SUMMARY
In this episode, Louis Massaro shares 4 things that stop you from delegating in your moving company.
- “You shouldn’t pay someone to do something you could do yourself. A lot of people grow up with that mentality. But you want to flip that. I look at it and I say, “Why would I do something myself I could pay somebody else to do?” I don’t want to do it.”
- “As a business owner, you have unlimited opportunity that is only capped by your time. You want to be by the pool hanging out while they’re doing all the work? That’s your right. You take on the risk. You get the reward.”
- “Freedom doesn’t mean that you don’t work. It means you have the freedom to work on what you want to work on. You have the freedom to go and scale if that’s what you want to do.”
- “Even if we didn’t teach or learn any of the moving stuff this weekend, this is the stuff that will help you succeed in your business. This is the stuff that’s really going to help you get where you want to go.”
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TRANSCRIPTION
Louis Massaro:
All right, delegating. What stops most people from delegating? Fear. They won’t do it right. By the way I suffered from all of these. So I’m not mocking anybody, but this is the voice. They won’t do it right. I tried to delegate. It didn’t work. Every time they didn’t do what they were supposed to do. I’m just going to keep it and do it myself. No one could do it as good as me. Maybe that’s true. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe there was one person in the course of my time that I felt that could be as good as me on the phones booking moves. They didn’t stop me from having 70 people in a call center booking moves. I could have sat there, “No one could do it as good as me,” and sit there and do it forever and have a couple of trucks. But that’s not what I wanted to do.
Also, we talked about sometimes we get lazy as owners. It’s true. Maybe someone can’t do it as good as you, but are you consistent? Even if you want to be consistent, if you’re trying to book moves and nobody does it as good as you, you still have to run the rest of the business. You still have to be in other places. So now we’re losing opportunities. So I’d rather have somebody who’s not as good that’s consistent. But if you’re that good at something, great. Document what you do. Who uses my sales script? Who’s increased sales with it? Okay. I’m like, “Hey, what do I do? Let me just write down what I say and get everybody else to say what I say.” Fine, you don’t have my sales script? Whoever’s the best person in your company, take what they say, write it down and have everybody else say that. Most stuff could be duplicated. You got to be able to delegate.
What if something bad happens? Something bad will happen. They’ll send the wrong truck. They’ll put the driver in the truck that didn’t have a license. Stuff will happen. Less of it will happen if you have the processes. You see how all this starts to tie together? This is the stuff that will, even if we didn’t teach or learn any of the moving stuff this weekend, this is the stuff that will help you succeed in your business more than anything, more than which marketing to use, more than dispatch, all that stuff. This is the stuff that’s really going to help you get where you want to go.
Guilt, right? Guilt. You shouldn’t pay someone to do something you could do yourself. Who grew up with this belief, was told this belief? Even if you don’t believe it now you grew up feeling this way. You got a parent that’s mowing the lawn all day long. I’m not paying somebody to do something I could do myself. I don’t know why that’s the voice, but that’s how I picture it. So what happens is a lot of people grow up with that mentality. They don’t say it. It’s in the back of their mind as guilt. You want to flip that. I look at it and I say, “Why would I do something myself I could pay somebody else to do?” I don’t want to do it.
My wife ordered this laundry basket from Amazon. She said, “Oh, it looks great.” It came in, I don’t know, 8,000 pieces. I’m like, “I’m not doing this.” I could sit and be present and enjoy it, no big deal. I’m busy, man. My time is more valuable than this. So it sat there for months. Then I learned about a service called TaskRabbit. You go on. I need someone to assemble some shit. Boom! 50 bucks an hour. He comes. Grab this, grab that. Here, assemble all that. I’m not going to sit there. We’ll talk about how valuable your time is. Don’t do something that you could pay somebody else to do.
As a business owner you have unlimited opportunity that is only capped by your time. My employees will feel like I don’t do anything. These are real statements. This isn’t me mocking or making fun. My first six hires were friends. I recruited all my friends. I didn’t know how to hire people. I’m like, “I need help.” I called my friends back home, “Listen, come out to Denver, give you a job. Come out to Denver.” So I had all my friends. It was this camaraderie to where now I felt a little bad if I stepped away and let them do everything. And it stayed with me until I had a shift in perspective and looked at it differently to where, you know what? That’s your right.
You want to be by the pool hanging out while they’re doing all the work? That’s your right. You take on the risk. You get the reward. You have months where you don’t make money. You have months where you got to go into savings to cover business bills. Don’t worry about what other people are thinking. It’s really something that you just got to get past. But once you do, you break through that freedom.
I don’t deserve freedom. I need to work hard. Another disbelief that somehow, some way we just picked this up from the time we were born til now. And we feel like, who am I to… The middle of the week I’m going to the beach? Or I’m going to take two weeks off and not do anything. I’m going to let somebody else do stuff when I’m perfectly capable of doing it. I’m going to invite a man that’s almost twice my age to build that laundry basket? I’m a young guy. I should be doing it myself. Fuck that!
