In this episode, Samantha shares practical strategies for overcoming the fear of delegation, designing systems that empower others to do tasks well, and creating a business that offers freedom and growth without burnout.

Takeaways

• The main reason tutors struggle to delegate is fear of losing control.

• Designing tasks as systems allows anyone to do them well, regardless of expertise.

• Documenting every task step makes delegation and future-proofing possible.

• Shared task management tools are essential for effective delegation.

• Creating a systemized process reduces the time spent on routine tasks.

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👋🏽 Hello! I'm Sumantha McMahon, and I've supported over 100 tutors and education business owners.

As a teacher 'dropout' turned professional tutor, combined with my 20+ years as a business owner, I'm in it with you! Yes, I'm qualified too :-)

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© 2024 Sumantha McMahon

the most common reason tutors struggle to delegate is that they don't want to lose control and they can't see how someone without their expertise could do the things the way they do. So they carry on doing it all themselves, telling themselves it's a faster way. Now I speak from experience here because that's exactly the thing I battled with at the very beginning and I sometimes still battle with it now but these days I have a way to get through it and I'm going to share it with you. Now, the part that always surprises me whenever I analyse this and reflect on my own journey is that fear that nobody without your expertise could do it the way you do. It's so real and it can feel almost insurmountable. But the reason I've discovered why it feels like the quality is at risk or that someone else couldn't do it is because the task lives in your head. Nobody can match you if there's nothing there for them to follow. Once you get it out of your head and design it properly, expertise stops. Being the thing that's a blockage. And I learned that years ago from the most unlikely person, and it's changed how I run my business ever since.

So in this episode, I'll share my story with you and I'll show you why Lett and Go has felt hard in the past and what you can do to overcome it. If we haven't met before, I'm Samantha and I help tutors build a business that earns well without taking over their whole life. So they get their time back and they have real options for the future. And this episode is really important for that because at some point your capacity is going to be full. Now, this episode is also a very natural follow-on from the last one, Already at Capacity, which was about how you can grow without adding more. So we're picking up right where we left off. Once you've decided what needs to come off your plate, that's exactly how you can hand it over without feeling like you're losing control. Now, letting go often feels impossible, and I feel like we often assign it to the wrong reason. You'll often hear that it's a confidence thing or a control thing or that you just need to learn to trust people.

And there's a grain of truth in that, but if we're only going to rely on trust, then you would have solved it by now because you would have probably tried to do that. You've probably handed something over in the past and you've watched it come back not quite right, or maybe that's your fear that's stopping you, and then you've taken it back. And you've concluded that it's just easier to do it yourself. Now here's what's actually usually going on. It's because the task is in your mind. You've done it so many times that every little decision, every exception, every I do this except when this happens, it's stored inside you and nowhere else. So when you hand it over, you're not actually handing over a task. You're handing over a blank space and you're just hoping that someone will fill it the way that you would. So, of course, the quality dips. Of course, it feels like a risk because there was nothing solid for someone to follow. And there's something underneath there as well, especially if you come from teaching. We are trained to put ourselves last and to be the one who holds everything, to do the extra bit ourselves rather than trouble anyone.

So doing it all can feel like the responsible thing, almost like a virtue. So delegating doesn't just feel risky, it can feel like you're getting away with something, like It shouldn't be that easy. So I want to pull that apart because I want to push back on that gently because it's the thing that keeps so many capable tutors stuck doing work that's actually eating up their time. Now, if this is already making you see the problem a bit differently, then do follow and subscribe wherever you are watching or listening so that the next episode finds you. I release these every week and often they build on each other. So I want to tell you about the most unlikely person because she taught me the this thing that this whole episode rests on. Years ago, when I was first preparing to launch Upgrade Your Education Business, I was still tutoring. I mean I still am, but I was tutoring a lot, and I was also marketing the tutoring business very heavily at the time. The marketing was a real time drain, and I thought about handing it over more than once, but I could never see how.

