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Apr 28, 2016

Delegate or die: Managing Internal Operations

As the CEO of an early-stage company, you have exactly one job — making sure the lights stay on long enough for your company to grow and eventually become profitable. Sure. A million things go into that job. Recruitment. Sales. Marketing. Engineering. Product Management. Etc. It’s not easy. But realizing you can’t do everything is the first step toward success. Delegating nearly every internal operations activity to others on your team will help you get focused on what matters most.

I know. This sounds like a luxury you can’t afford. But it’s not. It’s the difference between success and failure.

It’s likely that you’ll be the last to know if you’re not properly delegating. Your team will have figured it out long before you. Listen to the signs. As the key decision maker, failure to delegate can lead to bottlenecks in other parts of the company, ultimately making everyone’s jobs a whole lot more difficult. Help your team out by delegating!

Every second you spend trolling LinkedIn for potential candidates is a second you could have been meeting with your engineer about a development challenge she’s facing. Any moment you spend watching a demo for a CRM is a moment you could have been fine-tuning your fundraising pitch. Any amount of brain power you exhaust trying to develop an employee handbook is brain power you should have spent thinking about your revenue strategy.

Delegate the background research, demos, marketing drafts, etc. and swoop in to clarify any questions, fine-tune strategies, and gain your team’s insight in order to make the final decision.

Your job is to give guidance and let others focus their full attention on executing. It’s time to reassign the execution of tasks to your amazing team so you can focus on what matters most.

Almost every part of internal operations can be automated or delegated. Not sure where to start? Here’s a solid list.

Scheduling: Automate. There are a million tools. If that’s not enough, hire a Zirtual assistant.
Emails: Reply or forward. Always. You should also create canned replies to save time when replying to certain types of people. “Thanks for your message. We’re not interested at this time.” Label your emails for future reference and assign them as tasks if you’re not going to reply within a few days.
Random Tasks: Use a task manager to keep things organized — and then have that task manager remind you when you’ve missed a deadline. If you miss the deadline twice, delegate that task to someone else on your team or delete it (because you’re never going to do it anyway).
Fundraising research: Delegate the background research on every potential investor so you can simply read the summarized version. Choose a trusted member of your team or bring on a contractor or consultant to help you with this. It’s too important to do on your own.
Recruitment research: Delegate the task of creating a list of potential candidates for every role. You’ll meet with this person a few times to fine-tune their search and keep them on the right track.
Recruitment outreach: Once you’ve have finalized the list of candidates you want to reach out to, have someone else draft your emails to candidates and send them from your account. You’ll look over the emails before they go but your brain power will be reserved for other decisions.
Selecting internal tools: CRM. ERP. HRIS. ATS. They’re all important but you shouldn’t be the person vetting each of the various companies offering solutions. Instead, you should meet with a person on your team, tell them what you want in a tool, and have them research the best solutions. They’ll be the one to conduct preliminary demos and will only bring you in once the final decision needs to be made.
Employee Onboarding: You should automate this as much as possible — which requires a tool or service. Have someone else on your team choose the tool or service.
Employee Onboarding Documents: Have someone else on your team draft an employee handbook and onboarding tools. You can spend some time brainstorming important points and they’ll do the research to figure out the best way to go about it.
Finance, Accouting, Payroll, Benefits: Outsource this until your company is big enough to warrant hiring a full-time person. But don’t spend your time on these tasks. If you’re worried about the cost, you’re missing the bigger picture.
Employee Happiness: You think your employees are happy. They tell you every time you ask. But you don’t know if they’re content in their jobs and planning on staying with the company for the long-haul. Unfortunately, this isn’t a task you can completely delegate but you can have someone hold you accountabe. Select a person on your team (or bring in a consultant) to make sure you’re on the right track. They’ll launch surveys and make sure all managers are having 1:1s with their team (if you have a small team, this likely means you’re the one having 1:1s with everyone on your team).
Solving Ineffencies: Choose a person on your team (or bring in a consultant) and delegate the task of discovering inefficiencies and deciding on solutions. In theory, every person on your team should be coming up with innovative ways to do the work of 10 people. They should be able to identify inefficiencies and create solutions. In reality, they’re overwhelmed with constantly learning how to do the next task, they may not see obvious solutions.

If you built the right team, they’ll do the research to handle every task you send their way. They’ll almost always find a way to successfully complete that task. If you need to hold their hand on basic internal operations tasks, then it is highly unlikely they’ll scale with the company.

If you don’t have enough people on your team to take on some of these responsibilities, hire someone! And if you don’t have the long-term budget to hire someone, bring on a contractor to do the work. I also recommend bringing on a consultant who can help train your team to prioritize in a way that helps them take on more of these crucial tasks without overburdening themselves (or you).