Delegate functions, not tasks

The following is based on one of The Covenant Group’s clients. All of the names and telling details have been changed.

The more new people Robin hired and the more tasks she delegated, the more bogged down she became.

For most entrepreneurs, it is both important and possible become a success simply by being a great salesperson. For most entrepreneurs, being a great salesperson will get you only so far. As the world places more and more responsibility on the entrepreneurs to run their practice, success depends increasingly on their ability to build a business. Building a business and selling are two quite different things. Being great at sales doesn’t mean you’ll have the skills for building a business. Over the past couple of years, The Covenant Group has launched a number of programs and products to help entrepreneurs make the transition from salesperson to become a business builder. For most, the transition is a challenge, but the rewards are truly worth it. This case study explores just how challenging and rewarding the transition can be.

We first met Robin Froner over a year ago at a presentation we gave to a group of advisors on the challenge of building a business. Robin told us the presentation had spoken directly to her. Robin had entered the financial services industry six years earlier. She’d worked in a bank before that but hadn’t really been happy. She’d wanted a career that offered more freedom and greater potential. When she started as an advisor, she did everything from making sales, planning, client service, and filing. She enjoyed not having a boss, but realized the demands of doing everything herself were going to wear on her. That’s when she looked at hiring an administrative assistant. Initially, she found the responsibility of covering someone else’s salary nerve wracking. But it soon became apparent that she was able to spend her time more profitably. And the business did indeed grow. Over the next few years, Robin hired a number of specialists, first someone to do group benefits, then a disability specialist, and most recently, an investment specialist. With these latest hires, she felt less free to do what she wanted to do. Which was why she was now considering her next hire, a life insurance specialist. With this hire, she figured, she would definitely be freed up to focus on higher end clients. I could tell from our brief conversation that while Robin’s strategy of growing her business with new hires made sense, her implementation of it was flawed. She’d fallen into a typical trap. Like most, she entrepreneurs believed that she’d be able to grow her business just by hiring enough good people. But rather than free up her time, Robin would find herself more bogged down with the each new hire. Robin desperately needed to learn how to manage her organization. 

When we met with Robin, she began by explaining that she felt she was carrying the whole organization on her shoulders. We have heard numerous entrepreneurs say this. It was symptomatic of a specific management problem. The curious thing about this particular management problem is that it’s difficult for the entrepreneur to diagnose on their own. Typically, Robin told Herb that she considered the four people she’d hired in the past few years to be superb. They were all doing a great job; but somehow Robin felt the burden of every aspect of her organization. She felt that if she didn’t think it through, it wouldn’t get done. Furthermore, the whole point of hiring these specialists was so Robin would be freed up to meet the people she wanted to meet and begin building the relationships that were going to move her company to its next level; and this certainly wasn’t happening. In fact, with every new hire, she felt her freedom diminishing. She felt herself falling behind in her business plan. She had a vision for where she wanted to take the company in the next five years and a strategy for getting there, but she was killing herself trying to implement her plan, and in the end, not making the headway she’d wanted. She was even thinking thoughts she’d hoped she’d never have, such as wondering if she’d be better off just having an admin assistant, a reasonable income and a life. On top of all these problems, she felt she wasn’t making the best use of her people, and her people knew it. She treated them right, and paid them fairly for the work they were doing, but most of them seemed dissatisfied with the work she was giving them. She worried that one or two of them were thinking of leaving. She dreaded the though of losing them; they were good and she’d spent a lot of time training them. It all came down to the reality that her biggest expense was payroll, and she knew she wasn’t capitalizing on it. She wanted to know if her dream of building a strong, thriving business was crumbling around her.

We assured her that we were all too familiar with her situation and that her dream was still very much alive. But before we launched into possible solutions, we needed to explore her business further. We began by asking what each employee was accountable for. We started with Sandy, the benefits specialist. Robin answered that she’d been working with a number of companies, and that she brought Sandy in to handle the benefits. In some cases, she’d ask Sandy to pursue a particular company that she knew was looking to find a benefits supplier. We explained to Robin that it seemed she had a strategy for building her benefits business, and then we asked her a key question. “What would happen, if that were Sandy’s strategy?” She responded, “You mean actually put Sandy in charge of benefits?”. Yes, we responded. We then explained that Robin had been delegating tasks to Sandy, tasks of selling and administering benefits contracts for companies one at a time. We asked her if she would consider delegating to Sandy the benefits function, as opposed to simply tasks. Delegating the function would in effect put Sandy in charge of building Robin’s benefits business. Robin said she thought Sandy could do that. Then we asked, “How far into the future do you want Sandy to be working? If I’m Sandy, do you want me developing the benefits business you want in six months? A year from now? Ten years from now?” Robin replied that she could see Sandy working on what they’d need in 18 months, and that would be good enough. We asked her how this made her feel. “It feels great,” Robin said. “It would be a huge burden off my shoulders, and it would free me to work on the issues that only I can handle.”

We then discussed Robin’s other people. Robin saw that Chris could build the disability business over the next two years but judged that Tracy would not be capable of building the investment business. Tracy would still be a valuable employee, but Robin would have to find someone more capable to grow the investment side of Acme Financial. Over the next few months, we worked together helping her delegate properly; to delegate functions, rather than tasks, when she should.

Lessons Learned 

After we began working with Robin, the rewards were evident. She had made great strides in solving a key management problem that many entrepreneurs face: delegating tasks when they should be delegating functions. Everyone in Robin’s company is thrilled with the changes. Sandy, Chris, and Jamie, the new Director of Investments, are all much happier in their roles. Even Tracy feels better now, knowing that she is meeting Robin’s new expectations. But the biggest difference is for Robin who feels the freedom she’d sought for years to really build the business overall. She is no longer tied down by all of the details of her benefits, disability, and investment businesses. She is free to coordinate those businesses because she doesn’t have to run each one. And those parts of her business are growing faster than she could ever have grown them because each one has someone dedicated full time to growing it. At last, she feels on track with her strategy.

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The Covenant Group is referred to by many as where entrepreneurs go to become Business Builders. They are considered to be thought leaders and authors of the best-selling books, The 8 Best Practices of High-Performing Salespeople, The Entrepreneurial Journey, and The Business Builder.