If he’s assembling shit for 50 bucks an hour on TaskRabbit, cool. He’s happy. I’m happy. Great guy. I text him direct now. I love him. “Yeah, go ahead. Order whatever you want on Amazon in pieces. There’s no longer a restriction on ordering stuff that needs to be assembled.”
Comfort, losing their sense of purpose within the business. Your business ends up becoming your identity and it’s everything you do. And you find significance from that. And so it’s very uncomfortable to step away and be in a position where you lose your purpose. I’m not needed anymore. I got a great client in the room. Big franchise operation. He’s got amazing franchisees. He’s got amazing employees. He’s got an amazing team. And he was like, “It just feels weird that all of a sudden everything’s being handled and what do I do?”
But that’s the place you want to be. The freedom… I’m not putting a picture up here of a beach chair and an umbrella and a pina colada. Freedom doesn’t mean that you don’t work. It means you have the freedom to work on what you want to work on. You have the freedom to go and scale if that’s what you want to do or sit on the beach, whatever it is. But you’ll find a new sense, but that comfort will keep you there. I don’t mind doing these tasks myself. Got another client, two offices, van line agent, still goes through the mail every day. I’m like, “What are you doing?”
“Oh, I don’t mind. It’s no big deal.”
“Yeah, but your time, it’s not a good use of your time.”
No vision for how they’ll use their new free time. A lot of people hesitate to get that freedom because they’re like, “What am I going to do?” For me, my initial desire to get freedom was so that I could actually manage the mess that I created, not to have freedom to enjoy life or anything like that. That was a later progression for me, which I now know is all backwards. But you got to be able to identify what you’re going to do once you do free yourself up. You got to be able to say to yourself right now, “Okay, if I was able to free myself up from the day to day, what would I work on instead? If I’m not dispatching trucks, servicing moves, dealing with customer complaints, whatever it might be, what will I do with my time?” And it doesn’t mean you have to be doing something outside of work.
And then there’s skill, just not knowing how to delegate. If you have to struggle with this, don’t feel bad about it. It’s not like you learn to walk at a certain age, you learn to talk at a certain age, you learn to delegate at a certain age. It just doesn’t work like that. It’s a learned skill. What should I delegate versus do myself? How do I keep track of things I delegated to make sure that they actually get done? It will take longer to show someone to do something than just doing it myself. If you’ve got something that’s a onetime thing, it’s a onetime thing and that’s the case, just do it.
But if it’s repetitive or there’s several occurrences of it and it might take you longer that one time to show them how to do it, you’re going to save that time. You’re going to take that off your plate and move on. So we really got to think about what’s your time worth.
So what are some of the things you could take off your plate? Ongoing repetitive tasks are one of the easiest things to put into a process to teach somebody how to do it. Whatever it might be, confirming moves, opening the mail, bookkeeping. I’ve got a private client. When I first started working with him we got to a certain place and I’m like, “We really got to dig into your P&L to find the answer to what you’re looking for.”
“Okay, yeah. I’m going to get them.” He had an accounting background so he was going to do them himself. A couple months went by and I’m like, “Listen, you can do it, but you’re not. So let’s hire somebody to do it.” We got him a part time bookkeeper, remotely, and got the books done, right away.
And so the point is don’t let something that you’ve been meaning to get to, even if you have the skill to do it, you’ve got to be real with yourself and be like, “I know I’ve been talking about doing this, but am I doing it? No? Let me just hire somebody and get it done.”
Project management. So as you start to scale and you’re working on business development, you’re not just working on the day to day, it’s business development and how to grow and how to scale, there’s going to be a lot of projects going on. A project could be open this new location. A project could be set up training for all our new franchisees, stuff like that.
Operations management. How many of you know you need to hire an operations manager? Okay. Everybody else has one already? Okay.
Sales management. We’ll talk about sales… What’s today, Saturday? Wow, it’s going by quick. We’ll talk about sales tomorrow.
Marketing management, customer support, report generation.
Recruiting and hiring. Who doesn’t enjoy recruiting or hiring? Okay. Nowadays you could find yourself a part time, remote recruiter that works out of the office. That won’t cost you a fortune because it’s as needed. Don’t slow down the process because it’s something you don’t enjoy. We’re in a time now where resources and people are so easy to find and hire at cheap prices and just for what’s needed. You could easily get a virtual assistant or a virtual recruiter for X amount of dollars, X amount of hours per week or whatever it might be.
Basically anything you do, you can get off your plate. You start to make it a game and that carries over into your personal life.
