Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
☕️ Coffee, Chaos & Cashflow 🎙️
Fueling your business journey with real talk, laughs, and a dash of caffeine! Join Eric Griffin, Aram Street, & Yemi Ogunbase as they share wins, missteps, and candid advice on turning chaos into cashflow. Real stories, real lessons—entrepreneurship, unfiltered. 🎧
Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
#5 Should You Do It, or Get Someone Who Can?
Entrepreneurs often find themselves at a crossroads when it comes to delegation. We share our own trials and triumphs, from the costly lesson of assuming designers can double as marketers to the critical importance of defining roles with precision. You'll discover practical advice for those just starting out, like testing the waters with smaller tasks to ensure your team is up to par before handing over the bigger projects. It's a candid conversation about the realities of leadership, communication, and the potential pitfalls when expectations aren't clearly laid out.
All right. So, guys, give me something good. What's happened this week? What's some good news?
Speaker 2:So something that was a first for me was we went to Porto I just went there with you, Yemi Porto, Lima for a belated birthday celebration in your honor for your late birthday, that is fast. And we had a cocktail made with a Brazilian rum, which you'll have to pronounce for me because I don't have it in front of me, and I forgot what it was called. You know, that sounds good Cocktail is the Caipirinha.
Speaker 3:Uh-huh.
Speaker 1:And the Brazilian spirit is called Cachaca.
Speaker 2:Cachaca. There we go, that's right. So I was actually going to invert them because I couldn't remember what was the cocktail. I've heard about it for a while. I've actually been aware of it for a couple of three years because there's a place in Danville I've been wanting to go to that features it and they actually distill that particular Sasha, and so it was my first time to try it. Really enjoyed it. It was a great cocktail, so I highly recommend it. Is it brown rum? Is it brown rum?
Speaker 1:White rum. I think it's a more robust mojito.
Speaker 2:I think that's really good. Less on the minty, though so robust and less of the playful minty energy and just maybe stronger on the alcohol.
Speaker 3:So not as sweet, not nearly as sweet. Yeah Cool, they're not as sweet, you're just not nearly as sweet yeah, cool Like it Love it.
Speaker 2:Yeah very good.
Speaker 1:Very yummy, very much so, let's see. So something exciting for me. I celebrated a birthday. Happy birthday to you. We can't sing that, bro. That's a copyright claim.
Speaker 2:Oh no, oh no, um happy birthday to you.
Speaker 3:we can't sing that, bro. That's a copyright claim. Oh no, fair use fair use, fair use.
Speaker 1:so definitely blessed another year of life. It's also my birth month, but I'm still trying to trying to get into the aramistry level of having all the birthday freebies. Because you got that done, that's my friend. Yes, sir, yeah. So first question how do you decide whether a task or role is better suited for you or for someone with specialized skills?
Speaker 3:I would answer that, as is so in my experience.
Speaker 3:I want to always know everything about how to do the task myself before I give it to someone else, or at least enough to where I can talk about it and I am knowledgeable on it and I know what's good quality, what's not, because I've had, I've gone into tasks with the idea of, oh yeah, I'm just gonna fiber this off or give this to a contractor enough work or something, knowing nothing about how to do it.
Speaker 3:And I've gotten screwed over so many times, stabbed in the back from purse of people either taking way too long to do something that should take them 30 minutes or less, or the quality being terrible, or both both both qualities terrible, and it took too long. And now you have all that length of time, whereas if I just knew how to do it myself. One, I could probably just do it in 30 minutes at a time, which you kind of I beat myself up on that and then, two, you wouldn't have spent the money. When I hire somebody to do something, I know how to do it myself, and so I set a standard in my mind that this is how long it should take you to do it, because I can do it this long. But you are the so-called professional, therefore you should be able to do it in less time with me, right?
