It is a simple fact that I am terrible at delegating.

I have a very hard time giving work to someone else to complete. Even when I’m trying to think of tasks to delegate, when I am purposely trying to trim down my workload, I have trouble delegating.

But now I have a secret weapon.

Last week, on my company’s anniversary, I hired my first full-time employee. Cara doesn’t have an official job title yet, she is a jack-of-all-trades. I hired her because she is smart, flexible, likes variety, and because she is the best delegator I have ever met in my life.

Cara takes delegating to a whole new level, not because she is lazy, but because she is efficient. She is willing to do anything if it has a purpose, but if it is useless busy work, she’ll be happy to explain why. If she’s working on a project that can be outsourced to someone else who is not fully occupied with work, she’ll demonstrate how that makes sense. She is also excellent at training other people (which is a big part of delegating). Cara is a master delegator.

In the one week since Cara’s worked with me, her delegation skills have already begun to transform my business. And watching her thought-processes has given me some really good insight into why every person in every business should start delegating more today.

1. Teaching a job to someone else shows you where there are holes in your logic or where you’re taking too many steps. As I’ve begun to explain process-oriented work to Cara, she asks me questions that point out unnecessary steps or reveal a better way to do things. Today I was explaining how to check something from the admin section of a Web site. To do so involves a separate URL, login information and instructions on how to access the data. That process works, but Cara asked why we couldn’t just find the information from the public Website. Turns out we could, and that saved us about 10 unnecessary steps. Just by explaining the steps and having someone ask a question, we saved time and streamlined a lengthy process.

2. Feeling like you have to do something is a lot of pressure; it’s easier to think more creatively when you aren’t stressed with looming projects. I have a to do list that stretches for pages in my notebook. There are many items on that list that have been there for months. They are always on that list, always in the back of my mind; projects that I need to tackle but haven’t been able to get to. If there is a project that has been on your to do list for more than two months, think about delegating it. You aren’t getting it done, so at least some progress will be made if you give it to someone else.

3. Giving away something old and established makes way for something new and innovative. I have a number of repetitive projects that take up a portion of my week every week. These things are always there; kind of like during college on the weekends when I could not ever relax because I knew that there was a book to read or a paper to write. By delegating those kinds of projects, your mind has more room to be creative and to spend time on less process-oriented problems.

4. Establishing processes allows you to delegate and to increase your output in multiples. It’s fairly obvious that it is much easier to outsource something if there is a process for how it gets done. By creating processes around work, and figuring out how to get other people to help do the work, there is another benefit - the total amount of work that you can get done increases exponentially. An good example is the human powered search engine Mahalo. The site employs Guides who help to create pages that can be searched. There is a process to creating those Mahalo pages, and by making sure that everyone who works on the site knows the process, the site can grow faster as new Guides are added.

5. Freeing up extra time will allow you to write that blog post that you’ve been putting off for a week (or longer). More time for other work is the most obvious reason to delegate.

(BONUS) 6. Believing that you are the only one that can do a task isn’t helpful for you and isn’t helpful for your business. And it’s probably not true. This is the most common protest made by over-achievers and perfectionists who think that they can do the work the best or the fastest or without any help. And this notion is dangerous because trying to run a business completely alone will not work. And in most cases, it’s better to get 80% of the work done at 80% skill level than 40% of the work done at 100% skill level. On top of this, it’s usually not true that no one else could do the work.

When this article first came out, I printed it out and tacked it to my bulletin board at work because of this section:

“Moving into any new position requires that you get rid of the stuff from your old position. This means delegating. It means getting over the idea that you were indispensable on any of your old teams. You can’t do you new job well if you’re still doing your old job.

Delegating your old job should take three days. You find people who are taking a step up when they accept pieces of your old job so that they are excited. You give them an explanation of how to do it and tell them where to go when they have questions.

You are going to tell me that one day is not enough, that you have a very complicated job. But think of it this way: If you died today, your job would be delegated in a couple of days.

Delegating is not enough, though. You have to stop caring. If you are no longer on a project because you got a promotion, then you have to stop obsessing about how the project is doing.”

