Below Your Pay Grade

If you want to go from being a solopreneur to an entrepreneur, you have to hire. The person who tries to do it all will eventually stall. Their growth will plateau and maybe even recede. But hiring is just the first step. The next step is understanding what is below your pay grade.

Empower Your Hire

Anastassia was my first hire, and I tell everybody that I was extremely lucky to find her. I was fortunate because she is the daughter of entrepreneurs and because she takes ownership of every role she takes on. But I am also exceptionally lucky because Anastassia is extraordinarily insightful. She understood from the beginning that her job was to help me grow and that part of that was taking on the tasks that were below my pay grade.

For the first six months, we shared an office, and she constantly asked what I was working on. After I answered, she would always ask one more question. “Is that below your pay grade?”

Delegation

Like most entrepreneurs, I struggled to delegate. There were many reasons for the struggle. Sometimes, I did tasks that were below my pay grade because I enjoyed those tasks. Sometimes, I struggled with delegating a task because I was under the impression that if I didn’t want to do it, I shouldn’t ask someone else to do it instead. But more often than not, it was that doing everything had become a habit.

Growth Through Delegation

With Anastassia’s persistence, I became better at turning my tasks over to her so that I could focus on other areas that only I could handle. Specifically, I focused on networking and sales. Within two months of hiring Anastassia, we had doubled our revenue. Within four months, we had to hire our next employee. Without delegating and allowing Anastassia to do her job, I have no doubt that our business would have stalled.

It’s been seven years since I hired Anastassia. She is now my Chief Operating Officer, and she runs the business. I no longer struggle to delegate tasks. As a matter of fact, I am in the process of buying a second business, and Anastassia is taking on an even more prominent role at No Bullshit Marketing. I often ask myself whether I would be capable of buying another business without her persistent questioning of my tasks in the beginning and my acceptance of the fact I needed to let go. The answer is always the same. No, we would not be in this position. We would not have grown.