Many of us, online course creators, grapple with the fear of delegation.

That nagging thought that no one else can do the job as well as we can often looms large in our minds.

But what if, in succumbing to this fear, we’re missing out on a more efficient and sustainable way to grow our businesses?

This is the central question I aim to tackle in this episode.

As a fellow course creator, I’ve frequently found myself entangled in the whirlwind of tasks, spanning content creation, marketing, and business management.

However, a recent personal experience has sparked a significant shift in my perspective on time management and delegation.

In this episode, I’ll delve into the heart of this realization. I’ll explore the fear that impedes us from delegating and the prevailing belief that we can execute tasks better on our own. Also, I’ll uncover the essential tasks that course creators should concentrate on to expedite business growth.

If you’re a course creator wearing too many hats and feeling the weight of it all, this episode is tailor-made for you. It’s an invitation to embrace the transformative potential of delegation and to prioritize tasks that genuinely drive your business forward.

In this episode you’ll hear:

• The fear of delegating and its impact on business growth
• The concept of hiring to buy back time
• Key tasks for course creators to focus on for scalability

Links & Resources:

• Rick’s website
• DM me on Instagram
• Full episodes of The Art of Online Business Podcast on YouTube

Kwadwo [QUĀY.jo] Sampany-Kessie’s Links:

• Become a Facebook Ads Lead Gen Cheat Code Founding Member!
• Visit Kwadwo’s website for Facebook Ads help
• Say hi to Kwadwo on Instagram
• Subscribe to Kwadwo’s YouTube channel to learn with him as he learns about personal finance, financial freedom, foreign languages and enjoying life!

Timestamps:

00:00 – Introduction
00:40 – The problem of spending too much time on business
01:39 –  Personal experience: Bike crash and recovery
02:58] – The importance of delegating
05:54 – The suggestion of hiring a ghostwriter
09:22 – The price of time and sacrifices
09:47 – Trusting your team to delegate
11:32 – The importance of focusing on high-value tasks
15:30 – Letting go and delegating
16:58 – The freedom and fear of delegation

Please support the podcast by giving an honest Rating/Review for the show on iTunes!

So it’s like 7.30pm and I look at his video and it’s just way too late at night and I know that I shouldn’t just sit there and edit the video, but how I gave into the temptation. My wife came in after her Bible study that night it was like closer to 10 o’clock now and she asked if she could go to sleep and I realized the price of time. We should be delegating the lower value tasks and spending more time on the higher value tasks. If you want to keep scaling your business or scale more quickly, you have got to spend time on the activities that are worth more to your business. Hey there, kwayjo here, and if my voice is new to you, I’m the new co-host of the Art of Online Business podcast, and today was supposed to be a follow fix Friday episode, but I really felt that someone needed to hear this. So we’re going to take a little turn here and talk about a problem that a lot of us and I say us actually including me online course creators we have, which is that we spend way too much time on the business and we end up sacrificing business growth because of this thing. And if you’re watching on the YouTube channel, hi, my face is getting better After this crazy, unfortunately lackluster bike crash that I had that smashed my face in and I had surgery above and below my eye, broken nose, fracture on the orbital floor, which is the part of the bone that holds up your eyeball. I’m slowly improving, but it’s taking a lot longer than I thought.

So this topic it came up as I had a coaching call last Friday and I’ll kind of lay out the issue, which is we tend to be, as online course creators and coaches of braid let’s just call it fear. We don’t want to delegate out responsibility. And I get it. I know what you’re thinking because I have thought the same thing. My team couldn’t possibly do it as good as me, and maybe that’s true. Maybe they could do it better. So I’ve been reading this book called buy back your time. It’s by Dan Martell and he says don’t hire to grow your business, hire to buy back your time. Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they learned to do what they love and only what they love. And so, like I titled this episode, the price of time whatever course creator needs to delegate now, because what are we really sacrificing when we think we’re working on our business and doing all the things.

So, for context, I was having a funnel fixing call last Friday at least at the recording of this episode last Friday with a client it’s actually a husband and wife duo, a dynamic duo and during the call they ask a question what did I think about them setting up a second website? And my initial thoughts were, huh, this is intriguing. Let’s ask some more questions and, you know, through some more back and forth, it came out that they really just weren’t happy with the authority and the online SEO authority and the brand authority that the first website was building for them, and they wanted to have a second website that was more dedicated to the course side of the operations. And so, after a few more questions, it just really became clear they wanted to rank higher in Google, build more authority and increase organic leads Great. So since they thought their current website wasn’t accomplishing that goal, we started to explore well, what could accomplish that goal? Well, what could accomplish that goal? And so now this business had had success with their blogs.

