Running your own business shouldn’t feel like a never-ending marathon. If you’re clocking 60-hour weeks and dreaming about hiring your first employee just to claw back some sanity, this episode is for you.

Hi, I'm Mike Fox, host of this podcast, "Lone Wolf Unleashed." In this episode I'm tackling the not-so-glamorous reality of delegation—why just deciding “I’ll get someone in to handle my marketing” won’t cut it, and why human beings bring as much risk as reward.

Forget wishful thinking: you’ll learn why setting up solid processes, documenting your tasks (with templates to shave off real hours), and mapping out a hiring strategy are essential before posting a job ad or starting interviews.

Timestamped summary:

00:00 Setting up a hiring process

04:57 Delegating tasks in your business

09:46 Crafting interview questions and contracts

13:21 Delegating your first hire

Mentioned in this episode:

This podcast is part of the Podknows Podcasting ICN Network

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Check out the "Websites Made Simple" podcast with Holly Christie at https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/

Today we're covering the art of delegation.

G'. Day. My name's Mike and you're listening to Lone Wolf

Unleashed, the podcast where I help you to

take your time back from your business and to use it on your terms.

Thank you for joining me today. And we're covering how

delegation is the fastest

way to save time in your business without having to learn all this

automation stuff. But it comes with the highest risk,

and that is because we're dealing with these wonderful things called human beings.

And I'm going to walk you through today how we go about

setting you and them up for success

so that you can save time.

So we've talked about delegation before on this podcast. You can go back and listen

to some of those episodes. I can link those in the

description of this podcast. The premise of it is, is that

we need to know what we're giving people and we need to have it well

documented so that they can be set up for success so they can go and

do the job well. Episode over. Well, we've already, we've already

covered it. Thanks for joining me tonight.

Here's the crux of what I've seen,

particularly what I've seen recently. And you know, but it is

a very common thing for business owners to go through

is this typical type of cycle. So let me see if this

sounds familiar. You are a business owner, you work 60 to 70

hour weeks and you go, I've had it up to here. For

those listening, I am raising my hand above my head. I've had it up to

here. I am doing too much. And

I think that I've grown to a point where I am ready to hire someone.

And you go, I know I will get someone in and they can

take care of. Let's for example, just say my

marketing content. Great. All right, Good decision.

All right, that's fine. And that is the extent of the thinking

that goes into the hiring decision.

That's not enough. I know. Spoiler alert. I'm really

sorry that you have to hear it from me. That is not enough.

Just simply just saying that you're gonna bring someone in to handle your marketing content

is not enough. Now, there's more work to do here. We need

to know the type of work that we're going to be giving that person. We're

gonna want examples of what good looks like. We're gonna need step by step

instructions. We're gonna need to give them context about why

the marketing in your business is the way that it is. All of that

needs to be in place. Before you even think

about doing an ad, or before you even think

about reaching out to people to see who might be interested in the role.

And there's a new process that we need to establish here,

which is your hiring process. And

it can be very scary to think about what that looks like if

you've not done that in your business before, because there are certain

artifacts that go into the execution

of that process. You're not just

documenting now one process, which is the process that you want to hand

over or the several tasks that you want to hand over. It is a

new process that you need to flesh out. Now, the advantage of this and thinking

about this way is you don't have to define your hiring process every time you

hire. It is the upfront work that you do before you do

it for the first time. Think about that you're building a scalable engine

here and that when you go to hire, the first time you're solving

a problem, you build a process. And then the next time you go to hire

or do whatever it is that you're doing, you can use that process again and

the things are in place. If that story sounds familiar to

you, here is the recommendation of

what to do first.

Number one, we need to establish whether you really have a

need to bring someone on or not. Now, you might just

be in the mindset of, I just, I'm just working too much and I just

got a, let's just bring someone in. That's fine. If

you are feeling that way, it is likely that, yes, you do need to bring

someone in, but let's not rush into it. The first thing we need to

establish is what are the types of tasks that you want to get rid

of. This may not be so straightforward.

You just might be overwhelmed. And it's hard to make good

decisions when you're overwhelmed. So take a little bit

of a break, take a little bit of a step back, and let's have a

look at your business as a whole. I've done

episodes on the mapping out of your business like this

as part of a profile and what your processes are. But take a

step back, take a deep breath, sleep on it. You make good

decisions when you're well rested and you're not overwhelmed. So, number one, look after

yourself. Number

two is let's figure out the type of

work that you really do like to do. Because

chances are that you're thinking about getting rid of

the work that you don't like to do.

And that is perfectly natural. But that may not be

the right way to go first or it might be,

then you want to document out

the things that you want to hand off. So once you come to the

determination that you've of the work that you want to hand

off, we need to make sure that the

ecosystem, the infrastructure that is in place in your business is set up

to be able to start to share that with people. So what does that mean?

It means that we need to map out whatever process it is so we

have those tasks on a page or multiple processes,

depending on what the scope of the role is going to entail.

And then we need to document out those procedures, get those

step by step instructions down. How does the system work? That's

really what you're describing, is you're sitting down and you're working through what the system

is and what it does and how it works. That's what you're doing. Make

sure that you have your document templates in place. This is a big

one. It does save a lot of time. You know, recently

I did an analysis with one of my customers. They're saving between 30

and 45 minutes per document when it's accessed to be used.

That's a lot of time. So if you can get your document

templates in place, it just means that the person can come in and they can

hit the ground running rather than having to design stuff that should be in

place before they start at all. So

now you've got a bit of a picture about what you're doing. The next thing

we need to do is determine what your hiring process might look like.

