Episode 151: The Art of Delegation and Building a Business That Works for You

In this episode of The Wize Way Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, Tim Causbrook and Ed Chan tackle one of the biggest challenges for firm owners: letting go of the work. 

Ed explains why true growth comes from shifting from doing to managing—and how learning to delegate effectively can transform your firm.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:46 Managing vs. doing the work
• 3:27 How delegation works

Transcript

Wize Mentoring: 0:02

From Wize Mentoring is The Wize Guys Podcast for Accountants and Bookkeepers, a show about accounting and bookkeeping practice owners and the many stories, lessons and tips lessons, their experience of transitioning from a time- poor practice to a business that runs without them.

Tim Causbrook: 0:23

Ed, if you could share really one action point. I love what Jamie said about figuring out what motivates you or figuring out what will help you stay on this journey. We're big on persistence and consistency in this community because we know what we've got to do. You've just got to make sure that you do it each day or each week or each month, and you will get the result in the end, and everyone's different. So, Ed, it's overwhelming. I know I was pretty overwhelmed when I started with this.

Tim Causbrook: 0:47

There are so many different aspects to the journey. You've already said that you know, look at each of the seven divisions and withdraw methodically from those, and that's a really great one. Do you have any other action points? Maybe just one action point that you'd suggest taking next to act on this discussion? If someone hasn't really even thought about their business as a passive investment or as a business, and it's more that they go to work and they have a bunch of people who help them do their job, and they've got more of a job than a business, can you share? Where should they begin? What's the first step they should take?

Ed Chan: 1:18

I guess the hardest thing. We all grew up as grinders. We grew up doing the work, so it's really easy doing the work and for some of us who are now running our businesses, we you know, we enjoy doing the work okay.

Ed Chan: 1:33

So there's a tendency to want to do the work, but that's okay as a practitioner, and you've got, you know, an unlimited amount of time. But if you've got a limited amount of time and you want to run a business because the only way you can scale and make decent money and have a better lifestyle is to scale, and critical to your ability to scale and run as a business is your ability to delegate. So there's a difference between delegation and abdication. And I think that's probably, if I'm going to pick one thing that's probably the biggest challenge for all of us who've grown up, if you like, as grinders, as people that are doing the work, and now we've got to manage the work, and there's a huge difference between doing the work and managing the work. And then if you find it difficult to delegate, then there's a tendency to go back and just do the work, and hence, you know, I get people say to me it's quicker if I just do it myself, but you can't scale that. There's only so many hours in a day and you have to learn to delegate and part of the delegation process this is what I used to say to myself if I do the task from start to finish, then I'm not managing, I'm doing right, and your value to the organisation is not in your doing, it's in your managing, because the only way that you can scale the business is to improve your management ability. Now, this is the way I used to try and help myself think, and as I said, I was a grinder, and I moved into a management position, and nobody taught me how to manage people. So I used to say to myself, if I'm doing a task from A to Z, from start to finish, that I'm not managing, I'm doing, and I need to give it to somebody else to do 80% of it, and I only do the last 20%. So if I'm doing 100% of the task, I'm not managing, I'm doing, and being a doer is of no value to the organisation.

Ed Chan: 3:37

Being a manager is where the value is to the organisation and to your own team, to the people around you, and so forth. So every task that you're doing should be pushed over to somebody else, and then you end up doing the last 20%. And if you're not doing the last 20% and you're doing it from start to finish, then you're not managing, you're doing so. It's as simple as that. So, try and think of it in those terms and never do a task from start to finish. All your tasks as a manager should be done by the team, and you should be doing the very high- level tasks, the checking, reviewing, and the last 20% of that job. And if you train your people well enough, then eventually they'll be able to do 99% of that job, where you can just run a quick eye over it. Or if you're the owner of a business and you've hired a client manager to do the work, then you do 0% of that work at all. The whole team is doing it from start to finish.

Ed Chan: 4:40

So if I were going to pick one thing, I'd say learn how to delegate and not abdicate, and learn that you're a manager and not a doer. And it's not quicker if you do it yourself, but it takes a little bit longer to train someone, and it takes a bit more patience, and it takes consistency and the right kind of thinking. Because, Tim, you know and I know, even in our own firms and in your firm and when you're coaching other firms, you know the hardest thing to do is to get the owner to let go and to delegate and to manage and not do. But then you go to the client managers, and you know it's one of the hardest things to get the client manager to let go and push the work down. And they just want to hang on to it for several reasons. One thing they don't understand, right, is that their value to the organisation is to push the work down. They might like doing it, so there's a tendency to hang on to it, but that's not their role as a client manager.

Ed Chan: 5:44

If you're doing some administration work or some production work, you're getting paid a lot of money to do a very low-task activity. You'll either cost getting paid a lot of money to do a very low task activity. You'll either cost the client a lot of money, right, because you're charging an accounting rate for an administration task and or the organization is going to write that time off because you've gone over the budget, because you've misallocated resources to get that task done. So if you manage your work, you work out the resources that you need to get that work done. You don't jump in there and do it yourself. That's very, very costly to the organisation.

Tim Causbrook: 6:22

Great point there, Ed, on delegating and pushing down the work, not just at the owner's level but all throughout the organisation.

Wize Mentoring: 6:39

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