Delegation for Salon Owners (Part Two)

Hello and welcome! Last time I encouraged you to have a really good look at how you're spending your days, how you're spending your weeks, with a view to delegating some of the tasks that were holding you back in your business, some of the stuff that was cluttering up your week, when actually you could be spending that time better on building your business and on revenue-generating activity. And I always read your feedback with lots and lots of interest. Phil at buildyoursalon.com, by the way, if you want to comment on this audio. And I was struggling a little bit to get across my enthusiasm for delegation, apparently, and most of the comments were around not really understanding the kinds of things that you should be delegating. So today is going to be a little bit of inspiration for you. I'm going to give you 10 tasks that I delegate and how I went about it, and also three places to look for outsource help. So if you haven't got people inside your business that you want to be delegating these kind of tasks to, three places that you can go and look elsewhere. So let's start on the top 10 rundown. And at number one, I have my appointment setting. So as a coach, I make appointments with my customers. A lot of that process can be automated. But sometimes people just want to have a chat with somebody virtually. And my virtual assistant is brilliant at taking care of that. So I'm not talking necessarily about the appointments that you would have in your salon, though you could look at outsourcing your reception. I think that's probably a conversation for another time. But as far as things like appointments with your reps from your manufacturers, for example, that's the kind of thing that can actually be a bit of a pain to sort out or it ties up your receptionist. You could actually give those contact details to a virtual assistant or another member of your team and ask them to set those appointments for you. And I give my virtual assistant access to my online diary. She can see when I'm free and when I'm not. And she sets and changes appointments as she needs to. Number two, we could look at video. Now, video is a big part of my business, and I suspect it's turning into a slightly bigger part of your business, too. And video editing is something that I can do. But honestly, it's a little bit like drawing teeth.

I do. I do find it kind of a joyless task and something that takes a disproportionate amount of time for me. So it's far easier for me to delegate it to someone else. So this also brings us to the first resource that I have for delegation, and that's a site called OnlineJobs.ph. Now, OnlineJobs.ph is a specialist site for virtual assistants and outsourcers in the Philippines. They tend to be extremely affordable and terribly loyal as well and really nice people to deal with, I've found, generally. The video outsourcer that I have charges me a flat rate of $5, and it doesn't matter whether that video is... I think that's anything up to 30 minutes of video. So $5 for a quick video for Facebook or a longer video for YouTube doesn't really make any difference. And he will chop and change my video as much as I want him to. So what I tend to do now is record the video, and I will leave instructions with him. His name's Ernest, and I say, OK, Ernest, I fluffed that last bit. Can you go back about two minutes, and we'll take it from there. So I don't even have to type out particular instructions for him. And I upload the video onto Google Drive into a shared folder. He edits it and then pings it back to me, usually within 24 hours. I think the most I've waited has been two days for a video. He seems very keen to keep UK business hours, but I keep telling him it's not entirely necessary. But as far as going over and above the Call of Duty, and honestly, that 30-minute video probably takes him 30 minutes to edit. You know, he's really good, really quick. For me to do the same will probably take me an hour or two. So it's a really useful way of me decluttering my to-do list. Next up, when I've taken that video, I very often will turn it into something else, and a big part of that is transcription. So I find it a lot easier to create a video and then turn it into something else rather than write a blog or write an article. So I like transcription services, and there's a lovely little resource called Rev.com. And Rev.com, you upload your video or audio, or you give it access to a public post that has a video in it, and they will go away and transcribe it for you. And you can decide whether they're going to leave in the ums and errs and all the pauses and hesitations, or whether they're going to take those out. They now also have a completely automated service, where sometimes you don't necessarily need a brilliant transcription. Sometimes I will take an old video, and I'm just going to turn it into, I'm going to edit it and turn it into a script for a new video.

So you can use the automated service. Yeah, there's some errors in there, but it gives you the gist of what you were saying. So Rev.com is my top tip as far as transcription is concerned. Really, really cheap. And again, a fairly joyless task if you were going to do it yourself. Moving on from that, I also have somebody who will write a blog for me. So if I send her the video, let's say I've created a video on, I don't know, delegation, then she will go away and turn that into a blog. And I will give her a word limit of, you know, an ideal word limit for me. I tend to find about 1,500 words is the limit for my audience. So she will go away, turn the topic that I've given her into a blog. Sometimes she'll even do a bit of extra research for me. But very often there's enough content in the video and she'll put the headings in. And if I give her the keywords, then she will also optimize it for search engine as well. And that costs me, I think it's about $15 for her to write a 1,500 word blog. She's in South Africa, never spoken to her, certainly never met her, always does a brilliant, brilliant job. And I found her on my second resource, which is Fiverr.com. Now, Fiverr, I have had mixed experiences with, but I would say more positive experiences than negative. Certainly now that Fiverr has been around for quite a long time, there are vendors on Fiverr that have a lot of ratings now. So it's a bit less risky than it used to be, but occasionally you do get a bit of a dud. So it took me a while to find the people that I use on Fiverr, but now I'm very loyal to that platform. And for one-off tasks or infrequent tasks, I find Fiverr.com really, really useful. Next up is bookkeeping. And honestly, I don't understand why any salon owner would want to do their own bookkeeping, even if you can, unless you particularly enjoy it and you get switched on by inputting invoices into a spreadsheet. I just don't know why you would do it yourself. So I have a bookkeeper who comes into the salon about once every two weeks, picks up a carrier bag from the salon with all our invoices and receipts in it, and goes away and does wonderful things to turn that into a decent format ready for our accountant at the end of the year. She also produces me a quick profit and loss account at the end of each month to show what we've taken and what we've spent, and more importantly, how much is left in the business for me to spend in the way of dividends. The other thing that she's really useful for is I have a lot of trust for Julia now,