Speaker 2:I. I love this topic because eric and I actually, I think, fundamentally disagree about this. So it's cool because, like this is what this eric and I don't disagree about a lot of things, and this is one thing where I'm like I'm listening. I was thinking of the response as you asked me the question and I was literally thinking something completely different, and Eric it out as if financially there's a restriction. But I tend to think, as much as possible, I'm looking for people that are better at something, so that I'm doing, I'm really staying inside my wheelhouse of what I'm skilled at as much as possible.
Speaker 2:Now to Eric's point. You can definitely wind up with a lot of people that don't know what they're doing, that say they know what they're doing and get bad results. But to me that comes down to more in terms of how you vet or qualify someone that's getting the job. And for me personally and this is just the difference between the two of us but I would personally rather run through maybe three or four people that didn't do so great on the project to find someone that could, so that in the future, whenever I've got something in that category, I already know great, I've got this guy. Maybe it took a minute to get them, but they're qualified, they do a good job and I now I'm not going to have to spend my time working on something that is not in my specialty, so that's just sort of how I look at it.
Speaker 3:I think we look differently, but I think I think, um, oh yeah, if you have the time to do that and you're not on a time crunch to have to get something out there and get something done, then I would agree that if there's not a money restriction there, then, yeah, you definitely want to. You can vet people. You can take six months and find someone that works, waste a bunch of money, but you're not really wasting money because it's data, so you're finding that person. So, yeah, sure, I 100% agree with that. But it also depends on what stage of the idea or company are you at? Can you afford? Is your company like profitable, is whatever?
Speaker 3:You're just trying to offload a job and that's like that's where that's kind of okay.
Speaker 3:Like, if I'm just starting a project and it's not profitable or making any money and I don't have anybody, then what I'll do is I will, in my mind, be prepared to already do all the tasks before I delegate it out.
Speaker 3:But once, once I have figured it out, it's like okay, now going back to your thing, wanting to focus on what is important and in your wheelhouse, but you need to delegate across and you have, you can do that and, yeah, I would 100 agree with that. It's just the starting off, right off the gate. Um, if you don't have the time or the money, you kind of are forced to do it yourself and to learn it yourself and in that process of doing that you gain that knowledge of at least being able to talk about it. You might not be a professional, yeah, but you can talk about it and that's just. I think that's. I honestly think that even when you're talking about vetting people, having the knowledge at least enough to talk about it already cuts down on your time to be able to weed out the losers and the wannabes and be able to actually see the quality of what you need.
Speaker 1:And I think that's still important to be knowledgeable, because if you're not knowledgeable then you can become a victim to someone else who can take advantage of you yeah that definitely makes sense and it, you know, one of the things that I think about is elon is not an engineer, you know, elon musk is not an engineer, but he knows. He knows enough about the engineering process to be able to speak intelligently to his Tesla engineers. I've read that he knows a lot about these certain things. He gets obsessed about it because he has enough knowledge to be able to speak with that expert and be able to communicate the expectations, and so having that knowledge makes sense to me. But I also understand where you're coming from. Aram, as far as, like, this is a dollars and cents thing Is this the best use of my time, best use of my resource of time, and can I hire this out? So it'll be interesting to see how that plays going forward.
Speaker 2:So I think, yeah, just to end, cap that Eric's point is right. It really is a matter of where you're at in the stage of the company, right? You're just going to have more options at later stages and you're going to have fewer abilities most of the time to sub things out at early stage. So it is a case-by-case thing. It doesn't uniformly apply across every category. You do have to kind of take all that in stride. Okay, across every category.
Speaker 1:You do have to kind of take all that in stride. Okay, so what would you say between the two of you, any particular challenges or setbacks regarding delegation of tasks that maybe you didn't see, whether it was man, I delegated this task out and I'm still waiting on it, or I delegated this task out and it ended up being really good Kind of story time.