I told myself that I needed another teacher to do it, an English specialist, someone who could write the way I write, spot the errors I would spot, and hold the same standards. And because I couldn't find that person in my head, I just kept doing it myself. Then I hit a wall. I wanted to launch upgrade your education business, and I simply couldn't do the launch and keep the marketing going on my own. It was one or the other, delegate or delay the whole launch or even possibly cancel it. And that just wasn't something I was willing to do. So I found my first VA. And here's the part I didn't expect. She was dyslexic. She was she wasn't from an educational background at all. And she wasn't especially confident with things like spelling, punctuation, and grammar, the very things I've been convinced that I needed. Now I could have seen that as a problem. And by the way, at the time, AI wasn't really a thing, so I couldn't even lean on that. But instead, it turned out to be the best lesson I ever had in delegating because she couldn't lean on being an English expert.

I had to design the work so that the expertise wasn't the thing it depended on. I had to make it clear and I had to make it followable so that anyone could pick it up and do it well. I really learnt this from a book called The E Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. He talks about McDonald's and how they don't hire the world's best chefs. They don't need someone to know how to make a burger. Instead, they build the system so well that someone can make a product simply by following a step-by-step process or just by pressing a button. So the genius isn't in the person, it's in the system. And that was the moment it really clicked for me. I didn't need someone as good as me with the same expertise. I needed a task designed well enough that it didn't have to be. And here's the exercise that I would start with, the one that I still use. I did this at the beginning and I still refine it. The very first time I did it, it took me about half a day.

So maybe you can do it in stages or if you can block out half a day, great. Here's what I did. I sat down and I listed every single task in my business. Not the big headings, the actual tasks, broken down as far as I could. So for example, if I take my podcast, it would be the ideation, the scripting, the recording, the editing, the uploading, and so on. Then I grouped them by area. So I had a column for my podcast, one for the mastermind, one for my one to one work, one for social media, one for email marketing, and so on. And I did this for my tutoring business too. So I had one for tutoring admin, one for the actual tutoring, and one for marketing. Then I went through every single task and I tagged it, I marked it in one of two ways. Either I put in my name, I put my name against it because it needed me. And only me, or I put the label delegatable, because that was a sign that it didn't actually need me, and in theory, it could be delegated or systemized or automated.

So recording my podcast, that needs me. Delivering my tutoring sessions, that needs me. But a huge amount that was on that list didn't actually need me at all. It just happened to be sitting with me because that's just how it had always been. Now, marking something as delegatable doesn't mean you have to delegate it tomorrow. You might not have the budget or the support in place yet, and that's fine. The point of the exercise isn't to hand it all over at once, it's to see clearly for the first time how much of your week is spent doing things that only you are doing because no one has ever designed them to be handed over. I've kept that list alive ever since. So when I recently doubled the hours that I pay my VA for, I didn't have to agonize over what to give her. I already knew it was right there for me to just quickly transfer. So if you do nothing else after this episode, do that. Half a day, every task, two marks. It changes what you think is possible. Now, before we carry on, a quick word about how I help with exactly this.

Everything I'm walking you through today is something you can do on your own. But if you're sitting there thinking you'd love someone to lead you through it properly and help you really step into that leadership identity that helps you delegate confidently, that's one of the things I do with my one-to-one tutors, the clients in my Bespoke Accelerator program. It's designed especially to help you create a business for the long term. Over six months, I help you step into the identity of someone who leads their business rather than does all of it. You get your time back by working out what to delegate, what to streamline and what to automate so that your business is designed to be built around the life that you actually want, not just a tidier version of the one you've got. I'm working with a new round of tutors right now, and if that's the support that you've been looking for, then come and have a chat with me about it. No pressure, just a conversation to see if it's the right fit. The link to book a call with me is in the description.

So you've got your list, you can see exactly what can come off your plate. The question now is how do you actually hand it over so it doesn't come straight back to you? And it comes down to three things, and all of them is about getting the work out of your head. You need to document it, design it so that anyone can follow it and give it to home that both of you can share. So I'm going to take one of them at a time, I'm going to go through each one. The first thing is to document everything. And I want you to start doing this even before you delegate anything because it's actually the bit that makes everything else possible. Every time you do a task that could one day come off your plate, capture how you do it. Back when I started, that meant opening a document and writing out the steps one by one with screenshots so that nothing was left to guesswork. These days it's easier. When I'm doing a task, say I'm putting together a YouTube video. I just record myself talking through every step as I go along.

