Assistant on the Phone

The old rule of thumb for freelancers goes like this: for every hour of billable work you do, there’s another hour of work you can’t bill for.

It could be book-keeping, it could be marketing, it could be organizing or brainstorming. For the record, you shouldn’t be billing your clients using an hourly rate, but by charging a fixed rate for the deliverable. Working out your hourly rates is useful for planning purposes only.

Let’s say you’re earning $1,000 a week as a freelancer. Depending on your situation, this probably means you’re comfortable. Maybe not comfortable enough to go out for a beer every Friday night, but you’re also not struggling to pay the rent.

If this rule of thumb is true — and in my experience, it is — you can either double your income or halve your work through the art of delegation. I’ve just recently started delegating about 90% of those non-billable hours (and a few billable ones) to my wife, and so far it has allowed me to focus on getting more clients and doing more money-earning work.

The beauty is that because most non-billable activities can be batched, the time expense for Isabelle increases at a much slower rate than mine each time a new client comes on board. I can work full-time just on writing and delivering the product, while she works part-time keeping things in order.

I mentioned that I’ve also delegated some of my billable hours, because Isabelle has also taken on the role of my research assistant. This means I send her an article brief, and she does some research and sends me back a document with notes and links. This effectively halves the time I have to spend on each article, and sometimes I can even use the document I receive as a basis outline for the article I’ve got to write.

I still do research for each article, but now the groundwork is done — the most time-consuming part of research is the first phase where you have to dig into the topic and find out where the good information is.

If you don’t have a spouse who is happy and willing to take on this role (or even, if you don’t have a spouse you can trust with your work), this will be harder to pull off initially. You’ll need to find an assistant the hard way and pay them by the hour. But if you do it right, you won’t be losing money, you’ll be making it. I don’t need to pay Isabelle by the hour because any money either of us makes is automatically considered family income.

If not double the income, then…

If the effective practice of task delegation does not double your income, it doubles your income earning capacity. It means you can take on more work than you could humanly take on before. There are essentially two ways to double your income: double your rates, or double the amount of work you do.

Doubling your rates is a very time-consuming process. You can’t wake up one day and multiply your prices by two. And you may lose clients as you get more expensive even if it’s gradual, especially if you’re not seen to be delivering that much value.

But delegation is something you can implement rapidly, see results from quickly and either double your income or give yourself the potential to double your income in a much shorter timeframe.

How to Make the Transition

Taking on an assistant who you can delegate work to is not always an easy transition, especially if you like to have control over all aspects of your business. Most of us do.

Making the transition successfully is primarily about planning properly and setting clear boundaries. You have to know where your duties stop and your assistant’s begin, and conversely, you’ve got to know where the assistant’s duties stop and yours begin. There’s no better way to cripple an effective assistant than by dumping work on them that’s not theirs to do.

You’ll need a list of duties, whether that list is verbal or written (obviously written is better), and you’ll need to communciate it clearly and concisely. Clearly because boundaries that are foggy around the edges are as effective as no boundaries at all, and concisely because anything that communicates more than the minimum necessary will be forgotten within five minutes.

I’d love to hear your own tips, tricks and techniques for effective delegation, and if you meddle in this dark art after reading this article, come back and tell us about your experiences.

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