How and Why You Should Be Delegating Your Brand Building to Achieve Success as a Female-Owned Business Fast

Whether you’re looking at the first big hurdle of delegation or feel like you’re further ahead in the Big Race to Success, It’s essential to take a beat and refresh our minds about our own ability or lack thereof to focus our human brains. The average person achieves a measly 2-3 hours of actual work every day, when you consider the societal archetype of working 9 to 5, 5 days a week, that quickly clocks up to an eye-watering 25 hours a week of completely WASTED time.

Get real on the big vision 

Now, let’s think through this lens of exorbitant time disappearing into the ether. Visualise your big, dreamy plans for the empire you’re building right now. Using this rough calculation of about 15 or so hours a week to get to this goal (assuming all 52 of your work weeks a year run exactly as planned), how long will it take you to get to where you want to be?

Compare that to your current timeline or that big goal you have written on a post-it note on your office wall. Are you the sort of person who has a scoped out 5-year plan? Or are you more fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman?

Can you see where the disconnect is?

Like it or not, the only way to get to your vision goal point fast is by getting more hands to make lighter work of it all. This is WHY I strongly believe we women need to get better at the art of delegation.

Yes, it goes against our programming to be good, responsible girls.

Yes, it means not everything will be to your standard of perfect.

Yes, it will mean you need to spend money to make money.

If you just read this and it brought up a reactionary feeling of resistance, let me ask you this. 

Are you happy extending your timeline towards success by X5 or X10? 

How old will you be then?

How will that alter your expectations for where you want to be at these ages?

When we have made peace with the reality that being a CEO must include leading other people and letting go of 100% control over your business, it’s time for us to think some more. But this time, on the practical side of it all.

Pobodies nerfect sweetheart

Chances are you are already pretty self-aware about what types of tasks you’re not that great at. We all have our strong suits and areas of weakness. This is a fabulous way to begin feeling more comfortable about spending money to make money. Start by delegating the bits you are not naturally the best at first. One of the first things I decided I had to delegate early on in my business was my accounts. I only came to this realisation after staying late in my studio and crying while trying to understand a frustrating online tax return for about 3 hours. 

My Top 3 Favourite psychometric tests to reinforce that gut instinct you probably already have about your weakest areas and preferred working style include: 

KOLBE – Focuses on the way you instinctively get things done.

DISC – Reveals your natural behaviour styles.

Myers/Briggs – Where you focus your attention and the way you comprehend information. 

Any psychometric testing is not 100% final and precise; it’s more of a guide on natural instinctive behaviour. Anyone can work to develop and change profiling like this over time, but knowing more about how you’re wired to understand your intrinsic behaviours helps to open a new level of awareness about why you might find specific tasks in running a business to be more exhausting or full of friction than others. Sure, you can push on and work through them. I could plan to sit and sob every tax season. But do you really want to waste your precious energies and time this way?  

Money Messages

The other BIG part of the fear of delegation is spending your money. This is an area I am always working on in my personal development. I grew up with mixed messages about money, so now, as an adult, my instinctive behaviour and gut feelings about money are contradictory. 

In one money mindset training I did a few years ago, the expert asked us to think about our earliest memory of money. My memory was of my bright yellow bear piggy bank. The bear’s top hat was bright red with the money slot in the top, and it lived on the top shelf in our dresser in the dining room of the house I grew up in. When I got pocket money or birthday money, the bear was brought down, and I put it in there for safekeeping to spend after saving it. I think I was about 3 or 4, and we returned home from being away on holiday to find that our house had been broken into. My jaunty bear money box was gone! Only after this training was I able to draw a connection between feeling out of control and sometimes helpless about money in my adult life with this event out of my control as a small child.

Figuring out why you feel the way you do about spending your money is a vital part of overcoming the fear you might have about hiring help in your business. If you know that’s you, I highly recommend these three books:

You Are A Badass at Making Money – Jen Sincero

Get Rich Lucky Bitch – Denise Duffield Thomas

It’s Not About The Money - Catherine Morgan 

The other part of learning about money mindset is actually doing something about it. You can’t expect to read a book and be fully set to step into a new perspective about money. You have to DO IT. Feel the fear and make that first hire anyway. Of course, if Money Mindset is your thing, I highly recommend checking out the articles by Ilana Jankowitz for The Female CEO.

Review your profit margins 

The logical part of delegating and feeling good about it is to go back and look at when you last put your prices up. Is this a regular annual event? How much can you offset this new overhead with a price rise? 

Now that you are fully equipped to make that hire, how should you go about it all? 

Chances are you’re now thinking back to all of those job interviews you’ve had in your life so far and feeling unsure about how to make being on the receiving end of those experiences feel good. That’s hard, isn’t it? 

Here are my top hiring tricks. Please feel free to steal them for yourself to get started.

Seven reliable horses are better than one magical unicorn

By this, I mean you will naturally want to play it safe when hiring resources. This is normal, but it’s not actually that logical. Maybe you know straight out of the gate, you need someone who can do the invoicing, sort the socials, and help you turn your car crash of a schedule into a colour-coded wonder.

