Startup founders and executives often struggle to delegate. As a result, they get overwhelmed and burn out.

Jessica Lessin, CEO of The Information, recently wrote:

“A few weeks ago, I was reporting on two possible M&A deals and asked my sources why each company was looking at a sale versus an initial public offering down the road. In both cases, the answer was the same: The founders were done. There’s not a founder or CEO I talk to these days that doesn’t have some version of that story. They are exhausted.”

Samuel Ajiboyede, the author of the book The Entrepreneur’s Diary, said, “One reason a lot of startup founders and entrepreneurs get burnt out is the tendency to take on too many responsibilities.” His message is, “Don’t be afraid to delegate.”

If you are like a lot of startup leaders, several beliefs keep you from delegating:

You think you save money by doing everything yourself.
You think no one will care as much as they do.
You believe it will take more time to teach someone to do tasks than doing it yourself.
You do not want to put more work on others’ plates.
You do not know how to delegate.
You have a tough time giving up control.

These beliefs are reasonable when you are small. But if you do not delegate, your business cannot grow beyond the time you can spend on it. You also run the risk of exhausting yourself.

What you should delegate

If you want to delegate, you have to decide what you should hand off to others. A valuable tool for choosing what tasks to offload is the Eisenhower Matrix, based on former general and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower’s statement, “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. Urgent problems are seldom important, and important problems are seldom urgent.”

Steven Covey turned this comment into a matrix with four quadrants to organise your tasks and who should do them.

Tasks that are urgent and important, must be done by you
Tasks that are important but not urgent, schedule these for later
Tasks that are urgent but not important, delegate these
Tasks that are neither urgent nor important, eliminate these tasks

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What tasks are urgent but not important? It is a little misleading because calling anything unimportant can be confusing. For example, an Asana report found that managers spend 58 per cent of their time on administrative tasks like:

Email triage
Calendar management
Travel planning
Expense reports

Calling these tasks unimportant is misleading. They are important but do they need to be done by you? Probably not. Consider this:

Most executives spend three hours a day on email
It takes 25 minutes to schedule a business meeting
It takes 12 hours to plan a door-to-door business trip
It takes 30 minutes to complete an expense report

You can easily hand off these tasks to others. Other candidates include:

Invoicing and payment processing
Contact management and CRM maintenance
Document prep
File management

Does it save money to do this work yourself? Think about it this way, you are paying yourself to do tasks that you can outsource to others at a lower cost.

What you should not delegate

Going back to the matrix, to decide what you should not delegate, list the tasks that only you can do. These tasks require your judgment, experience, and leadership, and the buck stops with you. Examples include:

Defining and amplifying your vision and mission
Business strategy and planning
Hiring the key executives
Terminating executives
One-on-one meetings with direct reports
Fundraising
Meeting with investors, partners, and key accounts
Board meetings and reports
Keeping your team aligned and inspired

These are executive functions core to your business that only the top executive in a company can do. Depending on the size and status of your business, you might also be responsible for:

Product definition and roadmap
Sales strategy
Go to market strategy

Who you should delegate to

One reason executives don’t delegate is that they don’t want to give others more work to do. That makes sense when you look at the nature of the tasks you should offload. They are administrative tasks, and you may not have a team member at the appropriate level with the right skills to do that kind of work.

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You could hire some to do your administrative work, but it is probably not a full-time job, and administrative assistants are hard to find. The Lensa Index found that administrative assistants are the third most challenging position to fill. Also, the time and expense of recruiting, hiring, onboarding, and training become one more distraction.

Consider virtual assistants

Startup executives and owners are turning to virtual or remote executive assistants as a cost-effective way to delegate time-consuming administrative tasks. The virtual assistant market grew by 40 per cent in 2020 as remote work became the norm and executives realised offsite personnel can be productive and effective.

The virtual assistants usually work in areas of the world where college-educated, English-speaking talent is plentiful but opportunities for meaningful work are scarce. And most virtual assistants are already trained and have experience supporting executives, and have developed best practices for the tasks you want to offload:

Email organisation
Calendar management
Travel planning
Expense reports

There are a few ways to find virtual assistants, all with pros and cons.

Hire a freelancer through a job board:

Pro: the lowest cost option
Con: risk of a bad hire, you must do the management and quality control

Hire an independent contractor through a virtual assistant agency:

Pro: more vetted candidates make this less risky
Con: You still must do the management and quality control

Use a managed virtual assistant service provider:

Pro: the service provider hires, trains, and supervises the virtual assistants, so you do not have to
Con: not the least expensive option

Develop your superpower

Sam Corcos is a four-time founder and CEO. Sam says, “Delegation is a superpower. It also takes practice.”

If you have internal resources to take on administrative tasks, great! This guide should help you get started. If not, there are people from around the world eager to help.

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