This episode started with something simple — teaching my 7-year-old how to vacuum the house.

Hi, I'm Mike Fox, host of this podcast, "Lone Wolf Unleashed."

And in all truth, it wasn’t simple at all. It turned out to be one of the clearest lessons I’ve ever had on delegation, systems, and letting go of tasks I should never have been doing in the first place.

If you’re a solo operator who’s convinced delegation “doesn’t apply to you,” we need to talk. Because most of the work you’re buried under doesn’t require your judgment… just your knowledge. And once you learn how to transfer that knowledge properly, everything gets lighter.

In this episode, I break down:

• the hidden micro-decisions inside every “quick task”

• why handing something off is a skill, not a personality type

• how to define “done” so you’re not picking up the pieces later

• how to build a feedback loop that actually helps people improve

• the difference between teaching judgment vs teaching steps

• why your fear of “not being needed” is probably slowing your business down

If a seven-year-old can learn to vacuum like a pro with the right structure, you can absolutely train someone — or something — to take recurring tasks off your plate.

Listen in, and make this the week you finally hand off one thing you shouldn’t be doing anymore.

Timestamped summary

00:00 "Delegation Over Perfection"

03:17 Delegating Tasks and Automation

07:12 Delegating Tasks with Efficiency

10:47 Delegation: Knowledge vs. Judgment

13:00 "Communicate Task Completion Effectively"

16:08 Delegation Tips and Website Promo

Links

Tim Ferris talking to Sam Corcos - https://tim.blog/2023/09/20/sam-corcos/

My template download - http://lonewolfunleashed.com/procedure-template

Mentioned in this episode:

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In this episode, we're talking about delegation.

G'. Day. My name's Mike, and you're listening to Lone Wolf Unleashed, where I help

you to switch off sooner and to live larger. This past

week, my daughter came to me. She wants to earn a little bit more money.

She's 7 years old, and we're trying to teach her, you know,

good financial responsibility, all those types of things.

And one of the things we said, well, why don't we get you to

start to vacuum the house? We got one of those little stick

vacuums. It's relatively easy to move around the house. It's not one of

those big, clunky old things that, you know, weighed a ton when I was a

kid trying to drag it around the house, trying to vacuum.

You know, one of the things that I'm trying to do with my daughters is

to create an environment and to teach them things so that they're ready

to leave the house when they're 18. So that's one of my parenting philosophies,

and in that is trying to

find ways to teach them things and trying to

let go of things that I do and trying to give them

the responsibility of doing it slowly but in a measured

way. And I'll tell you that this

teaching my older daughter how to vacuum has taught

me more about delegation than any business book.

And practicing delegation is also going to teach you

more about how to delegate well to people than

reading about it well. So the purpose of this episode is to

go through the things that we need to think about when delegating.

You're probably sitting here thinking, mike, I'm a lone wolf

here. I run a solo business. I don't need to delegate.

Wrong, guys. So out of the three

things, elimination, delegation, automation.

Delegation is by far and away the most effective

thing that you can do to save time. So elimination is sort of

here nor there. It's. Yeah, well, most of the things that I do sort of

have a purpose. Yes, you can eliminate things, but it's

typically not a whole great deal that's going to really move the needle.

Delegation, getting someone else to do the work that you've built

systems around is going to be the best way that you can

start to save time.

One of the main objections is that the person you're

delegating to isn't as good at doing it as you are.

And I want you to just put that out of your mind. One of the

things you have to keep in mind is we're not looking at how long it

takes someone else to do A job, we're looking at how much time it

saves you. If you bring a VA in, for

example, and you get them to start triaging your inbox and setting up calendar

invites and things, it doesn't actually matter that they take twice as long

to do it as you would. The point is, is that that is a task

that you used to do all the time and now you've given it to someone

else. So one of the things that we want to think about here is how

do I let go of that anxiety, that control, how do

I allow someone else to pick that

up and do that work for me? So we're gonna go through a little bit

of a framework here. You know, there's other people that you can delegate to.

So obviously you can bring in an employee if you want, if that's suitable

to you, if that aligns with your goals. I'm not sitting here saying that you

have to, but it can be an effective way. Okay. Some of the other things

you might wanna do, other contractors. So if you're doing project based work and you

wanna outsource to a contractor, how do they set up projects? How do

they do certain things they need to be able to know? It might even be

a good way to start to automate or delegate

to AI agents. So if you want an

AI agent to pick up some emails or respond to emails of a certain

type, it's still going to need to be trained and to learn how to

do things. So the way that you explain the way that you

document you is going to affect the way that you set that up.

The skill is about what's capturing in your head,

delivering that in a way that is understandable to either the reader or

the watcher or whoever's going to be doing the task.

