Conundrums

If you follow Tim Ferriss’s advice about outsourcing — or if you just hire more than one other person to help you with your business — you’re probably losing money, time and clients. And it’s probably happening because things are falling through cracks, slipping into the void left by The Missing Link.

There’s a Missing Link between Tim Ferriss’s advice about outsourcing (or your current team set-up) and a successful outsourcing or team environment. It’s a link Ferriss fails to discuss, and one that most people don’t even consider until they’re urgently in need. One vital element that will save you money, lessen your stress, and ensure happy customers (who become return customers & your biggest source of referral income): the Manager.

The Missing Link Manager

Think less the dude who bossed you around at your high school fast food job, more Rosie from The Jetsons

If you’re a one-(wo)man shop, you’re the Manager by default. You know all aspects of your business (because you’re the one doing all of it). You know how things get done, you know whether they’re actually getting done, and you know how they all connect (because you are the connection).

If you hire one other person, then you’re probably acting as the “Manager,” in that you still know all the aspects of your business*, you’re just having someone else help you get some of ‘em done.

* If you hire one other person and you don’t know all the aspects of your business–that is, you’ve turned over knowledge and control to someone else and you’re not checking up on what they’re doing, and you’re not keeping yourself informed as to how they’re running things, you’re asking–nay, pleading–for a disaster. And they’re probably milking you. More on this in a forthcoming post.

Once you hire more than one additional Helper Person, you have a choice: either you retain that “Manager” role, where you’re overseeing your Helper People’s activities and ensuring things are getting done (a) correctly, (b) timely, and (c) effectively, or you can delegate that role to someone else.

What The Manager does

The Manager makes sure:

• that your Computer Guy is communicating with the Customer Service Gal so she can let your clients know when your online ordering page will be back up & running
• that the Product Production & Shipping Fellow knows what Customer Service Gal is promising customers on shipping times so that he knows when to have products ready to ship
• that you know what your travel itinerary is, and that Events Planning Dude knows when the event ends and communicates that to Personal Assistant Lady so she knows when to pick you up at the airport
• that if someone is screwing things up, either (a) you’re informed of it so that you can deal with the Problem Person, or (b) (s)he, as Manager, can deal with Problem Person in whatever way is appropriate.

The Manager is, essentially, the hub of knowledge in your stead.

She’s the one that takes on all of the “make sure everyone knows what they need to know” stress, and handles all of the “ensure no one is completely bumbling their part of the job” matters. The Manager is the steady, consistent Center for all the rest of the Helper Person spokes of your business.

Like a wheel, if there is no center (no Manager), the spokes are disconnected, and the wheel is weak… and traveling on that wheel is a break-down waiting to happen.

What happens when The Manager link is missing

When you have Spokes with no Center Hub (Helper People with no Manager), you wind up with:

• broken chains of communication, which lead to misunderstandings and mishandling of business situations — or personal misunderstandings which wind up costing you clients and/or Helper People.
• Multiple ways of handling the same issue, which leads to inconsistent treatment of your customers and your products.
• Confusion over who’s doing what, who’s already done what, who was responsible for telling whom about what next action step, and eventually resentment from Helper People who caught heat for something that they thought someone else was handling, which leads to a revolving door of Helper People and more time you have to spend training someone new.
• Lost money and time as you wind up having to step in when things get really bad and try to sort them out after-the-fact, fixing problems that have already occurred and stressing out over whether the problem is really fixed when you step back out again.

The inescapable bottom line is that someone in your business needs to have an overview of who’s doing what, what happens when, what goes where, and how things are supposed to be done.

That someone can be you.

But if you want to follow the Tim Ferriss business path and “outsource your life,” you need to hand over those reigns to someone else. You’re free to relinquish the role as your wheel’s center hub. But someone else needs to fill that void to keep the Spokes from breaking and prevent the Wheel from collapsing.

What makes a good manager

You know who’d make a bang-up manager? Rosie from The Jetsons, the housekeeper robot. She had everything it takes to be an ideal Central Hub for your business:

• able to keep in mind The Big Picture (need to have a functioning house and healthy family) without letting little details slip by (George’s breakfast needed to be ready before he hopped into his ship each morning)
• close connection to all of the Spokes in the Jetson household (the family members, pet, and house itself)
• genuinely gave a damn about her purpose: Rosie’s dedication to the Jetsons didn’t stop at the end of her tasklist; she was concerned about their overall wellbeing and worked proactively to ensure their wellbeing, improvising solutions where necessary
• able to keep organized the input she received from all of the various Spokes, as well as from her own work and observations, and able to process all of that information in a way that allowed to her to both ensure efficient running of the overall household and communicate the overview back to George (the “business leader” in this metaphor) when necessary

And, okay, so Rosie’s a robot and a cartoon. Two strikes against hiring her for your own business.

But when you run through the vital characteristics of a manager, you’ll notice that MBA, degree in management, or Fill In A Fancy Sounding Certficiate Anyone Can Pay To Receive are absent. In other words, what’s on the resume isn’t nearly as important as how well the person fits with you and your team, and how much the person is willing to work for your goals.

Notice what else is missing from the Good Manager List? “Ability to boss other people around.”

That isn’t what this kind of Manager is about. Your Manager needs to be able to be direct and ensure that stuff’s getting done, but she doesn’t need to be requiring others to “report” to her, or firing off “Joey didn’t email me until 8:03 even though he said he’d email me at 8:00!” emails to you. (A Manager who does that fails the first item on the Rosie Abilities list above — keeping a view of the Big Picture.)

Your Manager needs to be prepared to jump in and pick up the slack if necessary, but doesn’t need to be hawking over everyone else’s digital shoulder. Your Manager needs to be responsive to “holes” in the system so that she can help fix them — and so that you don’t have to — but doesn’t poke the holes in the system herself. She’s not out to make someone else look bad, but to make the system as a whole as effective and smooth-running as possible. As effective and smooth-running as you’d make it if you had the time, energy and desire to be the Manager yourself.

Is your Central Hub person doing that for you now? Are you doing that for yourself? Could you use some help in that area?

. . . . . .

If you’re unfamiliar with Tim Ferriss…

he’s the fellow who wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, a great book with lots of good ideas and tips that sets out to demonstrate that anyone can run a business with minimal time spent managing it and maximum time spent following your dreams and pursuing your hobbies.

Tim Ferriss advocates outsourcing of every possible activity, pointing out (rightly) that the more activities you’re able to outsource, the more time and brainspace you free up to do other things (vacation, plan the next product your business will sell, read a book, whatever).

 

 

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