Speaker 3:Going back to what I was saying, I would say I've had being stabbed in the back, being taken advantage of because of the lack of knowledge Definitely has happened lots of times. Wanting to get a graphic designer to do a marketing ad. Being naive thinking, oh yeah, this designer who knows designer to do a marketing ad. Being naive thinking, oh yeah, this designer who knows how to make a marketing ad, the marketing ad's going to sell. Of course it is because he does marketing ads. I tell him the audience, I do the keywords, I tell him everything. He does, print something out to me and I'll go and advertise it on social media and stuff and it should work.
Speaker 3:That was stupid. I didn't think that would work. Designers do. Most designers I know have never advertised on Facebook, don't know anything about marketing or social marketing and they're used to just making nice designs. But you are supposed to tell them and see, like you're supposed to have that knowledge of. This is what my audience wants to see and this is the way the ad needs to look.
Speaker 3:And at that point I might as well do it myself, because the amount of, because the amount of time that it will take me to communicate that going back and forth over two weeks or whatever. I could have done it myself in less than that amount of time. And those are the circumstances of where you kind of have to weigh out, like, is this, is this task worth giving over to somebody? Like, am I? Because to me it's not necessarily a money thing, to me it's a time thing.
Speaker 3:I'm trying to just get things going and if I think that and yeah, sure, I can't do everything at once, and that that's that, that's true. So sometimes you have to delegate out, knowing that's gonna make that person longer, when you know that you could do it shorter, so that's true, it's going back to the wheelhouse and figuring out what am I supposed to focus on right now? And is marketing really important? Is sales important? Maybe that's what I'm supposed to focus on and delegate the development and all that stuff out, because that can take as much time as it needs. Um, so, but yeah, experience wise, if you want, real like I can't.
Speaker 2:Like I have lots of stories, but that's a generalized summary yeah, for for me, the the times that this has not gone well have generally been because I failed to one think about what this person's role was going to represent, right? So I didn't clearly identify hey, I really need them to accomplish this, you know, and it was just like more quick, oh, I'm just like plugging a hole real quick, I'm just going to throw somebody over there, over there, yeah, like specific tasks type of thing. Yeah, so like actually outlining this is what I need this person to accomplish and clearly communicating that to them ahead of time. And when I haven't gauged both of those pieces before trying to pass off a project, I can think of a particular example with my cleaning company, when I did this a year and a half or so ago and something really fell through and I honestly kind of cost us a good bit of money too, and I would look back and like, yeah, I'm trying to take as much personal responsibility.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah, this actually probably wouldn't have ended up this way and maybe the person wasn't the best fit. There might've been a better candidate. But also, that person might've had a good shot at success had I taken a little bit more time on the front end to iron some details out and then go to them and say this is exactly what I need you to, this is how I need this to play out, this is how I need you to contribute to it, and gave them a little bit. It was a little bit too ambiguous, which cost us there. So again, I don't think it was a strategy like the idea of of you know passing that delegating that workout was wrong, but the implementation beforehand is really what cost success on that front.
Speaker 1:So that's generally, in my experience, where things have gone south okay and I I definitely appreciate both of your perspectives on this, just having you know both of you being business owners and obviously working in different kinds of business and now working together. So what advice would you give to to a new entrepreneur about letting go and handing those tasks over to people who you may have vetted or you've vetted enough to be willing to give them a chance?
Speaker 3:um, well, I just sorry, go ahead. I was going to say um, uh, the vetting process usually, at least for me, can constitute something like a test run. Or let me give you this little task. Will you do well in this little task? Will you do well in this little task? Are you communicating with me back and forth and then? And I've learned that you never talk about anything bigger than the little tasks, because if you do that, then they're going to give you the best job possible up front, just so they can get that bigger, bigger responsibility. And then they fall off after that big responsibility to their real personality, whatever. That was slackness or laziness or whatever. But if someone does really well and wants more of those tasks and I can see them working, then without telling them, I'll just drift them out even more and more and more. And then, um, next thing, you know they're doing the big task, but they don't know they are. Yep.
