Delegate Your Way to Success!
by Melody Fee

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Each week, I talk with members who are still struggling to have enough hours in a day to finish projects that are important to them and to find time to get started on new marketing ideas or business skills they want to develop. I am as guilty as the next agent in this area! We are trying to learn how to work smarter, but we may not be implementing this knowledge to make it work for us!

How do we give ourselves more opportunity to work ON our business rather than just in it? Start earlier each day?? Well, for some agents, this may be part of the answer. I personally find that I am most productive as soon as I get up and get going! It has to be before the phone starts ringing to be "uninterrupted." (As I sit writing, it is 7:25 a.m. -- not that early, but it sure is better than trying to start at 9 a.m., when the phones start ringing here at OSSN.) We have learned when our most productive time is during the day, and we have to utilize that opportunity to "tune in" to ourselves to get a job done (or a project started). If you have school-age children, then it may be most important to try to use those mid-day hours to really focus on those important projects that help you GROW your business. Whether it is a conversation with a supplier whom you want to promote a group with, or maybe a written proposal for a company that has told you they are interested in discussing an incentive cruise group with you, having that time to really put together a new project when you are at your HEIGHT of concentration is very important!

It is VERY easy to get bogged down by the LITTLE tasks that take up BIG hours of your day. I have had many members tell me they spend some of their most productive hours doing bookkeeping tasks such as creating their clients' invoices manually. After discussing the functions of database programs with them, they came to realize that they were making MORE work for themselves by not taking advantage of a tool they had needed to use for a LONG time. I remember a story that Gary Fee once told me regarding his early years in the travel business. He was working at the agency that he and his parents owned together when he moved back to St Louis. His mother Ernestine ("Ernie") had him working on three different cruise groups for the agency. When she tried to give him another group to work with, he looked at ALL the work he had piled up for his THREE cruise groups and said to her, "Mom, I have all that I can handle right now!" She proceeded to open up her desk drawer and show him the 30 files she was working on at one time. Well, I am sure he learned a fast lesson about how someone should be organizing their time and their records to be most productive!

If you are handling several groups a year, there are tasks involved with group sales that take up a lot of time. Entering data about your clients' payments, creating invoices, contacting clients about certain preferences, creating dining lists, sending out emails to clients about the trip, creating flyers in programs like Microsoft Publisher to use to promote a group -- these are all tasks that could be DELEGATED to an office helper. Giving these responsibilities to another assistant is sometimes VERY hard for the small agency! But, if we will invest a few good hours in training the right individual assistant, we could free up many, many hours for more creative tasks! Some of your best choices for additional help may come from retired accountants, stay-at-home mothers whose children are in school (who may want to work flexible hours that you could offer), and even college-age young adults who are computer literate and may show a real interest in our industry also.

Another way to begin working ON your small business is to consider training a few agents to work WITH you at the agency. If your agency has a few good outside agents/independent contractors working with you, you can turn over extra leads to those agents and still capitalize on the sale by splitting the commissions! Yes, this does create a situation where you will be spending time training them, too. But, if you can "CLONE" your selling skills and generate revenue while doing so, that is great!

With all of this being said, what IS most important is the small agency must decide how to take best advantage of tools, delegate time-consuming responsibilities to others when appropriate, and make the time to move forward to create new opportunities for their own agency.

We need to work ON our business, not just work in it!

Melody Fee serves as vice president of the Outside Sales Support Network. She may be reached at info@ossn.com.

(Credit: OSSN)