Now if you've never hired before, that's fine and there's lots of resources out there

online that you can look at in terms of what it means to hire.

Here are some basic things for you to think about. What we need to be

able to do is we need to articulate the, the task that you've

determined onto a position description. So a position

description is just that is, is a document that

describes what the position is, what it does, what its purpose

is, who they report to. All of that sort of stuff goes

onto a position description. That is the first document that you're going to want

to, to do up. Now that position

description might be fairly large. You might go, well actually, or maybe I need to

hire two different part time people to be able to handle that. That should become

clearer to you as you complete that position description. Now we're going

to use that position description to do up a job ad. Your job

ad is the second artifact that you can now do up

to hire someone. Now the job

ad is there. It is basically a marketing tool

for employees to join your business. It gives them a picture about

who the business is, why the business exists, who the customers are, how

long you've been around details out of your position description.

You don't necessarily need to share your position description straight away.

A lot of the details should be covered in the job ad. But then you

can. When you've got interested candidates, you can then share the

position description with them prior to setting up an interview.

Then you're going to have what type of person am I looking? So

we need to define some criteria there about the type of person we want filling

this role. And something to keep in mind here when we're determining

this criteria is that in business what we want is

we want to be able to hire the highest capability people at

the lowest cost. There's often trade offs that happen

with this, right? If you bring in a really highly experienced

person and you pay them a lot of money, chances are you're going to have

to refer to them less because they know what they're doing. But

you are a solo founder and you might not have the cash available to

pay someone a lot of money to take care of a problem for you,

which is fine. But we have to understand that person that you bring in

is going to need more handholding. So we want to be able to

establish some way of figuring out someone's

capability and how much to pay them. Essentially

then we have the interview. So people will apply to the

role. You'll look at their CVs, Are they a good match? You can

use AI. There's a whole bunch of organizations out there now using AI

to help them with hiring and matching up which CVS are

good matches to jobs. Then once you've done that, you want to

establish some interviews and you want to be able to interview and you want to

be able to have a set of questions that are targeted around how people would

handle certain tasks within that job. So not every interview set is

the same. Make them really meaningful, make it so you can get

to those outcomes quickly and know really quickly what's the crux of what I

need to know from this person to see that they can do the job. You

might not want to ask like these really silly general questions like

what's your greatest weakness? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You want to

be able to craft a really good, articulate set of

questions where you can really gather that information, get into that detail

with a candidate and then after that is

you're going to find someone that you're going to want to offer job to. You

need an employment contract, so you are going

to go to a lawyer. Please don't use ChatGPT for this.

Go to a lawyer, get an employment contract done

up. You may have local government resources in your area that

give you guidance on what should and should not be in

employment contracts, but definitely go and engage a legal

professional to help you establish that and you can have that in

order before you even start hiring. Right. You know, do this earlier,

go and figure out what that looks like with a lawyer. Get

that employment contract in place and then it's basically when you go to

offer the person the job, you will then input whatever details are

relevant into the placeholder text on that contract and you'll send that off

for signing and get underway. Then,

yes, you've hired someone, Congratulations, you've got someone in your business. It doesn't

end there. And I have a friend, his name is Rory Berry. He's a

people strategy guy and he

really tries to hammer home with people about

the whole onboarding experience into your business.

And I highly, highly recommend you figure out how you're

going to deliver a good solid

onboarding experience to your new starter. Now, there are

different ways to do this. Obviously it helps if they are in person. If they're

online, then you're going to need to establish really early a

cadence and a rhythm with them for catching up, making

sure that they have what they need, etc. Remember, the whole goal here

is that we don't want to spend more time managing them than we would

have taken doing the job in the first place. We want to spend less

time managing them than doing the job because

now we've saved time. Establish those cadences,

make sure your expectations are really clear. Make sure that

if they are not meeting the role

requirements that you know about that early.

We want to hire slow and fire fast. Remember, we want to make

sure that those things are in place, that you can see

what they're up to, what they're doing, that you're getting the outcomes

that you desired when you went to hire and then, you know, you're

managing them, etc. Etc. The goal is we want a happy

employee who brings their best to work. Create a culture

that can do that, and I don't have time to talk about that today. That

is not the purpose of this podcast, but it is really important that you

think about how you're going to onboard and give them that experience and make sure

that that type of probation period is taken care of. Really well,

Not to freak you out, not to discourage you about all the work that you

need to do to bring on your first person. But ultimately it is

a boon to businesses to bring people in because more people

means that you have been growing and you are ready to make that

first step. And ultimately it will save you time. Remember,

you are the shareholder in your business. You are the founder of it. You are

the shareholder. And the ultimate goal here is to create systems and

processes that other people can do so that you can reap the rewards from that

through business ownership. So what have we

learned today? We've learned today that hiring is worth it and

it can be an experience trying to set that up for the first time.

But it is very rewarding to be able to hand off work to

someone and have the things in place for them to go and do that for

you so that you can save time. But I don't want you going in with

rose colored glasses. There is a lot of work that needs to be done there.

I thank you so much for joining me. You could have been doing a million

things since today, but you decided to hang out with me and learn about how

delegation of your first hire can help save you time and the strategies

to use for that. Make sure to go check out my

lonewolfunleashed.com

resources and you can check out some of the resources there that might be

useful for you in your systemization journey. Until next week.

I'll see you then. Bye.