I try to keep that advice in mind, but I’ve already admitted that it’s a challenge for me. If you’re bad at delegating, try these seven tips to becoming a better delegator. But whatever you do, start delegating more today.

Photo by Mykl Roventine

Anyone who tried to visit any page on this site since last Wednesday already knows what I am about to tell you - my blog has been down for five days. It’s back up now, working just fine, but it appears that the damage has been done. My good SEO ranking on some good terms has been lost, 1/4 of my readers have unsubscribed.

I just wanted to send a quick note out to all of you who have stuck with me through the downtime - thank you! And I’m sorry for the technical difficulties. The short explanation is that this blog is using a technology that one of my new businesses/applications is also using, and when the developers made a change to that application, they managed to take down my blog at the same time. It appears that everything is now fixed and working like it should, hopefully there won’t be any more issues.

This outage really brings to light what I think is my biggest weakness as an entrepreneur - I am not technical enough. I know a bit about technology, definitely enough to talk about it and to understand the concepts, a smattering of HTML. But I am not a “do-er” - and so, when things like this happen, I am at the mercy of others. This fact is hard to take.

I am honestly not sure what the solution to the problem is, either. As the president of my company, I shouldn’t be the one who is doing all the nitty gritty work - that would be a waste of time and resources. I also don’t have the time to go back to school and to take classes to learn all this stuff that I wish I already knew. I could regret my college major (maybe computer science would have been a better choice than English, no matter how much I loved reading those books), but then again, if I had majored in computer science, who knows where I would be now. Maybe the influences of Maya Angelou (On The Pulse of the Morning), Sylvia Plath and Ralph Ellison are part of what has inspired me to be the person I am today, to do what I am doing right now. And regrets aren’t helpful, anyway.

So I put my lack of technical expertise in the category of unavoidable things that suck. At least for now. And I try to use this weakness as a reminder that I can’t build this business on my own, that I need help and input from a wide variety of other people to be successful. And I breathe. Slowly.

Photo by solidstate

That was my alternate title for the story I just wrote for The Industry Standard - up now on the site: 10 reasons that start-ups absolutely should outsource (almost) everything.

From the titles I’ve chosen, it’s pretty clear that I am a huge fan of outsourcing. Since I am the only full-time employee of my company, I am a big outsourcer. Outsourcing has been a great way for me to scale quickly without breaking the bank. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t rehash everything here, but if you want to read about my experiences with outsourcing, here are some choice selections:

- Globalization, outsourcing and Pure Incubation
- How to hire a Web designer using eLance
- How to prepare for the globalization of your Internet business

And I found out today that all this outsourcing has had a positive impact on my business - for the first time (March 2008), I was in the black.

I am a fan of celebrating the small victories (and believe me, it was small), so I’ll be celebrating this weekend. Have a good one.

Photo by bfick

As I mentioned in my last post, I just finished my first board meeting for Pure Incubation, and I thought I would share my favorite statistic and slide from the meeting. One of the things that I like the best about this business is that, by design, I am working with people from all over the world. Currently, I am working with 17 different writers, designers, developers, marketing people and consultants, in 6 countries on 4 continents. To illustrate this, I put together a world map with the locations of my various consultants and contractors. I’m not a designer so forgive the bad graphics!

I have hired a lot of Web designers for various projects over the years. I am not a Web designer, nor a graphic designer, nor any kind of designer. But I know how to use eLance.

eLance is one of the best tools on the Internet for hiring contractors to do one-off tasks, such as creating a Web design, or a logo or content for a Web site. I love eLance. I use it all the time. In fact, I love eLance more than I love CustomInk, which is saying quite a bit.

eLance was founded in 1999, and when I started using the service - I posted my first project on 10/4/2002 - I was still an early user of the online marketplace. Since that time, millions of projects have been completed using eLance, and it now is used by many of the biggest companies around the world.

Here’s how eLance works if you are buying services. (If you are a freelancer and want to sign up to provide services via eLance, try the Find Work section of eLance for more information.)