So you’ve got to remove yourself from the drudgery, from the day to day. Not this month, not this week, remember you’re on the road to mastery. There is time to get there. Don’t feel like you have to do it all right away. To build a sustainable, longterm, successful business that’s going to build wealth for you and your family, it’s not done overnight. Make your days mission driven, not hour driven. When you go to work, go there on a specific mission for that day. Go in and execute on that mission. And then you could manage your people, see what’s going on and get out of there.
Don’t just say, ‘I go to work at 8:00 and I leave at 5:00 and whatever falls on my lap in between, that’s what I deal with. Whatever phone calls come in, that’s what I deal with. Whatever people email me, that’s what I deal with.” You go in there on a mission on what you know you’re going to be working on. And when I say go in there, it could be in your spare bedroom. It could be at a coffee shop. It could be at a home office. It could be at a remote office. It doesn’t have to be at your office, but make your days mission driven.
Implement SOPs for each ongoing role that you delegate, standard operating procedures, your processes. It becomes very easy to delegate when all you do is just write out the steps for somebody. Even if you don’t get fancy, bullet point, do this, then do that, then do this, then do that. Always think eliminate, automate or delegate. Whenever you’re doing something yourself… I have this reminder pop up for me every single day so that everything that I’m doing, I’m like, “Can I eliminate this? Does this even need to be done? Is this even necessary?” Sometimes we started doing something years ago and we didn’t really think about it and just kept doing it. And it’s not even really impactful anymore. Can I automate this somehow? So much could be automated these days. Or can I delegate this to somebody else? Decide what to take off your plate, then make sure you decide what to do with your time instead. Remember we got to fill that gap.
If you don’t have the vision for what you’re going to use your time for, you’ll stay comfortable, not realizing it, that you’re staying in your protected shell, because you’re not quite sure. Listen, we all have that little scared kid inside of us. We all have it.
And if we’re afraid of what’s on the other side of something, we’ll stay right where we’re at. Know what you’re going to do with your time and you’re like, “Yeah, get that off my plate. I’m going to go work on that.”
Block time for delegating and follow up. We’ll get to block time, which is a way to manage your days and manage your calendar. But essentially, you’ve got to have time set aside for delegating because otherwise what happens is we just go, “Hey, do this, Hey, do that.” And we don’t really give them proper instruction and then it doesn’t get done right. Then we fall back into, “I’m not doing it because nobody does it right. We tried that it didn’t work.” We’ve got to have the time to actually give them clear instructions and information on what we need done.
And then build a team to run the day to day. Look at it and say, “What are the core functions to run this business?” The fundamentals, not business development and build your team that will run it. And then once you see that it’s running, then you could start working on business development.
Then you got to step into your new role. Remember, I use names to illustrate certain things. It doesn’t mean this is what’s on your business card, but your new role as Moving CEO, that’s what you want to step into. Not small business owner. You want to step into this Moving CEO for yourself. That’s the mindset. That’s the person that’s committed to mastery.
Okay, dabblers don’t have that mindset. Remove yourself from the day-to-day operations of the business. Again, it doesn’t have to happen overnight, but we all have to have something to shoot for. And if we don’t look further out, it just feels like every day is dreadful, the same stuff, the same stuff. And we’re going to have ups and downs and ups and downs. And we don’t really know where we’re headed. If you’ve got that vision of where you’re going and you know, “Hey, eventually I’m stepping out of the business,” every day will be purposeful. It’s not just going to be another day. You know where you’re headed.
Establish a new set of reports to run your business off of numbers. Think through what do I need to see? What would be nice? This is essentially how I started with the certain reports. Let me not worry about how I’m going to get the numbers. And this is where you separate the manager, the creator and the doer. Because when the creator starts saying, “What reports do I need?” The manager interrupts, rudely and says, “Well, how are we going to get those? I don’t even know how we’re going to go about doing this. Where are we going to pull those numbers from?” Tell him to get outside. Stay there and think about the reports that you need and then say, “Okay, I’m going to step outside now. You figure out how we’re going to get those reports.”
When you’re sitting and running it off your iPad or running it off your phone and you could see and know what’s going on from anywhere, what do you need to see? And then establish a new meeting schedule to manage your team. If you’ve got the reports and you’ve got a set a meetings, daily, weekly, monthly meetings that you have, either in person or over the phone or through Skype or Zoom or FaceTime or whatever, now you’re running your business like a Moving CEO. Now you’ve got the freedom to do whatever you want to do with that time.
So now you have a new set of priorities. The client I was telling you about that goes to Europe now, that’s where they travel for long, extended periods of time with his family and runs everything off his iPad. This was the target. That was it. What do we need to do? He actually said it like, kind of stumping me, which I get a lot. This is what I want. How are we going to get that? And it was, “Listen, we’ve got to remove you from the day-to-day. Get you a set of reports that you could see exactly what’s going on. Establish a meeting schedule so you still feel in control and in the loop. And then we need to get your calendar out and we need to block out times, weekly for the new priorities.”