On Delegation

(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on May 27th, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while. We’re getting very close now, so bear with me. Soon I’ll resume regular posting and then just upload these archives in one go.)

On Delegation

Here’s a funny story that happened to me a couple of days ago.

A young guy emailed me to ask my copywriting rates. Now, whenever I get an email that says simply, “What’s the cost?” I tend to assume it’s a no-go. When you do the work I do, the direct-response funnels and the higher-end stuff, actual customers want a lot more information than, “What are you going to charge?”

Namely, if I can do the job, what the process is, and all those other questions you have to ask when you’re not dealing with the quick, “Can you write an article for $50” style of marketing that’s on the internet.

Anyway, it turned out that this guy wanted me to do some cheap content work. So I told him my “This’ll take fifteen minutes” price, which isn’t really cheap content anymore.

Naturally, he didn’t want to pay my price. That’s fine, because I didn’t expect him to, and because, like I said above, the two markets; cheap Fiverr-style content and the direct response marketing, are almost entirely separate.

The problem came when this kid wasn’t done.

He needed me to do the work and he couldn’t up the price at all, much less the amount I was asking.

It became clear why, and this is the subject of the article, and how you can avoid this kid’s mistake for the good of your business and life.

What’s This Kid’s Mistake Then?

The mistake that our young entrepreneurial lion made is that it was clear he’d taken on a customer.

It turned out, when I probed him on this, that his “current writer” had let him down, and he needed someone to write an article for him otherwise “his client” wouldn’t get their work, and presumably would drop him.

Now, I’ve no doubt this kid has read some book or taken some e-guru course about how to make money the Tim Ferriss Way™. That is, you prospect a lead and take on a client and have someone else do the work.

Arbitrage, kittens!

This is not a bad idea if you need money and don’t want to do any work… until it isn’t.

Our kid is an example of this. He’s going to burn his bridges before he’s even started by committing a cardinal sin of freelance work: He hasn’t delivered the work promised.

Now, if he’s smart, he’ll read this and immediately plug the hole in this terrible business model by realising he’s on the hook and that the buck stops with him.

If he’s not, he’ll join the millions of people on Reddit and Twitter complaining about how business is a scam. He’ll say that clients are dicks, freelancers are lazy and that business isn’t possible.

And this, tough love time, because ultimately if you promise to do something for a client it is your responsibility to do it. You can’t blame the outsourced help. You can’t blame the world. It is no concern or responsibility of the client to keep your house in order as regards how the work gets done.

With that said, let’s talk about delegation rules according to your guru-of-gurus.

Delegation Rule #1: DIY

For most things, and in business in general, when it comes to things that you’re selling on to an end client, I’d say that you don’t want to delegate anything that you can’t step in and do yourself. For most internet business stuff, this is perfectly fine as a rule.

Take our kid; he’s charging an end-client for an article and he can’t find a writer to do it for the price or at the schedule he’s being paid for. This is bad news.

He shouldn’t really be charging out this service to a client because he can’t do it himself.

The easiest solution is for him to step in and write the article, although it’s unlikely he’ll be able to do so.

This isn’t a place you want to be; make sure that you can do it yourself. If not, take the more expensive route of hiring multiple people to do the job so you have redundancy.

“But, Jamie!” you cry, “What about those jobs you can’t outsource?”

Delegation Rule #2: Understand The Rules

There are examples like;

• Your legal stuff
• Your accounting stuff
• Refurbishing a home and having to hire an electrician

These things are impractical if not illegal to do yourself. Most of those things are internal as opposed to external, (as in, you’re not selling your bookkeeping to an end-client,) and so they don’t fall under the first rule.

However, I still recommend that, while you can’t do these things yourself, you know what it is that needs doing.

Take for instance my publishing stuff; I’m not a lawyer. I don’t sign my book rights away, and I self-publish for that reason. I don’t work and will unlikely ever work with an agent.

This is because the traditional publishing system is mostly a joke; filled with writers who do not understand anything about their legal rights and obligations, and farm them out to similarly unqualified folks.

If any of these people were to learn even the fundamentals of copyright law, they’d realise the error of their ways.

On a wider note, every single day people outsource their accounting or their contracts to specialists. There’s nothing wrong with this, but unless you understand what you need them to do, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get the best solution.

Fundamentally, I’d sum this up as “If you can’t do the job yourself, at least understand what you’re asking the person to do.”

That’s the second rule of outsourcing. The first being that you shouldn’t outsource unless you’re willing to step in and get your hands dirty if needs be.