delegate those time-consuming tasks, the better manager you will be because you’ll free up brain capacity for more long-term strategic thinking and creativity for building your brand.

What you gain when delegating:

• Time
• Efficiency
• Brain power for the bigger picture
• Employees specialize in the delegated activities and quality of work goes up (better than you doing it absent-mindedly)

Of course, you can’t lose control of your own enterprise so you’ll have to learn how to delegate and how to improve overall efficiency when doing it.

To decide what to delegate, ask yourself:

1. What tasks drag you down and feel like getting in the way of more important work?

Outsource these tasks to quality employees or freelancers.

2. What tasks you are best at and do with great results?

Once your to-do list shortens, you are free to move, think and drive the brand forward.

Tasks to delegate

Administrative tasks

• Scheduling meetings
• Phone calls
• Booking & travel planning
• Any documentation prep (contracts, licensing, patents)
• Employee time-off schedules

You don’t have to be a big shot to claim back your time. Get an assistant to organize it all so you can go to a meeting prepared instead of overwhelmed.

Special note about email: Anyone can scrape your email nowadays and fight for your attention. Just drop it. Get your assistant to sift through your mail and don’t even make a point about answering everyone. No serious CEO has time for this.

Accounting, taxes, invoices

This is specialized work and should be done by a professional anyway. It’s not worth saving on their services when a mistake can be a lot costlier.

Besides, invoices are work in retrospect – money to receive for products already sold, while you could be generating more sales at that same time instead of crunching numbers.

Marketing

This is where lots of entrepreneurs fall victim of their own control freak nature. You don’t have to do everything yourself to make it on-brand. With proper guidelines in place, your team or agency will be able to execute your vision.

These guidelines should include:

• Brand story
• Brand vision and mission
• Recommended terms and words to use + such the brand should not be associated with
• Style guide and brand voice instructions
• Target group(s)
• Topics of interest to the target group
• Frequented media channels and preferred formats
• Visual identity
• List of competitors as well as complementary services/ products

Many founders feel obliged to create content, post on social media, do outreach, prepare presentations, and coordinate photoshoots.

In your first days – yes, you will probably have to, but hire marketers as soon as possible and delegate it all to them.

That’s their field of expertise and besides your authentic passion and story behind the product, you shouldn’t be toiling over the company blog and doing cold emailing.

Read more: Content Marketing for DTC brands

It looks so much personal when you put your name on it, I know. But that’s why it shouldn’t be overused. The rare cases when you do get involved in marketing, it should be high-impact PR appearances and authority opinion pieces.

It’s worth keeping your own professional profiles, on Medium for example, especially if you have already gained certain influence only to weigh in on important topics and keep a thought leadership position.

What looks really bad: brand founders begging for backlinks personally or replying to comments under FB ads. Don’t you have anything better to do?

Website tweaks

You’re building your brand from scratch, but it doesn’t mean you have to maintain the website yourself. Unless you’re a seasoned professional in that type of work, leave it to someone better. Xobee Networks offers managed it support for non profits so you don’t have to worry about frustrating tech issues.

Not just the design, but copy, features, new products to add and product descriptions to write – there’s probably something to do every day and you’ll never be able to focus on more strategic work if you are first responder to issues.

Customer support

First, live chat is like being behind the counter of a brick-and-mortar store. It takes up (all your) time and focus just to be helpful and polite, let alone amazing at it. That’s why it’s best to have dedicated people for this task instead of you answering questions while trying to fit a hundred other things in your day. Support done this way will never earn standing ovation and will most likely hurt your brand.

Second, responding to reviews is ok, but it doesn’t really matter if it’s you or somebody else on the team. If you really think your name there will make a difference, have customer support write on your behalf.

Third, we talked about email already – it’s an endless spiral to avoid getting caught up in the first place.

The added bonus of delegating support is that you’ll be getting distilled feedback to use in your strategy thinking, but without the drama and details to clog up your brain.

Read more: How Native Cosmetics’ founder Moiz Ali grew his brand to stardom listening to customer feedback

New employee onboarding

Especially for small teams, you should welcome them to show openness and team spirit, but do not walk them through the absolute whole lot of their responsibilities. This should be done by someone who’s done the job or will work closely with the new hire. If you’re still on the process of finding the right employees, a Lehi recruiting company might be able to help you. You may also see post to use effective tips on how to find the right people for your company.

Besides, if you know each and every detail of blog formatting or sticker printing, you have too much free time on your hands 🙂

In the grey zone

Marketing campaigns

It’s alright if you work with marketing on event organization, PR and special campaigns, and approve their concepts for routine ones. As the brand visionary, your angle is unique and valuable. Just don’t let the mundane take over and suck you into fixing FB ads.

Sales deals

To get things moving smoothly, delegating also means trusting your team to make the best decision. For wholesale and retail deals, set up a process like the big companies do: set tiers of terms and let the salespeople handle it. No need to approve each individual offer if they know their targets and clearly defined margin to negotiate.

To sum up, any operations task that requires you to know details to do it well should be delegated so the people responsible dive deep into it and build expertise.

Some areas not to delegate or at least stay actively involved in:

• Brand growth and direction, long-term strategy, expansion
• Product quality and new product development; Product performance monitoring
• Supplier relations, manufacturing supervision
• Contract checking
• Strategic partnerships, networking (employees are bad for this)
• Budgeting, target setting
• Performance monitoring, quality of new customer acquisition and levels of retention
• Hiring, team building and motivation, efficiency and organization, internal communication
• Events, offline shows

After all, you as a brand founder are the driving force behind it all and your energy should not be wasted on short-term tasks.