By Kayla Coats | COO & Co-Founder of Sawtooth Media Group
One of the biggest challenges to growth in operations is training new people to take over tasks you are used to doing yourself. However, being able to hand off tasks as a business owner is key to the growth of your business. After some trial and error, I found an amazing way to grow your business with this productivity trick.
The “I’ll just do it myself” Trap
Training becomes difficult because it is a double-edged sword of a time suck. Doing all the tasks takes time. But, every time I’d go to pass off a task myself, I had to take the time to train that person on how I’m doing it, what I’m doing, and why I’m doing what it was I did. That kind of training would take up an hour of my day at least and sometimes would take weeks to hand off the task because it took a long time to do.
If I’m going to take the time to train someone to take things off my list that I have to do every day, we can grow beyond just what I am able to do in a day. But that takes more time, and I’m going to go faster if I just do it. And if I let them do it, I’m going to have to go back and check it, and maybe they did it wrong and I’ll have to redo it anyway.
This is how you fall into the “I’ll just do it myself” trap. But this hinders growth.
So here’s what I did.
The Productivity Hack
In working through how to make this more efficient I thought, what if I record it?
It didn’t take up any more amount of time, so every time I would say okay, this is something that should be SOP, I would do it and I would record it. That is the simple way to grow your business with this productivity trick.
I would record myself doing it and talk through the whole thing. Whatever task it was, the video became the SOP of how to do that.
To someone else seeing it for the first time, watching me do the task may be hard to follow for how long I have been doing it, but the beauty of the video! You can pause it any time, and rewatch as many sections as you need. This took no extra time for me and allowed new people to learn at their own pace and take over the work.
We were fortunate to have on our team someone who pointed out she could make the videos into sops with a written list and screenshots.
So version two on this process to grow your business with this productivity trick. Every time I did a video on something, I would send it to her, she would type it up, add the screenshots, and then my video would still be there for those who wanted to watch the video to support the text instructions.
Summary: Growth We Saw From this Productivity Trick
That’s how we all started operating. Then we were able to quickly pull people out of stuff that wasn’t their strong suit and allow them time to do their best work in other areas.
Because of this, we saw massive amounts of growth. It didn’t take up any more time to do that video and it enabled someone else to learn the task, opening up my time for more important tasks that were my strong suit to benefit the business as a whole.
If you want to get out of the rat race every day you’re going to have to help your employees grow and to be learning and developing processes. With this productivity tip, you’re gonna have more time to work on the business instead of in the business. Hopefully, this trick helps you grow your business!
Looking for more ways to grow? Get in touch.