I'm going to break it down.

My daughter. What do we do? We make sure that the vacuum

is ready to use. Is it fully charged?

Is the dust bin empty? So have we emptied that out? Maybe it has stuff

in it from a prior use. We want to make sure that it's ready to

use. If it's not ready to use, then we need to make sure

that we do the things that allow it to be ready to use. So if

the battery's not charged, then we'll need to put it on charge. We'll have to

come back and do it later another time. Are there any attachments for the surfaces

that need to be considered for us? No. We basically got tiles all the

way through. It's always on the same setting and it doesn't matter. Is there

anything that is moving before you start? Kids, obviously, they

love their toys. They love having things out. They're not

particularly good at putting things away. We need to make sure that before we start

vacuuming that we put things away. So one of her jobs as part of

vacuuming was not just the vacuuming. It was also

tidying things away so the vacuuming could occur. So

that's the setup face.

All right, so the next phase is the technique.

So one of the things that I noticed that when she was trying to move

the vacuum around is she would try to lift and shift,

and this obviously tired her little arms out. And

she did complain. Dad, my arms are getting tired. Can I stop? It's like,

well, no, they won't get tired. If you do it this other way,

how do you steer the vacuum? By turning your wrist. It will change

the direction of the vacuum head. Those types of things

we want to do overlapping passes. So back and forward. Overlapping

passes, not, you know, squiggly chaos. How does moving

around the edges work? It's obviously a lot of dust collects

in the edges of the room. So how do we make sure that we collect

all of that up really well? What does done look like for each room?

Is there still stuff on the floor? What does done really look

like? And it can be, you know, particularly on carpeted floors, it can be hard

to tell. So you need to walk through and go, okay, we know that this

is done, and it's done well because of xyz. Then there's the

navigation. So what order of rooms need to happen?

We normally do our house front to back, because obviously the front

door and around the garage brings stuff in when people come in

from outside. What do we do about obstacles?

Do we move them? Do we lift them up? Do we get vacuum underneath?

Are we just using the main head of the vacuum, or are we using some

of the attachments? Do we move the furniture? Do we go around it? All

those types of things. And then there's the completion phase. So once we have done

the vacuuming, maybe the batteries run out. Maybe you need to

go and charge it and come back and do the rest later. But we need

to empty the dust chamber. So I always like to have the

thing that I'm using to be ready for the next person. So I do this

at church as well. When we're packing the van, I like to have the

equipment arranged in a way that it makes it easy for the next person to

get it out. Right. So just looking at the orientation of how the

wheels are on different, you know, cases and things like that.

How do we make sure that it's easy to pick up for the next person

that's going to come and do this job? This is really important, particularly for

people delegating to others in business, because the person

that has to come and pick it up when that person away is going to

be you, right? So we want to make sure that you are in a position

that you can pick it up easily when that person is

not doing that role for whatever reason, that maybe they've taken leave or they're sick,

or there's just a higher volume there that you're going to need to step in

again to take care of things. There's cleaning the filter,

right? There's returning it to storage, there's plugging in a charge.

All those things are little micro steps that need to be learned.

It is the transfer of that tacit knowledge that you have

to another person. The point is, is that I said

vacuum the house, right? But there's actually 15

plus discrete decisions embedded in

that instruction. So what's best is if you do a video of

yourself doing something or you explain it and you record

it. There are tools now where you can literally feed a

transcript in and it'll give you a sop, a standard operating

procedure. Always. Just make sure that when you're giving an

instruction, it may seem like a simple instruction, but for someone who

may not have done something before, it's actually quite difficult to understand everything

that might go in or out of that.

The other thing here that we need to think about is how we monitor and

control what the person has done. So with my

older daughter, once she had vacuumed, I would go and I would

see what she's done. Check the floor. Have you gone

around? Show me how you're doing that. Oh, this is a problem. Can you

redo this bit? The same goes for delegation. It's not

abdication of responsibility here. It is the setting up

for success. It is the passing of responsibility. So

we want to make sure that when we give a task to someone, there is

a feedback loop there that is effective. Did I go through and

vacuum for her again? No, I didn't. I

pointed out where certain things needed work. I

explained to her how and I explained to her why. And then she

would go and she would correct what she'd done. What does this mean? It

means that the next time that she goes to do this, she's going to be

better at it. Practice makes perfect, right? If you continually

step in and you can continually pick up where the ball's been dropped. People

won't ever learn how to do things properly. And you'll always complain,

oh, so and so, just, oh, they just don't get it. Maybe it's

not them who doesn't get it. Right? I'll put that challenge to

you.

So what can get delegated, particularly for solo operators?

