Untangling Your Fishing Line - Delegating in Your Business

My family and I went on our first family vacation this weekend.  By family vacation, I mean a work trip with some family time squeezed in there as well.  Since my two little men are now well on their way to the age of four, I knew it was time for them to start collecting some man points.  While I’m not sure how many man points I’ve accumulated over the years, I know I’m fairly certain I’m still in positive territory.  Since it’s never too early to start, I wanted to make sure that they had a solid bank of man points at an early age.  It’s a precautionary thing just in case they have a moment of weakness and drink pink cocktails or go clothes shopping with their girlfriends when they get a little older.

As part of their christening, I did what any proud father would do – took them to Fleet Farm to pick out their first fishing pole.  Now from my recollection of fishing with my dad, I remember having a knack for creating the most unimaginable rats’ nests ever.  Whether it was operator error or a problem with the reel, I’d like to place blame solely on the equipment.  With that in mind, I found every “cool” open faced reel I could locate.  It didn’t matter.  Hunter found a mini Star Wars kiddie combo, and Jack found the Spiderman equivalent, each with the dreaded closed face reel.  While my memory isn’t clear, I probably had nightmares that night about fishing line wrapped and tangled and knotted and looped and the worst possible rats’ nest you could imagine.

With the rods ready and our bags packed, we headed up to the resort to relax and catch some fish.  My boys have the attention span of, you guessed it, a couple of three year olds, so I wasn’t sure how long they’d last out on the boat.  When we got to our first spot, it wasn’t more than five minutes in that we had our first tangle.  Hunter’s pole was a mess, so I spent some time cleaning that up.  The next thing I know, Jack’s line was tangled around the back of the boat, and repeat the process.  I had my line in the water for a little bit, but not too long.  The fish weren’t biting there, so we packed up and moved to another spot.  After what seemed like milliseconds, I was already untangling some more lines.  I’m not sure why I thought I may actually get some fishing in.  I remember being a kid myself and wreaking havoc on my dad’s poles, leaving him no time to fish. 

If you’re a business owner, many of your days, weeks, and months are probably spent untangling the fishing lines in your business.  There are a lot of important things that can help you succeed and grow that you probably want to do, but somewhere in between the idea and actually following through another rats’ nest came your way to untangle.  Have you put off a long-term business model and set goals to work towards?  Did you plan on attending some of your industry’s top trade shows but instead had to put them off?  Maybe on the safety and risk management side you recognize the need to implement a culture of safety to reduce your workers compensation costs and boost morale.  Risk management sometimes can be the toughest thing to devote time to because your ROI may take a year or more to materialize, and with other coals on the fire it often gets pushed back.

One of the toughest things in business and personal life can be delegating some of these less important tasks to someone else.  Do you have someone in your business who may be equipped to untangle some of those lines you’ve been dealing with?  If you don’t, could you train them?  Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m going to take a wild guess and assume that you didn’t hire someone you didn’t think you could trust.  If that’s the case, stop hesitating and start delegating.  You’ll appreciate your newfound time, and you’ll probably find yourself enjoying your time at work a lot more doing the things you want to be doing. 

We all know that no one can do certain things as well as we can.  Some things though can be done by someone else close to our perfection, and that’s usually okay.  The things that really need our expertise should get our undivided attention, but prioritizing is a good place to start.  By letting go a bit, putting your trust in your employees and delegating those less important tasks to them, you’ve now given your business another chance to succeed.

So think about your business and your personal life.  What types of rats’ nests are you dealing with that would be better off being handled by someone else?  If you were to hand off one or two of these time consuming, menial tasks to someone else today, think of the things you could accomplish.  If you don’t, you’re risking not reaching your full potential in the future, missing those opportunities to grow and improve your profitability.  You aren’t in business to fail, so stop running it that way.

In today’s day and age, you’re either growing or you’re dying.  Start focusing on what really matters, and don’t get caught up in the day to day.  If you haven’t already, today is looking like a great day to start delegating. 

 

A big thanks to the MSBOA for putting together a great conference this past weekend.  And by the way, Jack did manage to catch his first smallmouth bass and wanted me to put it on the wall.  I think that’s worth a few man points.

 

Andy Bertram CPCU, ARM-E

abertram@cobrown.com

651-800-6173