Free yourself from busy work and outsource with confidence
How to outsource, work smarter, and maintain your brand’s integrity.
It’s 7:30 p.m. and you’re the only one with a green dot next to your name on Slack. You’re finishing up the design for a social post, and before you sign off for the day, you need to send a contract, review the latest website updates, and respond to about 15 emails. Whew.
You’re a founder, and the forward motion of your business depends on you. You tell yourself it won’t be like this forever—that one day your team will take over social media or contracts. But for now, you feel like you’re the only person you trust to get it right.
If you’re burned out and ready to grow your business in 2023, this blog is for you.
Keep reading to determine what you can delegate and the pieces you need to have in place in order to pass projects on to other people.
1. Understand why you resist delegating.
Is there a core insecurity that’s keeping you from passing off busy work to other team members? (Bet you didn’t think we’d go this deep in a branding blog, but here we are!)
Here are the common reasons I see that keep entrepreneurs from delegating:
1. You haven’t hired anyone you can delegate to.
Maybe your budget is tight and hiring a virtual assistant feels like an expense you can’t afford. But hiring help isn’t an expense; it’s an investment that can free you up to focus on the growth of your business.
If this sounds like you, ask:
What is it costing me to spend my valuable time on projects that aren’t my expertise?
Write down the most joyful and profitable ways for you to spend your time as a business owner. Reflect on the time-sucking tasks that are keeping you from doing this work. Compare your hourly rate to the hourly rate you would pay someone else to do the same task. (If your rate is higher, it’s time to outsource!)
When you value your time and expertise, your business will grow.
2. Everything you’re doing feels too important to delegate.
Perhaps you’re an established entrepreneur with a small team, and you still find yourself posting to social media. This is the face of our brand! I can’t hand it off to someone else, you think.
If this sounds like you, ask:
In what areas am I believing that everything is my responsibility?
The way you show up on social media and how you interact with customers matters. But that doesn’t mean it has to be your responsibility. With the right processes in place, others can take to-do items off of your plate and create excellent work.
3. You don’t have processes, templates, and branding in place.
Without clear design guidelines, brand voice guidance, or templates, it IS hard to delegate and maintain a level of excellence. But once you invest the time and resources to create these, training can become a breeze. (Keep reading to learn how to do this!)
2. Get serious about brand strategy.
I don’t need to convince you that your business will grow if you start delegating. (You know that already!) But as a founder myself, I do have a tried-and-true solution for making delegating easier, both for you and for your partners: Brand strategy.
A clear brand strategy not only makes you more appealing to customers; it also strengthens your business internally.
I often meet small business owners who have a general brand strategy in their heads but haven’t put it down on paper. While it may make perfect sense to them, no one can quite match the look and feel they’re hoping for when it comes to copywriting or design. (And this makes them wary of outsourcing!)
I like to think of brand strategy as the picture on the puzzle box: It’s a model of what you want your business to look like. With a brand strategy in place, everyone on your team will be speaking the same language about your purpose and mission. Clearly documenting this brand strategy allows you to seamlessly onboard new contractors and employees, saving you time and giving them what they need to hit the ground running.
Here are the key components of a brand strategy document:
Brand Purpose & Mission
This is the bread and butter of brand identity. Your purpose and mission define what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters.
Brand Voice Guide
When you’re outsourcing copywriting, social media management, or public relations, you want to have a consistent messaging—even if there are multiple people writing for your brand. That’s where a brand voice guide comes in, outlining the do’s and don’ts of how your company talks.
Brand Style Guide
When you’re outsourcing design, video editing, or photography, you want to have the same cohesive brand look across visual mediums. Your style guide outlines how you use the logo, colors, fonts, patterns, and iconography.
Work with a brand strategist
If creating a brand strategy sounds like more work than you have time for, enlist the help of a brand strategist!
When I work with clients, I think of their ideas and dreams for their business as puzzle pieces. In our strategy sessions, we dump all of the pieces on the table, flip them over and sort them. Then, the Author team transforms those pieces into a full picture that accurately represents who you hope to be. Often, that process also helps you clarify who you hope to be.
In Author’s work with Evergreen Bride, our brand strategy conversations gave her deeper clarity on their founder’s why. Building gorgeous, wood flower bouquets was her what, but her deeper purpose was to leave clients feeling more valuable, beautiful, and confident than before. Since we built her brand strategy, she's hired new team members and created an onboarding process that aligns new staff with her brand's purpose and mission. It’s a win-win: New team members get excited, and she has the resources she needs to delegate to her ever-expanding team without losing quality.
3. Create templates that make everyone’s job easier.
Once you have a document that articulates your brand mission, brand voice, and brand style, it’s time to start implementing. If you find yourself reinventing the wheel for every social media post, package design, or email newsletter, rolling templates into your process will save time both for your and your team. Plus, they’ll create a streamlined look that makes your brand more recognizable.
Whether you create these templates or you hire a trusted designer to build them, they’ll make outsourcing a breeze because you’ve already approved their look and feel. You can even drop text on top of each template in Canva! (Don’t tell a designer I told you this.)
4. Nail down organization.
Getting flooded with a slew of questions from a new hire who can’t find what they need in the Dropbox abyss? (Or anticipating this happening?) Lack of organization can make you second-guess whether or not it’s worth outsourcing.
Working with a branding agency that will keep your logo files organized and pull the right assets for the right projects makes all the difference. I can't tell you how many times I've asked a client for their logo and they’re not able to find it! I know what a headache this can be for business owners, so all of our branding clients' logo assets are neatly organized for easy access.
5. Take the next step.
When you’re dealing with an infinitely long to-do list, it’s easy to feel like you don’t have time to outsource tasks or work with a brand strategist.
But the time and money you invest in branding could give you back your weekends, give you mental space to think bigger, and ultimately, grow your business. (And maybe even log out of Slack once and a while!)
If you’re ready to reclaim your time, expand your team, and put the puzzle pieces together, let’s chat brand strategy! Click here to schedule a free 30-minute discovery call with me, Amy.