So this can be a little bit of a challenging one, especially if your strategy

is to stay solo. But I want to give you some other things to think

about. What type of things can be delegated for AI

automation? It's really repetitive. It's rule based, okay? It's black

and white. They are low judgment tasks for

contractors. You know, it's project based, it's specialist

work. Maybe there's a series of procedures that need to be gone

through in a systematic manner, but maybe it's more complex work,

okay, a little bit more gray. Maybe there's other client considerations that need to

happen for each time. For a va, you know, you might be looking at

admin, overflow, scheduling, research, all those types of things. How do you

want those things to be done? What does good look like? Provide them an

example that you've done, Walk them through what you do, how you do it,

what decisions need to be made along the way. This is not just about doing,

it's also about those little micro decisions that need to be made along

the way. So the question before any

delegation is this. Does this task require

my judgment or just my knowledge? So if it's just

knowledge, capture it and hand it off. If it's just knowledge, just

capture and hand it off. If it's judgment, you can either keep it or you

can train the judgment. Okay? It's harder, it's longer. There are a lot more

rules involved. Human brains are really good at jumping to the

end of a conclusion. Okay, Skipping steps or longer decision

tree. So being able to capture these things, how

decisions are made, all those types of things is important, but it does take longer.

If you're trying to delegate authority, then you need to

make sure that you are more rigorous in that documentation. If

you want to retain the authority and it requires your judgment, retain that and then

palm off the things that just require the knowledge,

not the judgment. Here is a

procedure, that template that you can use.

You can get this on my website@lonewolfunleashed.com

Procedure- template

Here's the basic outline of it. The trigger.

So what kicks off the task? Why are we doing it? We

have the inputs. What do you need before starting so as I said with

vacuum, you know, is it ready to use, is it charged? All those

things, the steps, put them in numbers,

make them specific, screenshot them, take photos,

accompany visuals. All these types of things really help.

If it is a judgment thing, you might have a table with the different

inputs and outputs and how certain things, under what

circumstances things are done. There is a definition of done.

So how do we know that the task is finished? It looks like this.

The floors are clean, there is no dust. You know, list out the things that

need to be true for that task to have been completed and then hand

over. So who needs to know that the task was done?

There is a great interview on the Tim Ferriss show. I'll put the

link on the show notes. It's the interview with Sam Caucus

who used to be the CEO of Levels and he used a

phrase which is if you don't communicate, then you didn't

perform. So if you fail to communicate, then you fail

to perform. And that is really interesting sort of take

is because if you don't let the next person

know that it's their turn to do the thing, then it's like you

didn't perform at all in any way in the first place. Make sure that

you put on the document who needs to know that the

task was done? So here are some things to think about.

I often hear people who have failed the delegation think they didn't do it

right. Maybe your instructions were incomplete or how it was

communicated to the person trying to do the job was not quite right. Maybe it's

not their fault. Maybe you need to elaborate more in your instructions. It

took longer to explain than to do it. Yes, the

first time. Okay. As I said, people need to practice.

People learn by having a closed feedback loop. You need to be able

to monitor what they've done, provide feedback, get them to

correct their mistakes. If they don't do it and you just pick it up because

it's faster, you're going to constantly be picking up for them.

They're not going to be able to learn. They keep asking questions.

Great. This is a good one. Whenever they ask a question, make

sure to go back to the procedure and to update it with the question. Okay.

Have a frequently asked questions and make sure that you update it as they are

asking questions because this means that it will be more complete the next

time you try to delegate this task to someone. We know that especially in this

environment, employees aren't forever. If you're trying to delegate to someone,

it's likely that you'll be delegating this task to them again in the future.

How do we make it easier for next time? I had to redo it anyway.

Did you define done really clearly? Did the person have a

really good idea about what done looked like so that they could hand

off something of higher quality? Most solo

operators don't delegate because they are attached to being

needed, so the business is running without them. It feels like a threat,

not a goal. The goal is to have a business that can run without you,

and that is by building up really good systems. People

are a part of systems and delegation are part of systems.

If you can't hand off vacuuming to a seven year old, you definitely can't

hand off that client onboarding system to an employee.

So let's start small. Document one thing this week that

is your homework this week. Document one thing this week the skill of

delegation is still a skill that needs practicing. It is

a skill that compounds it has a return on investment.

So you can get the procedure template link at my website.

The link will be in the show notes. Check out my website

lonewolfunleashed.com thank you so much for hanging out with

me this week. It's been a pleasure showing you how to do

delegation. You could have been doing so many other things but you decided to

hang out with me and learn about how you can free up time through the

use of delegation. I look forward to seeing you in a fortnight.

Take care.