Gina and Rachel have learned the hard way about delegation.
Gina fractured her wrist at the end of 2018. Rachel managed to fracture her ankle in Spring of 2019.
(Graceful ladies that they are….)
Injuries like these showed the women of WYMWYA how important it is to delegate activities so your business can keep going at the same pace, even when you cannot physically keep going at the same pace!
“When you lose your right hand, especially if you’re right-handed and you really can’t function without your right hand. We take it for granted. How many things do we do with our hands?” asks Gina.
In Episode 3, Gina and Rachel discuss how Gina has managed to keep “the bulldozer” moving forward despite a broken right wrist. Instead of getting totally overwhelmed, Gina chose to start delegating tasks.
“We try to do everything, whether it’s physically with our hands or in our businesses,” Gina says. “We try to do everything, we take on things that we shouldn’t be doing, which actually affect our bottom line and generating more sales and making more money. (Breaking my wrist) has been an amazing experiment for me because I’ve had no choice but to call people in various people from my various teams to help.”
And, you’ve got to learn to trust that the people who you use to execute the tasks you delegate to them can actually get them done. Gina says: “I tend to take on too many things and I don’t generally trust other people to do things as well as I think I can do them. And I think delegation is such a matter of trust, of trusting that someone else’s competent and even if they don’t know how to do it exactly the way I want to, to be able to also communicate that and say, Hey, thank you so much for doing this for me. Can we make this and that change instead of being like: why did you do that?”
During the episode, Rachel responds, “I can see also from watching how quickly something like this can happen just out of the blue and suddenly you’re literally crippled and your business being crippled. That is, that’s one good reason to delegate so that everything doesn’t shut down just because you have to take a break. I don’t think about it that way because I feel like everything’s rolling along just
fine. But we think about it when something does happen and all of a sudden we’re like, ‘Oh man, I wish I’d have to put this system in place and that system in place.’ But then it’s too late. It’s like the saying you don’t, you don’t fix the roof when it’s sunny because it’s not leaking.”
And, boom…Rachel broke her ankle a few months later and experienced the same thing in her life and business that Gina felt with a broken wrist: the need to delegate and get help on things that aren’t the highest and best use of her time. Or things that she simply could not do physically.
In your business, do YOU have systems in place? Rachel brings up the point: “What do you do for yourself or your company to be sure that at least if something happens to a key employee, do you have systems in place? Do you have procedures and policies and procedures written out for someone else to step in and take over or at least have another employee or to backup who knows how to do those important jobs?”
You just never know when a mini disaster is going to strike…so, start thinking about how you can put some systems into place that will keep your business (and your life) moving forward if you suddenly can’t do it yourself.
Be careful out there!
And…for more on getting back into the swing of things after health issues, check out Episode 13 below…
