Three Key Ways To Becoming More Efficient In Business

As business owners, we understand the importance of efficiency in order to scale and serve more customers. 

How do we build things so we create income-producing assets that do not NEED our time to continue producing income/assets?

Robert Kiyosaki has this thing called the cashflow quadrant where he explains the 4 main ways you can create income and build leverage from it.

We look for the latest tools, recruit the best talent for our team, and try to bring costs as low as possible. 

When it comes to efficiency, what steps do we need to take in order to ensure we remove as much from our plate as we can? How do we do more in our business without us actually doing more ourselves, as the business owner? 

This is what we’ll be talking about today.

In this blog, I will be sharing how to use the D.A.D. framework to get more efficient in business and get more tasks off your plate. 

Before we get into the juicy bits, what is the D.A.D. framework? D.A.D. means delegate, automate, delete.

Let’s break it down bit by bit.

Delegate

As quickly as you can, you want to get as many tasks off your plate so you can focus on the tasks that will GROW the business OR allow you to actually work less.

Why start with delegation? 

Because this allows you to get into practice of taking tasks off your plate and not micromanaging. It also helps you understand how to help someone do their task better. 

If you can’t understand what you’re asking somebody to do, how can you expect them to meet the standards you expect? 

You may be wondering why it’s so important to understand what you’re delegating.

If you understand what you’re asking team members to do, every mistake becomes a teaching opportunity because you know how to fix it yourself. 

The way I look at mistakes is that it’s a breakdown in communication. When someone in the team makes a mistake, it’s either I haven’t shown something clearly, or the person hasn’t understood what I’m trying to get them to do.

This is why I welcome mistakes because it allows me to refine my/our process. There’s only so many times the mistake is going to be made before you have a process or system that’s working and creates room for your team members to operate with confidence and thus allowing you to do all the things that move you closer to your goal.

When it comes to delegating, I like to start with the tasks that I know like the back of my hand. 

I have a perfect example at the time of writing this. There was a problem that I had to solve for somebody and in demonstrating that I was able to solve this problem, I have now created this avenue of income into my business. 

Because I know how to solve the problem, 80% of the fulfillment is already taken care of. I just need to go find somebody who can execute the fulfillment bit to a high enough level. For cases like this, that person needs to have some skills that they come to the table with. 

By finding someone who has the skills, it becomes easier for me to let go of the things that I need to let go of and focus on finding more clients. 

This is why I prefer to delegate tasks I know at the back of my hand. Someone had a problem that I could solve, I documented the solution to the problem, and that documentation has become training for my team members. 

If I wanted to expand on that, that documentation can even become an info product that I sell down the road (but I haven’t thought that far ahead yet). 

To bring this point home, delegation is usually the first step to take back your time. However, because it’s the first step, it can be very tempting to abdicate instead of delegate. If you’ve been here for a while, you know the difference between abdication and delegation. 

When it comes to getting the task off your plate in the way that I’m talking about, you delegate so you go from being the doer of the thing, to the person managing who is doing the thing. You shouldn’t have to do the thing anymore, you just check and see if everything is up to standard. 

Automate

I’ve put automation second, because this is what will allow you to get menial tasks off your team’s plate. 

The first step is to get tasks off your plate, the next step is to get tasks or menial tasks off your team’s plate. 

What is it that can happen that tools can take care of without a human needing to do anything? There’s a bunch in business. 

Recently, I figured out how to automate our onboarding and service delivery past the point where my involvement is needed. 

Traditionally, whenever we have a new client, what I would have done is I would have manually given that to my project manager, which adds to her task load. But in automating it, I’ve created a room whereby there’s almost infinite scale. What I mean by that is if we were to get 20 clients tomorrow, the onboarding process means we can handle those 20 clients. 

Because there are these little bits in the process that are automated, we can better serve those 20 clients because my project manager now doesn’t have to keep track of 20 client tasks. 

When one part of the process of service delivery gets delayed, it becomes a trickle down effect and affects the whole team. However, because I’m able to automate menial tasks, I free up the project manager to be able to better serve the clients and manage the team. 

One good practice when setting up automations is to make sure your team understands the process of what they’re trying to do. 

The way I tend to work with my team is that as I set-up the automations, I answer any questions they have and walk them through the whole process. That way, if the automation gets broken for whatever reason, my team can go in and fix it. I don’t have to be around to fix it myself. 

One thing I will say is don’t fall for the trap of trying to automate everything. The reason for this is because doing that removes the soul from your business. 

What I mean is that for example, think about walking into an Apple store and buying an iPhone. The experience of buying the product just doesn’t consist of the purchase itself, but the whole package, which involves human-to-human customer experience.

As a business, if you have mastered the right level of customer experience, don’t try and automate that because that removes the soul from your business. 

Your experience as a business owner and your team’s experience as the implementers will help you determine what to automate and what not to automate. 

As I said earlier, you do not want to delegate what you should be automating and you do not want to automate what you should be delegating.

Delete

Finally, the last step is to delete the tasks that don’t drive results. This also involves deleting tools that you don’t need in your business anymore, and deleting projects that no longer energize you and suck your soul.

When there’s something you’re not sure about, delete, delete, delete. 

When you want to become effective and create more time for yourself, you have to become ruthless in removing the things that take time but don’t boost results. This applies to both your time and your team’s time. 

It is important that you set aside time to actually assess everything that’s going on.

As an example, around June 2022, we were putting a lot of content on Pinterest to the point where my content person was complaining because it wasn’t really driving results. I wanted us to do it for six months to see if that would drive any results. And surprise, surprise, it didn’t. That’s when we decided to stop.

Looking at the lack of results we were getting from Pinterest, it was easy for us to delete this task because we realized that our service doesn’t relate to that platform.

Efficiency is Everything

And that’s how you D.A.D. aka delegate, automate, delete, to be more effective in running and growing your business. Everything in business is all about being able to determine what you as the business owner should delegate, and what you and your team should automate. 

Each business is unique and what I may want to delegate, you may want to automate. Don’t pressure yourself into determining this mix immediately as you’ll learn through experience.

Just take note that anything that is draining your time and energy and isn’t getting you the results you want may need deleting ASAP. Your time as a business owner is precious, use it wisely, my dear reader.