Sign up for an account.
This process is easy and self-explanatory. You will need to have a credit card or a bank account from which your payments can be made. When you are picking your username, choose a name that can be associated with you and your business, as that name shows up everywhere when you are posting projects. For example, my username is PureIncubation, which is my company name, and works great.

Post your project.
After you have registered, you will be able to post projects to get bids. This involves filling out a form with the details of the project, including:

• Posting Title: Make sure to use the keyword for the project in the title - such as “One-page Web design of a technology site.” The providers are alerted to new projects based on keywords, so you want to include the type of project that you are hiring for (Web design) somewhere in the title.
• Category: For a Web design project, select “Website development”
• Subcategory: Select “Web Design”
• Work Description: Include a description of the project. Concentrate on making this as descriptive as possible without overwhelming the providers who are bidding. This will not be your last time to talk to the people you will consider hiring, but you need to be descriptive enough to interest them in the project and to get an accurate bid. I typically include a short description of what the project is (how many pages, what I want designed, if I have a logo or need one, if I know the general layout of the site, etc.), and I ask for a timeline and samples of relevant work. I also try to throw in something specific in the bid that the providers will need to respond to, just so that I can be sure they are reading the description of my project and aren’t just bidding indiscriminately. For example, I’ll write “Please include a link to another technology site that you have designed in your bid.”
• Work Type: For a Web design project, I pick “Fixed fee” because I do not want to go over the budget that I have set.
• Budget Range: This depends. If I know the budget, I sometimes pick a range from the list. But most often I select “prefer not to disclose” because I don’t want to influence the provider higher with their bid. Many times I have gotten a project completed at a lower cost than I anticipated because of the competitive nature of the eLance bidding system, and I don’t want to foil that process.
• Response Deadline: This depends on how much of a hurry you are in. Most of your bids will come in during the first three days, but the longer your bidding is open, the more bids you’ll get. You can always extend this deadline later if need-be, as well.
• Sealed Bidding: This allows you to be the only one to see the bids. Since this feature was instituted, I have found a much greater range in the bids that I receive because providers are independently bidding. I usually leave this checked but I’m honestly not sure if it makes a difference.
• Work Location: I always select “work can be done anywhere”
• Escrow: This just depends on how you want to pay. If you choose this option, you will use the eLance Escrow service and pay for everything up front - only releasing the funds when you approve various phases of the project. I personally don’t select this feature, but I am happy to use it if a provider requests this type of payment option.

Review the bids.
This part of the process is the key to making sure that you have a successful experience with eLance. You’ll likely receive quite a few bids (I typically get from 15-20 per project) and you need to review each bid from each provider to find the one that will be best for you. This is how I manage the process:

• Read the bids: By reading the bids that are made, you’ll be able to see if the eLancer is a good communicator, if they have answered your specific questions and if they posted any relevant information for your project. It is a red flag at this point if the provider either does not answer the questions that you posed in the description of the project or has spotty communication skills - you will want to proceed very carefully with hiring anyone who fits into either of those categories. Eliminate any providers that you don’t think will work.
• View all the portfolios: This is the most important part of the process. I look at every single portfolio, specifically, I am looking for sites the provider has designed in the past that are similar to the one that they will do for me. Sometimes providers are excellent at designing a Web site for an ecommerce company, for example, but terrible at designing a site for an elegant restaurant, or vice versa. I also look for overall style and if I “like” the designs that the provider has produced in the past. This is subjective, but design is subjective, and this site will represent you and your business, so it’s important to be picky. Eliminate any provider who doesn’t fit your requirements.
• Review the bid amounts: At this stage, I look at all the providers who are left and see how much money they bid. You may be able to narrow your shortlist down further.
• Look at history: eLance allows you to review the feedback and earnings history for all their eLance providers. You’ll quickly see that some providers have been using eLance for years and make gobs of money using the site, and others only occassionally dabble with projects that they find via the marketplace. What I am looking for at this point is any red flags - providers that score low or have consistantly bad comments. It is not unusual for a provider to occassionally have some negative feedback. If this happens, look to see if the provider had responded to that feedback, how they handled the complaint, and if the buyer has a history of dissatisfaction with providers. There are a lot of bad clients out there and a random bad comment should not elimate a provider from your selection process. But if you find any pattern of bad feedback, beware!
• Ask some questions: You are likely down to a shortlist of vendors, and at this point I always ask each provider on that list a question via the Private Message Board (PMB). I don’t always have a question, but I always come up with something to ask because at this point I’m trying to assess if the provider is quick to respond and if they have good communication skills. If a provider doesn’t respond, or doesn’t respond well, do not hire them even if you love their designs. It will not be worth it in the long run.

