A common problem that many MSP business owners have is that they have a hard time delegating. They tend to do everything themselves, so they know “it’s done right,” and end up being overworked.
It’s hard to let things go that you might have been doing yourself for several years while building your business. For many IT business owners, they’ve been their only employee for a while and had no choice but to do everything themselves.
Once they grow enough to bring other employees onboard, trusting someone else to do things like interface with customers, close leads, and perform important repair work can be hard to do.
Using an integrated PSA and RMM platform can definitely help streamline the workload so you’re not quite as overwhelmed. But, if you’re bringing other employees onboard, it’s usually so you’ll no longer have to work so many late nights and weekends. To make that happen, you need to delegate.
53% of business owners believe they could grow their business more if they can delegate at least 10% of their workload to someone else.
Tips to Help You Delegate Successfully
If you find yourself saying “I’ll do this myself” way too often, here are some tips to help you let go and let someone else take on some of the heavy lifting at your MSP business.
Take Time to Train Properly
One of the biggest barriers to passing on tasks to someone else is lack of proper training. If you’ve been doing something for a decade, it probably feels like that task is now on auto pilot for you, but it wasn’t always that way.
Understand that someone else isn’t going to have the years of experience that you do, and they may need more time than you think to become proficient at a certain task. Be patient.
Make a formal training plan, instead of whipping through a process and expecting someone to pick it up instantly. Give them time to practice and become proficient themselves so that you can feel good about passing on that task to them.
Yes, training properly will take extra time that you may have to work into an already busy week (or three), but it will pay off when you can actually delegate something and feel confident it’s going to be done right.
Learn Your Employees’ Strengths & Weaknesses
Not everyone is a good salesperson and not everyone is great at more detailed and tedious tasks such as writing code. Part of delegation is choosing the right task for the right person.
If you have someone that loves to interact with customers and can talk your ear off, then they may be great at prospecting and closing leads. While another employee may be better suited to taking over some of your remote IT operations.
Create Detailed Guides/Instructions
When people are just thrown into the deep end when it comes to learning a new task or process, they’re often being set up to fail because they don’t have enough instruction or guidance.
If your guide is more of a “don’t mess it up” rather than a set of step-by-step instructions that include what not to do, you’re likely to have a problem. This can lead to an employee misunderstanding, not doing something the way you want, and then you taking back the task that you tried to delegate.
A detailed set of instructions can alleviate this issue.
Use Software That Makes Delegating Easier
If you put an RMM and PSA in place that makes it simple to handle everything from customer invoicing to support tickets, you create a structured workflow. This makes it easier to pass off tasks to someone and retain the same consistency.
For example, putting an automated customer ticket workflow in place allows someone to step into your shoes and keep that same workflow going because the structure of the process is being handled by the MSP software.
Create a Delegation Strategy (Decide What and When)
You can feel better about delegating if you come up with a strategy. For example, you might choose to delegate less critical processes first, ones that won’t cause too much disruption if something is done wrong.
Then as an employee builds up their skills and knowledge, you may decide it’s time to delegate something more critical to them.
For your delegation strategy, decide on which types of tasks you are going to delete, who you’ll delegate them to, and decide on a timeline.
If you don’t timeline your strategy, you could end up continually saying, “This week is too busy, we’ll do it next week.” Stick to a timeline and make time to delegate and train properly.
Lighten Your Team’s Workload Using Syncro
Syncro can create a workflow consistency and process that is easy to delegate to others. Our platform gives you multiple tools to run every facet of your MSP business and lightens the workload for your entire team. Start your free trial today.
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