Successful Owners Pay Other People to Do the Hard Work

'Nobody else can do it to my standard.' If that sentence is the one that stops you from hiring, then it deserves a closer look, because it prices the wrong purchase. What a wage buys you is hours back in your own week, and what the business earns from those hours afterwards depends on what you choose to refill them with. That piece of arithmetic, run honestly, is what separates a hire that pays for itself from a hire that becomes a cost.

The last article set out the four levels of work and showed why the reach of an hour rises with each one. Moving up from the bottom of that ladder begins here, with the purchase of other people's time, which is the reason unification deserves an article of its own.

The wage is the same whether the hire pays or fails

Suppose that somebody you hire takes over twenty of your fifty weekly hours. If you were to refill those twenty hours with more of the work you already did, then your revenue would stay where it was while your costs rose by one wage, so the hire would have failed before the person had made a single mistake. If you were to refill them with work from a higher level, whether that is training the team, winning an audience, or deciding what the business builds next, then the same wage would buy you the climb that the last article described.

The wage is identical in both cases, so what makes hiring pay is whatever fills your calendar once the hire has started. An owner who ran the first version of that experiment would conclude, honestly enough, that she could not afford to hire. What her experiment tested, though, was the refill, because the wage did buy her the hours and she then spent them at the old level.

Hand over the work that fills your week

The instinct in a first handover is usually to keep the skilled work and hand over the scraps, which are the errands, the inbox, and the paperwork. Those scraps deserve to go, although handing over two hours of errands will only ever free two hours. The ceiling on your business comes from the thirty hours of skilled implementation in the middle of your week, and those thirty hours are the hard work that this article's title refers to, because a wage has to buy exactly those hours before the ceiling will move.

Handing over that skilled work is the frightening part, and the fear has a respectable reason behind it, because your customers judge you on exactly that work. The answer to the fear is a document.

A written standard is what makes the handover safe

An owner who hands work over without a written standard has given away the work and the judgement behind it at the same time. The person she hired has to guess at the method, so the work comes back wrong, at which point the owner concludes that nobody else can meet her standard, when what she has proved is that she never wrote the standard down for anybody to follow. A written standard ends that loop, because it turns your own judgement into a document that you can teach every later hire from, check their work against, and correct them with.

1. 1

   Open with the outcome the customer must receive

   Write down what a finished job looks like from the customer's side, in measurable terms wherever the work allows, so that the person you hire is able to judge their own output before you have to.

2. 2

   Record the method as you do it today

   Write the steps down in the order that your own hands follow them, including the small corrections you no longer notice yourself making. Those corrections are the standard, and leaving them out is the commonest reason that a first handover fails.

3. 3

   Add the checks that catch your commonest failures

   List the places where the work has gone wrong for you before, and put next to each one the check that would have caught it. Your years of scars, written down as checks, are the part of the document that a new hire could least easily invent alone.

4. 4

   Name the point where the person must stop and ask

   Draw the line beyond which a mistake becomes expensive, so that the person knows which decisions are theirs to take and which ones should wait for you. A clear line of that kind spares you from checking everything, which was the point of hiring in the first place.

When the work still comes back wrong, correct the document before you judge the person, because every later hire would run into the same gap in the standard, while a standard you have corrected teaches all of them. The document also outlasts any single employee, which means that a resignation costs you a person without costing you the method as well.

Managing the work is your new work

The first of the freed hours go into unification itself, because a team working to a standard still needs somebody to review its output against that standard, to train the people, and to decide who does what. An hour of management produces nothing that a customer could hold, which is why it feels like waste to somebody who has spent years making the product with her hands. Measured on the ladder, though, the value of that same hour reaches every customer the team serves, so it earns more than the implementation hour it replaced.

Expect any handover to run below your standard at first, because the person is still learning the parts of the job that the document cannot say. Review their work against the document, because the document now holds your standard, and tighten it wherever the misses gather in one place. The distance between their work and your standard then closes from both sides.

The hours you freed are the point of all of it

Buying other people's time is the first move up the ladder, and it is only the first of them. Once the team is working to the standard and your reviews have settled into a routine, your week will hold free hours for the first time since you started the business, and how far the climb continues depends on what you spend those hours on. The place that returns the most is the third level, where you would explain what your business knows to many people at once. The everyday name for that work is selling, and the next article makes a claim you may not expect, which is that selling is the easiest skill you will ever learn, because you have already done the hard part of it.