Speaker 1:So it's a 30-step project. You're going to give it to them a step at a time.
Speaker 3:Sometimes it can't be like that though.
Speaker 3:Sometimes, when you hire a marketer, for example, and you have your AdWords going really well, you've worked months like zeroed in on that and now it's time Okay, I need to give this on to someone else to just manage.
Speaker 3:That's a huge. That's a much bigger leap of faith, especially with somebody that you don't know. You haven't found that in that person. You have to just give your control over your account to this person and I would say, like advertising companies and agencies, it thinks like they're the same way and you know, just because you're an agency doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to get good results at all. So I would say that's a much bigger leap of faith. How do you do that? You kind of just have to take the leap of faith and do as much due diligence as possible, get as much references as possible you know that aren't family members and, um, yeah, and the thing is, if they're legit, then they'll give you the phone number to their customers and say, yeah, call them, talk to them about how I've managed their account and all this, and that has always worked out pretty well in my case.
Speaker 2:Yep. And then just what I said previously just make sure you're identifying on the front ends as much as you can what you need, this position, what the project needs to look like. Handing it over. Try to communicate to the person you're allocating to as thoroughly as you can before signing it. There will be rare occasions where a fire pops out. You've got to put it out as quickly as possible. So you're going to have as much time or deliberation as you'd like, but try to not let that become your MO or how you delegate tasks to other people.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would also go add to that and say you need to, ahead of time, put everything in in some form of contract or written agreement.
Speaker 3:I wouldn't say you need to go to the degree of always getting like some official document, like an employment agreement or something like that, but just something that states I will do this, I will do this, I will do this. As specific as possible that says that's when the job ends, and then you can redo the tasks again and be like okay, now I'm gonna do, I'm gonna keep up with this, I'm gonna keep up with this, I will keep up with this, and you can broaden it out. But that really keeps everyone accountable and on the same page. It also gives you an excuse to let the person go very straightforwardly, instead of it being like, oh well, I well I did do this and I did do this, and it's like well, you didn't do this, this, this, this, this, and you've had this deadline to do it and I needed that, so sorry, you know, it does give you a better or structure way of, and it's more transparent to the other person to know if they're on the edge of being let go or not yeah.
Speaker 1:Final question, looking back on your journey with clean space, is there anything you wish you had done differently regarding delegation and task management?
Speaker 3:I think I answered this one in um in a preview, I think it. It was the last episode, but it was basically saying you know, in hindsight, of course, there's a lot of things that there's things that I wish I didn't delegate to, that I wish I didn't even do, honestly, or rely on someone else to do, and a lot of those things they're just like okay, I could have done this quicker, this cost us this much time. I could have just did it, or a weekend, instead of waiting weeks for this whole thing to get done, or at least have something that we could talk about and go back and forth and tweak on and whatever. And so I think there's lots of that kind of stuff. But again, you have to. So, yeah, in hindsight you can think about that and you can take that as data and say, okay, if this, I need to be more on top of thinking, okay, what's the time frame that this is going to take? Is this worth me doing, or is it worth the amount of time waiting for that person to do it? And it's just.
Speaker 3:You know, I don't have, I kind of have that in my habits, but there's so many things going on when you're building a business and you're so many different things and sometimes you have a bazillion tasks and if one person's like, oh, yeah, this task for you, like, yes, please go do it. You know so anyway, but you have to put yourself. You have to think back when you were actually there, did you intentionally try to lose the company money and and lose the game in that, or were you trying your best and trying to make good decisions with what you had and the data you had available to you? You have to remember that whenever you think back. So that's why you don't beat yourself up. You know, only beat yourself up if you're intentionally losing.
Speaker 1:That is our time, gents. I appreciate you. We've got Eric Griffin Pichanga. We've got Eric Griffin Pachinga. We've got Aram Street. Yeah buddy and I'm Yemi Ogunbachi. Thank you for another episode of Coffee Dow Chat Cool.
