Nick Deck - an agency owner and offshore delegation enthusiast who runs Agency Sidekicks - a vA on steroids! They take the time suckin task you should not be doing and takes care of them. Hear his story and how he can overcame the fear of delegating and how delegating specifically relates to agency owners' lives.

In today's episode, we talk about delegating and how freeing it can actually be for Agency Owners. Nick talks about learning the hard way that delegating is sometimes not a very easy thing to do, especially when you're working with offshore help. He spent way too much time in that hiring and firing process. Losing hours of time and money - But, figured it out and now has the answer and that answer is - Agency Sidekicks

Takeaways From This Episode:

Why Is Delegation Mission Critical To agency success?
Take the training aspect out of your life.
Tips for overcoming fears of delegating.
How do you tell a control freak to delegate?
What does effective delegation look like?

Agency Sidekicks takes some damn good human beings, puts them through a training program, gives them on the job experience, then prepares them with the fundamentals of a wide variety of different digital marketing skills so they can be your amazing “agency sidekick”. Meaning, they are ready to be there for all the agency duties you do not have the time to do. For Example, if you need someone who needs to learn Facebook ads, HubSpot, or whatever it is, they take them and focus on training and prioritize that training for them. They do the training for you and make sure your sidekick is prepared for whatever position you are needing to be filled at a fraction of the time and cost. And if they get stuck on any of the stuff they're working on with you, the team at Agency Sidekicks is there to take care of the situation. They have a team of experts that are there just to support these guys. Basically, Agency Sidekicks ends up saving a lot of that babysitting, hand-woven kind of stuff that comes up when you're delegating stuff offshore.

Let's talk about some hurdles on how to overcome the fear of delegating.

Nick has some tips on how to overcome the fear of delegating. Most people have the fear of the job not being done the way they want it done if it is delegated. And, you know what, you're right. In a lot of cases, you're probably going to be able to do the task better than the person you're delegating to. But if you can get it 90% of the way and it accomplishes the same goal in the end, It still works.

What Would You Do If You Weren't Afraid?

Nick explains that in delegating, the goal is to not to cut corners on communications or on expectations but to take the time to train the person behind you that allows you to scale. The point is to learn to delegate so that you and your agency can be more productive and successful. Go through the little bit of pain of delegating. Let your people make a few stupid mistakes at your expense but then reap the rewards. Agency Sidekicks is someone you can trust to handle your delegations. Hear more of Nick’s answers and how you can have someone give the responsibility 90 -100 percent instead of you giving it 30- 40 percent because you have too much on your plate. Typically, the performance and the output goes up and your time involved in it goes down. The clients' response, clients' value and clients’ happiness goes up. It's almost always a good thing.

Delegating is definitely an art form you have to learn. It's not something that comes naturally to most entrepreneurs. Once you have mastered delegating, it's something that you actually really enjoy doing. You start to appreciate delegating because of how much more productive you become.

If you do not learn to delegate, you will never get out of the Rat Race. In most cases you are so over stretched and over worked you are only giving you clients 25 to 30 percent of your attention. In reality, the client deserves more than that. By delegating, you are giving your clients what they need and deserve and getting out of the rat race.

Rat race and life - pictured as a word Rat race and a wreck ball to symbolize that Rat race can have bad effect and can destroy life, 3d illustration

Tips For Overcoming Fears Of Delegating.

Finding the absolute best bang for your buck when using Agency Sidekicks. Find out what role they can play to make sure all things are being taken care of and you are using your time wisely. Use Agency Sidekicks for the majority of the hours that are not needed by a specialist. That saves the specialists hours to focus on the really high value tasks. Start with the simple stuff, you know, all the stuff that you're looking at your task list for the day or for the week, and you're like, man, I should not be doing this, you know, that kind of thing, right? If you love it, great. If you hate it, why are you doing it?

A great example that Nick and I came up with is the executive assistant. Someone to check your inboxes everyday and delegate what truly needs to be done by you or another specific person. Obviously, it is a little more detailed than that but you get the point. Remember Agency Sidekicks are specifically trained for agency life.

They have people that are trained up on a wide variety of tools and they continue to train them so they are doing some pretty sophisticated tasks these days. Nick suggests starting off with 10 hours a week of deleting the stuff that is sucking your time. The sooner you can start to delegate, the sooner you'll be on your way to live in the quality of life that we all hopefully set out to do.

Give me some tasks that are specifically related to agency life.

Nick explains how it is broken down by your ROI. What is a certain role costing you and what is the return on the investment. For example, the high value wages, high value roles that you have. If you're paying somebody $25 - $50 bucks an hour, make sure they're doing stuff that's worth that an hour, if not, hire Agency Sidekicks to take care of it for only $10 an hour.

Word ROI on calculator. Business and tax concept. Stock photo

Nick breaks down in more detail examples of what Agency Sidekicks can handle and what they should not be handling from graphic designers to copywriters and so on. Agency Sidekicks can pretty much do anything that does not require a specialist.

He has perfect examples of ways to turn them loose with big projects, spending five minutes reviewing it, making sure it's all good and then you can send it over to the client. Working with Agency Sidekicks gives you the means and capability to hand off projects faster with the assurance they are taken care of properly. It is time to take the time to train somebody how to do it and then never have to think about it again. You might have to give them a little bit of feedback every once in a while but you never have to think about that because they've learned how to do it, because you've taken the time to show them how you held their hand through at once, and then they're good to go. Every hour you hand off to a Sidekick is an hour you've got back somewhere else.

If you are a control freak or if you're overworked, you have to look into Agency sidekicks. You will figure out that Delegation is your friend. Pick the top three things you can delegate out and try Agency Sidekick's smallest package.

Shameless Plug - Week to week to see if they are a fit for you. win-win

Agency Sidekicks has a $10 an hour, 15 hours a week minimum and it is week to week. If you don't love it, after the first week, you can cancel right away. They always ask people to give it to the good old college. At least three or four weeks - you will not regret it.

Agency Sidekick has you covered. This is a business decision that you have to evaluate. Go check out agencysidekicks.com. See if it resonates with you, see if the tasks that they list make sense. After that, It is probably worth a 15 or 20 minute chat just to see if they are a good fit. If it's a good fit, they will work hard to make sure that you've got all those things delegated the right way. Book a call on their website or message Nick directly. nick@agencysidekicks.com