Emery Designs

The days of posting to your followers and growing through hashtags are over. Welcome to the age of paid content and chat marketing(! !) This NEW... style of social media marketing allows restaurant owners to: Target their ideal customer base (people who act like their best customers) Track customer visits and transactions down to the dollar See an exact, live-updated ROI through exclusive software Restaurant owners just like you are transforming the way they do business. See for yourself

Happy Holidays to All! It has been a wild ride this year! We will be closed until January 4th to recharge our batteries!!! We look forward to hitting the ground running with you in 2021!!!

Have Your Done Your First Quarter Post Planning Yet??? Use the 2021 Post Planner - Ask Me How! http://www.emerydesigns.net/

Happy Age of Aquarius! Be kind to someone today!

The 7-Yes Test: Right-Sizing What You Delegate When there’s something you want to delegate, run it through this set of 7 questions and you’ll right-size it so t...he task is the right size for your Assistant, and - most importantly - you can accelerate how fast you get work off your plate. Any question you run into that’s a no, simply modify the task until you can say yes. Typically this means unpacking the project or task into smaller pieces, then delegating just one piece at a time. Remember: The goal is autonomy. We want our Assistants to be working without our help on as many tasks, as soon as possible, so this formula paves a golden path to their autonomy so you can start getting your time back this week. 1) Is the task a $10-20/hr task? It’s important that the level of difficulty is appropriate. Tasks for technical experts range in the $40/ hr - $500/hr. Set your Assistant up for success form the beginning by setting them up to have a fighting chance from the start. Over time, they will likely graduate up into higher and higher level tasks. Start them on the easier work to get early wins. 2) Does it happen at least once per week? Massive shortcut is to pick the tasks that happen repeatedly and OFTEN. It can seem like a waste of time to spend 30 mins teaching a 15 minute task. Unless, of course, that 15 min task happens four times per week... That’s an hour per week, or 50 hours per year. Would you invest 30 mins of teaching to get 50 hours back? That’s called leverage. 3) Is there room for error? Avoid delegating anything with dire or difficult consequences if misperformed. For example, sending confidential data to the wrong client, or making a $10,000 purchase of the wrong product, are both small mistakes with big consequences. Pro tip: if you need help with work that’s high-stakes, you can modify the task so you are double-checking the work before release, or perhaps you’re the one with the final step so you can confirm everything is accurate. Add that final-check by you, and the scope of what your Assistant can take on instantly expands, even into higher-stakes areas. 4) Can it be completed in 20-60 mins? The problem with delegating large, multi-hour tasks, is your Assistant might be off-course for a LONG time before you realize they need a course-correction. So start with smaller tasks, or at least small increments of larger tasks, to get your Assistant up and running. As they build experience and familiarity, they’ll gain confidence and context to handle longer and longer stretches of work. 5) Does it require you to create minimal training? We call this easy to teach. By minimizing how much work you need to put into training, we maximize the speed that you can get tasks off your plate. This also accelerates how SOON you'll be ready to teach this task to your Assistant. At this point, don't teach difficult or complicated tasks / processes; your goal is to get in quickly and get your Assistant into the game ASAP. 6) Does it require minimal learning by assistant? We call this, easy to learn. This is actually different than "easy to teach" (above). For example, you could give your Assistant your username and password to a 20-hour course; assigning the login information is a 1-min task which is easy for you, but the 20-hour course is hard and time-consuming for your Assistant. The task you choose to delegate (even if you aren’t training it) still needs to be relatively easy on your Assistant to learn so they can get an early win, achieve autonomy, and start actually taking work off you plate. 7) Are you already doing it? Bad advice I hear all the time is "you don't need to learn it, just buy a course and have your Assistant study it." It’s generally a bad idea to delegate anything you aren't already doing because: 1. you don't know how to train it, so asking your Assistant to learn and execute is, effectively, 'the blind leading the blind,' which doesn't work 2. you can't evaluate and coach the quality of work 3. you don't know how to estimate time or difficulty 4. worst of all - you aren't actually getting any time back once your Assistant is doing the task! If you choose, instead, to delegate what you've already been doing in your day-to-day, then as soon as your Assistant is doing that task independently, your time is now freed up to focus on what matters most. One exception to "Are you already doing it?" is if the given system / task / project is already running in your business, and your Assistant is simply stepping in to take it over from a more expensive staff member or contractor. If that’s the case, make sure the size and sequence of delegation still meets the above 6 questions. Your Assistant will still need the first 6 questions to be true, even if it’s someone else training them. The 7-Yes Test is a simple-yet-effective question-set to help you avoid the vast majority of landmines in delegation. Happy Delegating! Tim See more