Select your provider.
Once you have made your choice, select the provider with the “choose bid” button. You’ll then go through a process of reviewing the business terms. Some providers require you to pay a percentage of the work upfront, this doesn’t bother me, but if you don’t want to work that way, you may want to choose the escrow option, or negotiate the terms.

Fill out the requirements document.
Once you have selected your provider, it is likely that they will ask you to fill out a requirements document to help direct the project. These are usually guides to the design process and help you and the provider figure out exactly what you want so that the designer can better fulfill your needs. Fill out these forms! Take as long on them as you need and be thorough- they will greatly help with getting you to the finished project that you want.

Communicate effectively.
At this point in the project, the only thing left is for you to communicate effectively throughout the process. Respond promptly to questions from the provider and ask them any questions that you have. Keep an open line of communication.

Pay and provide feedback.
After the project is complete, make sure to pay the providers promptly and give your feedback about their work on the project. When you are leaving comments remember that future providers will be reading what you say and will bid on projects that you post to a large degree based on what kind of a buyer you are. At the same time, make sure that you are providing accurate feedback to help other buyers in the future.

That’s it! If you go through all the steps, you will likely have a great, completed design. Of course, once you have the design you’ll need to have your Web developer implement it (or hire someone from eLance to do it for you) but that’s for another post.

Just a couple of other points to mention:

Negotiation - It is possible to negotiate with the providers on eLance. However, keep in mind that many of them are making the lowest bids possible already because the marketplace keeps prices down. But if you find a provider that you really want to use, and their fee is just slightly above what you are willing to spend, you may be able to ask them if they will drop their bid. Sometimes they will not - so be prepared for them to say no. Also, this typically works better if you are working on a second or third project with a provider that you have worked with in the past.

International outsourcing - If you have been wanting to jump into the international outsourcing market, this might be the best place to get your feet wet. Many of the eLance providers are not U.S.-based, and by using eLance you will have the opportunity to work with various people from around the world. Also remember that English is a second language for many of the people who use this service, so keep that in mind when you are conversing and negotiating. Err on the side of politeness.

If you have any problems - I have never had a single problem with an eLance provider, but I know that it happens. If you run into any issues, eLance offers assistance, including mediation and the ability to report any violations.

If you don’t find a provider - It is possible that you will go through the selection process and not find the provider that you are looking for. This has happened to me in the past. Never pick a vendor just for the sake of picking a vendor. Usually, this is a case of a project being posted incorrectly. You may need to change the category or subcategory under which the project is posted. Or you may need to change the description or scope of the project. Sometimes you may have an unrealistic budget that needs to be amended. Typically if you re-post the project again with some changes, you will find a provider. There is also the option with eLance to search through the providers that are part of the site and specifically invite select ones to bid on your project - this is another great way to get excellent providers bidding on your projects.

So if you need to be in the market for a new Web design, consider eLance as an option.

There are so many good things about starting a company. The freedom. The independence. The creativity that it brings out in me. The amazing things that I’m learning. But the one thing that is so incredibly frustrating is that I have to rely on part-time contractors to get anything done.

The last job that I was at, I worked with an incredible team of people. Technically, I guess they worked for me, but each of them was so good at what they all did that I really considered us to be a team with myself at the helm, giving directions and making sure that the company, the development, the product – that everything was moving in the right direction. Quickly. Efficiently. FAST.

Now, I am a solo act. I am still working as quickly as I ever have – probably more so because I’ve upped the amount I’m working to approximately 15 hours per day (all the statistics about how much you work when you’re self-employed are right, it turns out). But no matter how quickly I work, I am always waiting for someone else to get something done.

