Successful Owners Pay Other People to Do the Hard Work

'Nobody else can do it to my standard.' If that sentence stops you from hiring, then look at it again, because whoever says it is pricing the wrong purchase. With a wage you buy hours back in your own week, while what the business earns from those hours afterwards depends on what you choose to refill them with. Once you do that arithmetic honestly, you can see whether a hire will earn back their wage or only add a cost.

In the last article I set out the four levels of work and show why the reach of an hour rises with each one. When you buy other people's time, you take the first step up that ladder, to the second level, which I call unification and which is the subject of this whole article.

The wage is the same whether the hire pays or fails

Suppose that you hire somebody who takes over twenty of your fifty weekly hours. If you refill those twenty hours with more of the work that you already do, then your revenue will stay where it is while your costs rise by one wage, which means that the hire will fail before the person makes a single mistake. If you 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 with the same wage you will make the climb that I describe in the last article.

Because the wage is identical in both cases, whether you gain from hiring depends on what you fill your calendar with once the new person starts. Suppose that an owner tries the first version of that experiment. She would conclude, honestly enough, that she cannot afford to hire, although what she would be testing is the refill, because she gets the hours for the wage and then spends 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. Hand those scraps over, although when you hand over two hours of errands, you only ever free two hours. The ceiling on your business comes from the thirty hours of skilled implementation in the middle of your week. Those thirty hours are the hard work in this article's title, because you raise the ceiling only when you pay somebody to take exactly those hours.

Handing over that skilled work is frightening for a respectable reason, which is that your customers judge you on exactly that work. The answer to the fear is a document.

Write the standard down before you hand over the work

An owner who hands work over without a written standard gives away the work and the judgement behind it at the same time. The person whom she hires has to guess at the method, which is why the work comes back wrong. The owner then concludes that nobody else can meet her standard, when all that she proves is that her standard exists only in her head. You end that loop by writing your own judgement down as a written standard, which is a document that you can teach every later hire from, check their work against, and correct them with.

1. 1

   Open with the outcome that the customer must receive

   Write down what a finished job looks like from the customer's side, in measurable terms wherever you can measure it, so that the person whom you hire can 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 that you no longer notice yourself making. Those corrections are the standard, which is why 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 tends to go wrong for you, and put next to each one the check that catches that failure. Once you write your years of scars down as checks, they are the part of the document that a new hire could least easily invent alone.

4. 4

   Mark 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. With a clear line of that kind, you need not check everything, which is 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 hit the same gap in the standard. Once you correct it, all of them can work from the corrected version. The document also stays in the business when an employee leaves, which means that you lose the person and keep the method.

Managing the work is your new work

You spend the first hours that you free on unification itself, because a team that works to a standard still needs somebody to review its output against that standard, to train the people, and to decide who does what. In an hour of management you make nothing that a customer could hold, which is why that hour can feel like waste to an owner who is used to making the product with her own hands. When you measure it on the ladder, though, you reach every customer whom the team serves with that same hour, which is why it is worth more than the implementation hour that it replaces.

Expect any handover to fall below your standard at first, because the person is still learning the parts of the job that you cannot write down. Review their work against the document, since your standard is now in writing there, and tighten the document wherever you see the same miss again. Their work then improves while you make your standard clearer, until their work matches it.

The hours that you free are the point of all of it

Buying other people's time is only the first move up the ladder. Once the team works to the standard and reviewing their work is a routine for you, you will have free hours in your week for the first time since you started the business. How far you climb from there depends on what you spend those hours on. You get the most back from the third level, where you would explain what you and your team know to many people at once. The everyday name for that work is selling. In the next article I make a claim that you may not expect, which is that selling is the easiest skill that you will ever learn, because you already know your subject and only the explaining is left.