But the issue, the thing I started bringing up with this couple, was that both the husband and the wife were writing the blogs, and the husband was even learning how to do keyword research and learning how to do SEO in an attempt to make his blogs rank higher, and that’s good right. But the wife is the CEO of the business and the husband also has his own business. Their time is super valuable and they had come to me. I managed their ads, and for some clients I manage ads. Those clients also choose to have me do funnel fixing calls with them. It’s another service that I offer on top of ads management, and so they had come to me to help them fix their sales funnel, and they really want to scale their business, and so I proposed and they agree that we just started exploring solutions where they could have someone else do the SEO, someone else learn the SEO, do the SEO, buy that person a course and have that other person write the blog so that the husband and wife CEO team could devote more time to higher value tasks that only they could do, tasks like creating a webinar, optimizing their sales funnel, making connections with people for future collaborations or even improving on their programs messaging.

So I’d given them a suggestion how about they find a ghostwriter? And the wife’s first response was because she’s a published author. She’s like, well, but then that person wouldn’t be able to write in my voice. I’m like, well, that’s true, but they could. That’s what ghostwriters do. And I was like, by the way, you wrote a book, right? Did you have an editor? She’s like, yeah, I’m like, well, what did the editor do to the words that you were writing? And she outlined a few things. I’m like I bet that changed your voice a little bit. So we kept on going and I thought, well, what if you found a writer inside of your current community who’s familiar with her field of expertise? And then maybe the wife could end up dictating blog article ideas, or even blog articles that just float to her mind, because she’s full of them, right At length into a voice note and then let the writer take the SEO course, pull together the blog article and publish it. But I want to go past just giving them the advice and I want to let you, the listener, know that I relate. I could definitely relate.

So here’s something that happened to me last week. I am growing a YouTube channel. It’s youtubecom slash quajo Q-U-A-Y-J-O. You can go down to the description in the show notes and find the link and follow me there. I’m actually starting a hundred days to a hundred K month challenge. Because of a lot of the issues that I had from the accident where I can’t actually look at a screen for more than three hours and it’s really hampered my ability to work nine hour days. I’m admitting that I used to work that much, but I can’t do it anymore. So I’m forced to revisit how the business is structured and how I’m spending my time, and so my take on this challenge is that I’ll devote the first hundred minutes of every day to the highest possible revenue generating activity and we’ll see how close I get to a hundred K months in new and in new revenue.

So back to this YouTube trailer. I had my video editor make a YouTube trailer for me and after the third revision I got it and I just I knew I could do better. I was happy with it, but not super happy, and maybe you relate where you’ve had somebody in your business do something that you’ve done well before and that you really know how to do and you’re just like I could do this better. And I can because in my previous business that got destroyed by the pandemic elementary Chinese I had edited at least 150 videos on my other YouTube channel and grown that channel to like 21,000 subscribers not big, but not small and so I really know the visual style that I like.

So it was 730 pm on a I believe it was a Thursday night and I knew I’d already pushed past my work limit. And why was I even working that late? Because I have to take long naps, because all the trauma that happened to my face. I can’t just work three hours, I have to do like one hour and just lay down, or two hours and just lay down, because my face is screaming at me and the pain goes beyond what I can control with medication. So it’s like 730 pm and I look at his video. It’s just way too late at night. I know that I shouldn’t just sit there and edit the video, but how I gave in to the temptation, I edited the video anyway. You know it was good. My edit my trailer. You can go look at it on my YouTube channel. It was better than what he produced. It’s not like I did a side-by-side comparison. Ken, if you’re watching this, you did a good job, I just wanted it better.

My wife came in after her Bible study that night it was like closer to 10 o’clock now. She asked if she could go to sleep. I realized the price of time. I was proud of my new YouTube channel trailer. But what was the price I paid? Because she was waiting. She wanted to tell me about her day. Here’s the kicker she already saw the previous YouTube trailer and she liked it. She thought it was fine. According to her, I could have uploaded that Basically, the editor had already done 70 to 80% of what I could do myself and was spending that time really going to make the trailer. I mean, was the trailer that much better? You can be the judge of that. But what did I sacrifice? You know, I sacrificed some moments with my wife, some time listening to her kind of unwind and tell me what was going on with our two kids and all the things that I kind of missed during the day, because I’m in bed recuperating from this whole surgery and this trauma to the area around my eye.