Let me be really quick to say that I am not blaming anyone for this situation – I am still working with an amazing group of people. It’s just that they are only contracted to work some (small) number of hours per month. I mean, I work more hours PER DAY than each of them work per month. This is the way it has to be, but it really tests my patience.

According to Chris, this situation is attributable to the Good Fast Cheap theory of business. OK, I don’t think that Good Fast Cheap is technically a business theory, I think it’s more a concept that designers use when working for clients to try to help them understand how they work, but it’s a reality with my company so far. Chris’ claim (and I think he’s right) is that you can pick two of the three – Good, Fast, Cheap – but you will have to forgo the third. In my case, I have picked good and cheap, but I have to let go of FAST.

This is really too bad, because fast is one of my favorites.

If you want to grow your business, I can’t think of a reason to put globalization off any longer. Pick a country, any country (other than the one in which you’re currently doing business), and take a step forward. There are ways to pick what country to start with, such as determining which countries already send a lot of visitors to your site, or finding a country that has a market in which your product has a lot of appeal. Then just start.

One of my clients is starting by re-writing all of the code for its primary application in Unicode, which has the “potential to cope with over one million unique characters.” Or you could start by examining how companies like Yahoo are managing their multilingual content. Or just subscribe to a blog that focuses on the day-to-day process of globalization. Or maybe your first step is simply trying to feel comfortable working on a project with someone in another country. My suggestion is to just try it. One site I’ve used in the past for outsourcing is eLance. The online service allows you to bid out projects of many types (including translation). All you have to do is register for an account (you’ll need an active credit card or bank account to qualify to use the service, although it’s free), then post your project. You’ll get bids from all over the world. This week, via eLance I’ve worked with contractors in Argentina, Russia and India (as well as my U.S.-based contractors – this isn’t a post about outsourcing all your work overseas!) This experience alone might open you up to the possibility of exploring other markets. Just start.

~Today’s view: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13799608@N08/1450092271/

This is not a comprehensive list of the things that you’ll need to do to prepare your Internet business for globalization, but you need to start somewhere. And if you haven’t started yet, now is the time. This quote in a recent press release from comScore says it all: “Internet users outside the U.S. now account for 80% of the world’s online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencing double-digit growth rates year-over-year.”

Let me repeat that – 80% of the world’s online population is made up of Internet users outside the U.S. Internet users are multinational. It’s time to get started on this. Here’s how.

1)      Make sure your tech people at every level of the organization know the strategic plan for globalization. You may or may not have a CIO or CTO who typically sits at the table for strategic technology planning, but do not leave even the lower-level tech folks out of the discussion on this issue. For globalization to even have a chance at working, the technology behind your site needs to support globalization. And that technology is fairly complicated. My (incredibly) simplified understanding of the issue is that you need to use Unicode. But trust me, there’s way more to it. Just take a look at Microsoft’s “Globalization Step-by-Step.” You need your tech people on this one.

2)      Get psyched up about hiring someone who lives and works outside of the country in which you operate. In order to effectively localize your site so that it really works for people in the country that you’re trying to reach, you’re going to need to hire someone who actually lives in that country. This is the only way that you’ll be able to avoid creating a site that – for the lack of a better way to describe it – feels weird to the local users.  

3)      Pick your short list of target countries. Just because you’re starting to look into globalization, that doesn’t mean that you should tackle every country at once. One suggestion is to take a look at the international traffic that is already coming to your Web site by examining your site analytics or log files. Chances are that the countries that are sending you a lot of traffic before you’ve done anything to your site are going to continue to provide a good market for your products and services.

4)      Register your domain name with the appropriate country-code top-level domains. There are rules that apply to the registering of these domains – some countries require citizenship, for example – but it is always worth trying to get the country-appropriate domain name to support your site.

5)      Practice patience. Just like your original business wasn’t built in a day, neither will your international extensions. It will take time for the local versions of your site to take off and for your site to become established in the markets that you’re trying to penetrate. Stick with it.

~ Today’s view:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/13799608@N08/1439224573/