Overcoming the Mental Block on Delegation & Why It’s Critical to Growth

Back in 2004, I bought a business using an SBA loan, money I’d saved from consulting, and a lot of confidence I probably shouldn’t have had.

I wasn’t naïve to the restaurant industry; I’d been working in restaurants since I was 16 as a waiter and then assistant manager and general manager. I knew the importance of managing food cost and labor cost and my way around the kitchen and restaurant staff.

What I didn’t understand was how different catering was from a regular restaurant. That’s a story for a different day.

The thing I wanted to talk about today however was the training period. I was taking over from an owner, John, who had been the owner for four years. Before him, the original guy had owned it for nearly twenty-five years. We had contracted for a two-week training period. The problem was this seller had a very hard time wrapping his head around what I wanted to do and how he was going to train me.

In John’s mind, he had very specific routines he followed each day and very particular ways he did things. There was so much to learn according to him that he had hired the original owner to work with him for almost six months in the kitchen before he felt like he could take it all on.

My plan was different. I immediately hired a cook to do the cooking. I was planning to run and grow the business, not work in the kitchen. I wanted John to show me and my new employee how he cooked each of the meals and then I figured we’d be good to go. Once through should be enough in my mind.

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So we started in on cooking the ribs- one of the mainstays of their menu. John went through the complicated mix of spices to make the rub and then the way to apply it. He showed us how to put them on the rotating racks in the brick oven, how long to leave them for, and how to test for doneness.

All along he kept saying things like “it’s more like a feeling” and “you have to just kind of eyeball it” and so on. But I asked a lot of questions and took lots of notes on times, temperatures, quantities (most of which were only loosely documented prior to me), and the recipe and made sure I knew the steps and the process.

He was pretty sure there was no way we’d be able to replicate his skill at creating this delicious food with so little practice. But sure enough, the second batch of ribs looked and tasted identical to his original batch. In his mind, it was a complicated process that required lots of practice and feel.

In my mind, it just needed to be documented step by step, and enough questions asked to unearth the specific process he followed that he had committed to memory but never written down anywhere.

It went like that for the rest of the two weeks. I would review, document, and track everything he would do and then be able to do it just about the same in one or two tries. At the end, he was depressed. He felt like he had a special skill that made him unique and valuable to the business that he had invested a lot of time to learn and perfect and what I had inadvertently done was to demonstrate that wasn’t true.

I think there are two key takeaways from this experience anyone who wants to grow their business (or thinks they can’t) can learn from and immediately put into practice.

How and Why to Delegate for Business Growth Success

John’s problem was he was trying to do everything the way the original owner had shown him which meant everything was kept in his head. The original guy had been doing it all himself and knew everything by heart. John felt like when he bought the business he had to do it the same way. So he never wrote anything down either and did everything exactly the same way.

I, on the other hand, had no such illusions and never planned to try and become a cook. Instead, I knew cooks came and went and the goal was to be able to make sure whoever I had in the kitchen could operate effectively from day one. For me, it was necessary to create a procedure and recipe book for each thing that was made so anyone could follow it and get the same results.

The first takeaway is just to be open to the idea that there is almost nothing in any business that can’t be taught to someone else to do. Lots of owners are like John, and the original owner, who both thought that being the only one who could do what they did made them special and valuable and somehow teaching other people to do it with them or for them would diminish the business.

I think the opposite is true- having a business where the owner can offload tasks and get help and support allows the business to grow to a size beyond anything a single person can manage on their own. It also means that the stress on the owner can be reduced because the burden of doing everything is now shared among many people.

I firmly believe that if you hire the right person for the job and take the time to break down what you are doing into steps, procedures, decision points, and whatever else is needed to replicate what you are doing there are few things that one person can’t teach another to do. Certainly, cooking BBQ was a transferable skill!

But even things that at first seem to be highly variable and dependent on the long time skill and expertise of a single person can be taught to others. It might not be doable in a weekend, but it can certainly be done. There is virtually no business or role you can name that can only be done by one person and not delegated.

And that is the second takeaway. That you simply need to look at each step in the process of what you want someone to help you with and break it down to the steps that are required and document them so someone else can follow. It may take a few tries and it may require some additional supplemental steps and asides and notes, but it can be taught. After all, if you learned it, surely someone else can as well.

You fundamentally can’t grow a business beyond what you yourself can handle if you can’t hand off tasks to other people. The first step in growing is to understand that you aren’t making yourself invaluable but rather you are holding yourself (and everyone else at your business) back by not continuing to grow. The second step is to take action to start teaching other people how they can help you do some things so you can do more of other things and the business as a whole can get bigger.

Not doing this leads to burnout (why John sold the business to me after just four years) and stress and employee turnover (people don’t stay at places they themselves can’t grow) and makes you a single point of failure. If you don’t show up, the whole business goes down.

On the other hand, deciding to grow and to delegate and teach what you know so the whole operation gets bigger benefits everyone including the owner way beyond what you could ever do by keeping it to yourself.

Once you understand this, the opportunities to grow are limited only by how big your imagination allows.