When you break it down, that’s a LOT of different skills. Sure, you can find a gifted PA or EA to do a bit of everything, but from experience, it often works out much better and more cost-effective to have more people do less than finding one fantastic unicorn of a hire. Think about it this way: When that unicorn is sick, takes a holiday, or gives you a week’s notice, what position do you want to be left in? Having to do everything as well as find and hire another unicorn? Or worry about one function that is an easy replacement whilst everything else is ticking along fine with your other resources support instead?

My five steps to hiring:

Always ask your network for recommendations first.

All that work you have put into building your network is about to pay off. This is when you can lean on your good character and standing of being a helpful connector in your area. Ask for recommendations to an email and scheduling VA, a social media VA, a sales VA, and an email marketing VA. I recommend you do this one-to-one on a call or DM. This yields better results than doing a blanket social post. When you reach out to someone directly for their help, they are way more likely to want to help you.

Then, after you have asked 5-10 contacts for direct recommendations, think about doing the blanket social post to see if any other names pop up or if any new keen potential suppliers want to throw their names into your hat.

Source the average price. But use it as a rough guide only.

Before discussing numbers in an interview scenario, do your procurement research. Look around at the average prices and style of charging these suppliers ask. You can head onto resourcing websites like Fiver or Upskill to get a read on the lower end of the single gig market. Be sure to add this into your direct one-to-one back and forth to see what your colleagues are paying or feel is reasonable to pay. Aim to get a rough average before you conduct interviews.

Note I’ve said to use this as a rough guide only. You want to have a scale in mind before going into an interview. What is the cheapest end of the market? What’s the pricey end of the market? Don’t set your heart on paying a bargain price point for someone amazing. You’re going to end up disappointed because your expectations are skewed. You will use the interview step to determine what price you want and need to pay.

5:1 Interviewing face-to-face.

This might seem counterintuitive, but bear with me. Having learned the hard way, the time spent holding a series of efficient interviews far outweighs the time wasted in dealing with any bad hire that comes with the loss of money and the baked-in burden of emotional stress/trauma. Whenever I hire anyone for anything these days, I find it helps to get into a flow state on the interview process. I block out a whole morning or day to hold interviews back-to-back. Right now, I aim to meet with five people for every role I hire for.

I draft a series of about five questions related to the job and the skills I need. What happens in the interview goes in a simple table that looks something like this?

Making the right decision.

At the end of this series of meetings, I think hard about who is best equipped for what I need at a price point I’m willing to pay for peace of mind and competence. Then I sleep on it. The next day, I judge the likeability and personal vibes side of things separately. You’ll feel like you want to hire the person you like the most. So, splitting this part of hiring into its own category always helps me to divide the emotional aspect of it up. Let’s face it: if you hire more people just like you, will the skills you are naturally not so good at will be fulfilled in a way better than you could do them? Probably not.

Hiring Cautiously with 90 days to get out.

Sometimes, despite all the due diligence in the world, a hire can still go wrong. This is where a 90-day review can save your bacon. I know you know that entering into any agreement without a contract is foolish, so this needs to be the fundamental baseline of formalising any hire and protecting your business in the process. Mandating a 90-day review and booking this in on day 1 of your hire allows both parties to air any solvable teething grievances or part ways with dignity before things spiral out of control. 

Delegating your brand baby

Even the most creative Female CEO needs help to grow her brand and business. I’d argue that the more creative you are, the more help you need when articulating and developing a brand. It’s so easy to want to play around with the creative branding stuff when your happy place is colours, visuals and feelings. This does not a profitable performing brand make, my dear! 

Branding Strategy is where the logical facts part of a business intersects with the creative aspect of a business. To grow and succeed, every single creative output must be connected to the facts and binary part of your business. The keystone that brings these two worlds together is known as a Branding Guidelines Document. This is a lengthy, robust map to the inner workings of your business. I’ve talked about this in this article and here and here on my show #MwahTV.

Creating an entire brand guidelines document may feel like overkill for where you are in your business right now. To help you navigate this effectively, I have this fun free quiz designed to help you clearly understand what type of brand owner you are. This shows you where you need to work the most on your branding first.

Which of these brand hires do you recognise?  

Brands take a lot of different types of skills to implement and then grow. Here is an introductory list of hires you may or may not be familiar with that are all needed to build a brand. I’ve divided them into one-off hires and ongoing hires for you. Not all these roles will be relevant for your business now, but it’s worthwhile considering when you might need to invest in these things in the coming months and years.

Now, knowing what type of brand owner you are in your business, having completed the Free quiz, what is the right next step and hire for you?

With this insight and the tricks of the trade you have today from this article, you can be closer to being the delegating Brand Leader you know you are destined to be. 

Laura Pearman is a passionate modern feminist and Creative Swiss Army Knife working with female founders to get focused on how they can grow their business with refined creativity to become the most memorable brand in their marketplace.

With degrees in both Marketing & Photography followed by ten years of running her own creative business serving hundreds of clients, you can trust her recommendations and insight.

Flying the flag of equality for women, she strives to do what she can to ensure newer generations of women in the workforce find it easier to build a career without the glass ceilings and systemic restrictions still around us today.

You can read all about Laura here.