So I thought I would kind of guide you down a little thought experiment and leave you with some encouragement before I finish this episode. So I want you to think about it like this we all fall into this trap of just not trusting our team to delegate. Yet we want to grow and scale our business to higher heights, and we don’t want to be the one working all the time in our business. So like. The one thing I notice is that, as a high earning online course creator, we should be delegating the lower value tasks and spending more time on the higher value tasks. Here’s this thought experiment. Think of it like this you have a goal to make $100,000 in one month, but you can only work a maximum of 40 hours per week. That’s four weeks, so 160 hours. And in this experiment, multiplication does not exist, it’s only addition, as in you can only add up the value of what you do every hour in order to reach 100K. Right, that’s the only way. So if you want to arrive at $100,000, you would need to spend each hour doing a task that’s worth at least $625, because my calculator says 100,000 divided by 160 is 625. So that would be if you just kept going at that hourly rate. That would be $625 per hour If you spent your time on $10 an hour tasks and when I say $10 an hour task, this comes from this concept that you could do a time audit right, and some of these tasks would be $10 an hour tasks, others would be $100 an hour tasks.

Well, yet others would be $1,000 an hour and even $10,000 an hour tasks. But if you only spent your time on $10 an hour tasks Since you only had 160 hours you would never make it to generate that 100,000 at the end of four weeks. And $10 an hour tasks those are like reconciling your books, recording all your expenses into QuickBooks, your accounting software or at least that’s my accounting software Creating social media graphics, editing your videos or even responding to the endless stream of customer service emails that you can’t arrive at 100K that way. In fact, even if you spent your time on $100 an hour tasks, the maximum you would be able to generate would be $16,000, because you had 160 hours at $100 an hour, right, and so examples of $100 tasks more valuable than the $10 an hour tasks would be writing ad copy or creating Facebook ad campaigns. Side note, this is why Rick and I continually say if your business is already earning over $150,000 in annual gross revenue and you’re running your own Facebook ads, it’s probably time to hire out that activity, and I’m not just saying so selfishly, because I’m a Facebook ads manager.

What I’m telling you is is, if you want to keep scaling your business or scale more quickly. You have got to spend time on the activities that are worth more to your business. So what if you spent your time on $1,000 an hour tasks, or even $10,000 an hour tasks? Then you could get to your 100K in a month in just 160 hours. Again, you’re not allowed to work overtime, so it’s eight hour days, right, 40 hours a week. So a $1,000 task or $1,000 per hour task would be something like creating a webinar, strategically planning it out, building a sales funnel, optimizing your sales funnel, prioritizing your schedule so that you’re spending time on the things that move the needle in your business right. And the $10,000 an hour task? That would be like recording a podcast, like I’m doing right now, or delivering the webinar that you spent so much time planning out, or even hiring the right team member to your team, or doing public speaking in your subject matter expertise, or guest podcasting.

And so the temptation is to do it all alone, since you are talented I mean we are talented. I mean, heck, we built our businesses from zero. You can do all the things inside your business. You’ve clocked way more hours than anyone on your team has, and you know your business inside and out. So I just wanted to encourage you, your team members. They don’t have to be as good as you at every task that they’re doing that you could be doing in your business. If they can do something 70% as well as you could do it. Let’s take a $10 hour in task. Then you spent your time doing that task. It’s worth $10 an hour. If they can do it 70% as well as you, that’s good enough. That means now their hour was worth $7 an hour. You can take that hour that you got back because you were willing to let go and delegate, and you can spend your time doing a $1,000 an hour task or $10,000 an hour task, and that, my friend, is the way to scale your business.

It’s what, quite transparently, I have been forced to do because of my accident and now I can’t my eye can’t tolerate screen time, so I’ve really had to take. Well, I’ve been forced to just lay in bed and use audio notes to communicate with my team, and I’ve watched them take the baton. I’ve watched them take the SOPs that we’ve made. I’ve watched them take on a lot more responsibility. I’ve watched them start to think like I’ve been thinking in their individual roles and it’s been quite freeing.

Yeah, it’s been scary and I understand you might be a bit fearful too. What if they mess it up? Well, I have a four year old. He’s past the toddler stage. He can walk now. What if I held his hand all the time when he was learning how to walk? What if I didn’t let him try on his own?

You know how babies are when they kind of get up on their two legs and they fall over and they’re so cute. But how many times does the baby fall over before the baby ends up learning how to walk and become a toddler? And wouldn’t it hinder if the parent helped them out a hundred percent of the time? I would wait here to say yes, and that’s the encouragement I want to leave you with Take the leap. Maybe the next step for you is to hire that first team member. Maybe your next step is because you already have several team members, to give them a bit more autonomy. Maybe spend some time working on some key performance indicators and let them understand how they can function in their role independently and self manage themselves according to those KPIs. I hope this finds you well. Be blessed, and I’ll see you in the next episode.