Hey friends, it’s just you and me today on a special mini episode of Proof to Product! This week, I want to talk to you about delegating. There comes a time in most businesses where you are going to want to start hiring a team. For some of us, we hit a wall, we start to realize we're overwhelmed, and we just simply cannot do it all. If you want your business to grow, delegating is a key skill that I want you to have. So I recently did a free master class about delegating where I identified four steps to figuring out what you need to delegate. I realize not everyone is able to watch masterclasses, so I want to run through some of these strategies here. Now, the master class covers these in more depth and I'll show you examples, but for right now, let's run through these key points. Step One: Track your time.  Before you can hire someone, you need to know where you currently spend time in your business. Ideally, I'd like you to spend a week tracking everything you do, and that includes how much time you spend on social media, talking to clients, checking email, engaging with your clients or your customers. Whether you're updating your online site or packaging product, track it. You can use time trackers online, like Toggl, or use a spreadsheet to check off what you're doing throughout the day. It's really up to you how detailed you want to get. I don't want you to analyze the time yet, just track it. As you're doing this, you may see some habits that you can adjust to save you some time. For example, maybe you're spending too much time on social media. Any hands raised? Mine is.  Step Two: Get Organized So in this step, you'll want to organize your time blocks into what I'm calling buckets. Create some very high-level buckets of where you spend your time. This could be product development, marketing, accounting, administration, or even family, personal things. I usually have a bucket for that, but feel free to make these what you want and what suits your life. Add any others that work for your business, too. Use the information you collected in Step One to help you decide what buckets you need and group similar types of projects together. Within these bigger buckets, I want you to break things down into smaller tasks. In the accounting bucket, for example, you might have bookkeeping and taxes, payroll, invoicing, all of those things, right? In the marketing bucket, you'll probably have writing your product descriptions, writing your social media captions, content scheduling, research, advertising that you're doing. All of that would fall under marketing. Get all of your time tracking information organized.  Step Three: Analyze It  This is the step where we look at where you're spending your time and how these buckets fit together. Here are some questions I want you to ask.  What is taking up the most time in your business?  Which tasks do you love to do?  Which ones are your favorites?  Which tasks feel like they drain you?  Which tasks are revenue generating?  Which ones are bringing money into the business? Which tasks do you not need to do yourself? There's a lot of things that we do in our business. Most of the time, most of us are working just one person shop and we're handling all the different things, but there's a lot of things that we're doing on a day to day basis that we could be delegating to somebody else.  Keep in mind that what works for one company may not work for you. So don't jump on the bandwagon and hire somebody for let's say social media marketing just because some of your friends are. Really focus on what is going to make the biggest impact for your business. Once you've determined where you're spending your time and which tasks you want to take off your plate, it is time to think about bringing people onto your team. Step Four: Hiring  It is important to hire people who have specific expertise, especially if it's a project-based thing or they have a very specific role. For example, you would not want t