Who’s Doing What

This affects small businesses as well as large corporations way too often we hear “that’s not my job” or “I thought YOU was doing that” and in the end nobody did it and something was overlooked.

Many times I think we spend more time on titles than we do on actions. In a small business where it may  be just you or you and one other person it’s even more important to know who is handling what task or when what task is being handled.

An exercise I’ve done with a couple of companies I’ve worked for is to have your team/staff do these three steps.

Step One, write down what they think their job description is.

Step Two,  list everything they do on a weekly basis.

Step Three, write down what their strengths and weaknesses are.

You should easily see who is doing what, what isn’t getting done, and maybe the fact you have the wrong person doing a task.

Of course if you are an individual doing it all in your business this exercise will be a little different.

Step One, write down tasks you do on weekly basis.

Step Two, write down your strengths and weakness. (It’s ok to not be good at everything!)

Step Three, Make two columns. First column list the things you like to do. Second column list the things you don’t like to do.

In most cases the items in your second column will take you longer to do because you don’t really want to be doing it. And if it takes you longer to do it means you are losing productivity and wasting money.

In fact when looking at the results from either exercise you will find that by not using your resources to their full ability you are losing money.

Yeah I know you’re thinking it’s not physical money out of your pocket but in fact it is!

Here is a few reasons why. If you have someone doing customer support that hates working with people they’re are most likely going to honk someone off which will either result in a refund, missed sale or lack of repeat business.

If you or someone on your staff is not good at a certain task and you spend extra time struggling to complete the task then you are losing time that could be used doing something you are good at.

Look at it in terms of dollars, if you charge for example $50 an hour for consulting or providing the service that you do and it takes you three hours to handle your support desk in essence you cost yourself $150 dollars.

Now think about if you could outsource your support desk at even $10 and hour and they can do the same task in an hour (because they like doing it, and yes there are people that like customer service.) Then you’ve WASTED $140 dollars!

Even if it took them the same three hours you’ve still would’ve wasted $120 because you would not have been able to bill those three hours at your normal rate.

I recommend to try the exercise mentioned above that fits your scenario find out items that you can either have a staff member do better or outsource the things you don’t like or want to do.

You will find out you will end up making more money AND be much happier.