and she has access to my online bank account. So she also takes care of payroll and makes the payments. More importantly, she takes care of all the invoices that need paying. I don't get involved in that side of it at all. And because she has the whole picture rather than just part of it, she knows when we can afford to pay certain invoices and when it's worth us hanging back for a week or so for the sake of cash flow. So a bookkeeper, a really good bookkeeper, I would say is worth her weight in gold, and it costs me, I think it's about £55 a month. It's really not very much money at all. Next up, email. I have delegated the first sort of my email inbox to my virtual assistant, so she will go through and just delete everything that is obvious rubbish. I have form email accounts, which I use quite heavily, and some of them are very old now and have accumulated an awful lot of spam. So she will go through and unsubscribe from what she can, junk folder the stuff that she can't, and just delete anything that I don't really need to see. Saves me an awful lot of time wading through in the mornings and probably takes her less than an hour. Again, my virtual assistant came from onlinejobs.ph. Next up, I have delegated the laundering and ironing of my shirts. So I have somebody who comes to the house about once every two weeks, picks up the shirts, washes them, dries them, irons them, and brings them back on hangers. Yes, I could iron my own shirts. Yes, it does feel terribly decadent. I don't mind in the good months, but in the poor months, I have to say it does feel a little bit decadent and a little bit of a luxury. But the amount of time it would take me to iron a dozen shirts, you know, it would probably take me a good couple of hours. It probably takes her less than half that, probably a quarter of that. And she probably does a better job than me. Anyway, to be honest with you, that takes me to my third resource, and I've had an awful lot of success for local stuff, just putting posts out on Facebook. Does anybody know? So looking for recommendations locally can be a really brilliant way of finding outsourcers if you want that interaction, if you want to be able to sit down with somebody and have a meeting about something, or obviously for someone to come to your home, then Facebook can be a really good place to look.

I have delegated the admin around a new school term. And any parent out there will know what this is like. So at the beginning of the school year in particular, we get a calendar. And unfortunately, it's not the same calendar for... It's not a specific calendar for each of my boys. So I've got one who is 11 and one who's 8. And they just get one big fat school calendar for the whole lot. And then it's your job to go through and figure out which bits apply to which child and diarise those. And I never get round to doing it. And we always seem to be on the back foot. And we always seem to be missing deadlines and not putting stuff in the diary soon enough. So I delegated that task to my virtual assistant. Actually, the first time I did it, I delegated it to the salon receptionist and gave her the calendar and said, my boys are in this year and this year. Can you find everything that's relevant to those years? And put it into my online calendar. So put it into my Google calendar. And she went away and did it. And I have to say, it was a game changer for that school year. And it's something that we do every year and then revisit every term as well. So a really good use of somebody's time for a couple of hours. But it saved us an awful lot of headaches as a family. I have also delegated some content creation for my Instagram feed. So Instagram, I'm not a big user of Instagram. It doesn't serve me terribly well. I think I'm better focused on Facebook. But I do feel the need to have some kind of presence on there. So I create, well, I say I create. On my account, there is the creation of a lot of inspirational quotes. Not quotes from me, quotes from other people on a particular topic. And I have delegated that creation process. It's a two-stage process. So it's going to take up 0.9 and 0.10. So 0.9, I asked my virtual assistant to go and find me 40 quotes on resilience, for example. So I was set a theme for the month. And then she'll go away, find me 40 quotes that can be attributed. And I will go through the list and say yes, no, yes, yes, yes, no, no. And choose a number of quotes that I want to use. And then she has access to my Canva account through a system called LastPass, which we've spoken about before. And then she will turn those into quotes that I have a template set up on Canva for. So all she has to do is type in the text from the quote and type in the attribution. So who said it? And then export that. And then, of course, the final piece of the puzzle is she has access to later.com.

And she can schedule those posts as well. So that entire research, content creation and content scheduling has all been outsourced. Now, it's a brilliant example, firstly, of something that can be outsourced very easily and with very little risk. But secondly, it's that batching of content, which I never quite seem to find the time to sit down for two hours and find 40 quotes. But she can do all in one go. And it probably doesn't take her the two hours because she's doing it all in one go. And she's got a certain number of sites that she keeps revisiting, I'm sure. And also when you're in the mood for it, creating a whole batch of content on Canva and scheduling it all in later can be done really well as well. But when you're trying to create two or three at a time or you think, oh, goodness, I haven't done any quotes for a couple of days. Let's quickly whiz in and do one at a time. It's a very inefficient way of doing it. So by outsourcing it to someone who has the time, they can batch the content and get it done a lot quicker as well. That entire process, I think I'll probably pay about $15 for. So there we go. Mixed in there were three places that you can look for outsourcing help. So that's onlinejobs.ph, our fab friend, Facebook and also fiverr.com. And 10 ways that I hope have inspired you, whet your appetite a little bit at home and at work on how you can use outsourced help. Hope that's been useful to you. If it has, don't forget to hit the email button and tell me what it is that you found interesting. Tell me how you're using outsourcing and delegation in your business. And until we speak again, take care.