Then I turn to AI and I ask it to create a clear manual for me. So 10 minutes of talking becomes a document that someone else could follow. The reason this matters so much is that it's the first thing that gets the task out of your head and onto the page, where it stops being yours alone. And once it's written down, something powerful happens. You're no longer dependent on one particular person. So let's say you have a VA and you stop working with them for whatever reason, you're not back to square one. You can hand the manual to the next person and they can pick it up. So you've really created something that's future-proofed. So now let me show you what designing a task can actually look like when you're turning it into a system so that a VA could do it without your expertise. Remember what I told you about my very first VA? She wasn't an English specialist, so I couldn't just say do my marketing and hope. I had to design it. I had to turn it into a system. The first thing I did was I built a schedule. I decided exactly what kind of post went out on which day, and I'm going from memory here.

It was something like Mondays might have been something like a motivational quote, Wednesday's a testimonial, Friday's a top tip, and it ran on this two-week cycle. So the following Monday might be behind the scenes and so on. Now she never had to wonder what to create because the schedule told her. Then I gave her a bank of examples. I went to Pinterest and I made a board for each slot in that schedule. Some were examples of my own from the content I had already made. And someone from other posts or stuff that I found on Pinterest that I liked, so she had inspiration. So for every single day she could look at the board and see exactly what kind of thing we were going for. Then I made the template on Canva as simple as possible. I didn't get precious about branding. Often it was a solid background with any colour, with some text sat on top. But I kept a few things consistent every time. So I used the same font, I used a photo of me and my name at the bottom.

Those were the anchors. Everything else was flexible. And that was very deliberate because it meant she didn't have to be a designer. She wasn't trying to be creative in Canva. She was just following something. And for the captions, she used my past content as the raw material and repurposed those because my voice was already sitting in everything I'd written before. So here's how it actually ran. She'd produce fortnight's worth of content at a time. I'd review it, tweak anything that needed it, and she'd publish. A job that used to swallow hours of my time came down to about five to ten minutes a fortnight because all I was doing was checking. And the longer she did it, the faster and more accurate she got because the system was doing the heavy lifting, not her having to guess her way into my head. That's the whole principle. I didn't find someone who could replace my expertise. I designed a system so that my expertise was already baked into the process and all that was left was to follow it. So I know I've given you an example based on marketing, but I wanted to break it down because you can apply this principle to anything you want to delegate.

The main thing is that you've documented it and you've created a system. Now for the final part that's really, really important. You've got it out of your head. Now you need to give the work a shared home. When you work alone, you can keep everything however you like. If you love pen and paper, brilliant, you can carry on. But the moment you want to delegate, All of that has to live somewhere where you can all see it, both of you, or if you have multiple people, all of you need to see it. You don't need anything fancy to begin with. When I first started, I just used a spreadsheet. Later I moved to Trello, and these days I use ClickUp, which I lean on very heavily for my business, because I can share different lists, create project plans, assign tasks to different people, set deadlines, put checklists all in one place. But please don't think you need to start there. The tool matters far less than the principal. You want one shared space where the tasks and the deadlines and those manuals all live so that nobody is chasing you to find out what's going on.

That's what turns delegating from something that creates more work for you into something that actually gives you time back. The task is documented, it's designed so anyone can follow, and it lives somewhere you can share. So get those three things right, and you're no longer the bottleneck. Now, if you'd like to keep thinking about this kind of thing with me, the best place to be is in my VIP club. It's my free email list and it's where I share ideas every week, often before they go anywhere else. So you can join from the link in the description. And if today has landed because you know that this is the year you stop being the person who does everything and you'd like to be led through it properly, that's exactly what my bespoke one-to-one accelerator is there for. There's a link to book a free call with me in the description as well. So as always, thank you for staying with me to the end. I know your time's precious, so the fact that you spent some of it here means a lot.

I hope this episode has broken down for you a way to delegate in a systematic way and in a way where you can feel confident that you're not losing control. I'll be back on Wednesday if you're listening with a shorter episode. And if you're on YouTube, then I'll see you next week. Until then, take care.