Stop doing the work when your hour is worth more than the job

Quick answer: Hand off a task when it repeats, when you can write it on one page, and when your hour earns more somewhere else. Start with one task this month, while you can still afford the slow start. Don't wait until you're drowning.

Picture a landscaper who bills $60 an hour when he's on the mower. He also spends two hours a week walking properties and quoting jobs. One of those quotes turns into a $6,000 contract. The mowing pays $60 an hour. The estimating paid $3,000 an hour. He's still mowing on Tuesday and writing quotes at 9 p.m., because that's how he built the place.

That's the whole problem in one man's week. The numbers are made up, but the shape is real. Most owners are doing cheap work with expensive hours.

Price your hour first

Pick the work only you can do. Selling, pricing, the long-standing customer, the judgment calls. Work out what an hour of that's worth. It doesn't need to be exact. Round it.

Then work out what it costs to have someone competent do the other work. Add payroll tax, insurance and tools to the wage, because the wage is never the whole cost. Your accountant can give you the real loaded figure for your state.

If your hour on the high-value work beats that loaded cost, you're losing money every hour you spend on the low-value work. You're just not seeing the bill.

The signs it's time

You don't need a spreadsheet to spot it. Look for these.

• You're turning down work, or running late on it, because there's only one pair of hands.
• You're the answer to every question, and the phone rings during supper.
• Your own work gets sloppier around hour ten. Customers notice before you do.
• Nothing happens when you're sick. Not a slow day. Nothing.
• You can cover a new wage for three months even if the extra work doesn't arrive on schedule.

That last one matters. Managing costs money before it makes any. If you can't carry the payroll through a slow quarter, fix the cash first. Run the weekly numbers for a month and see what you really have.

Hand off the wrong thing first, and you'll quit

Owners usually hand off what they hate, or what's on fire. Both are mistakes. The thing you hate is often the thing that's hardest to do well, like chasing money or dealing with an angry customer. The fire is no place to train a new person.

Hand off what repeats. Scheduling. Deliveries. Data entry. The second coat. The setup and the teardown. Work with a clear finish line and a low cost of getting it slightly wrong.

Keep the estimating, the pricing and your oldest customers for now. Give those up only after someone has earned it over a year of doing the easier work right.

Write the job down before you give it away

This is the step everybody skips, and it's why handoffs fail.

Do the task for one week with a notepad beside you. Write what you actually do, not what you think you do. Then boil it to one page. Put a sentence at the top defining done. Not "clean the site." Try "gate latched, tools wiped and back on the truck, no clippings on the driveway, and the customer's side yard raked even though nobody asked."

That last part is the old rule. Leave it better than you found it. Build it into the standard on day one and your people will do it without being told twice. Stay late and stack the chairs yourself for the first month so they see what it looks like.

Manage the front end, not just the finish

Say what done looks like. Ride along on the first three jobs. Check in again when they're a fifth of the way through, which is when the wrong turns show up cheap. Then look at the finished work with them, not behind their back.

This is slower than doing it yourself. For the first couple of months it'll feel like a bad trade, and you'll want to grab the tool out of their hand. Don't. You're paying a start-up cost, and it has an end.

If you need a way to see whether it's working, put a few lines on one page of numbers and watch them weekly: jobs finished, callbacks, hours you spent on the work you handed off. When your own hours on that task drop to near zero and callbacks don't climb, it's working.

Serve them, and hold the line

Managing is a form of service. You owe your people clear instructions, the right tools, a fair wage paid on time, and a straight answer when they ask how they're doing. A man who works for you shouldn't have to guess.

And you owe the customer the standard. The service-with-a-backbone part is where most nice owners fail.

When the work comes back wrong, fix the instruction first. Maybe the page was vague. Maybe you never showed it. Fix that, then try again. If the same person misses the same standard after a fair run, have the direct conversation. If it ends badly, there's a decent way to do it.

What you can't do is quietly redo their work at 9 p.m. and say nothing. That teaches everyone that sloppy work gets rescued by the boss. You'll end up with a payroll and the same sixty-hour week.

When to wait

Sometimes the answer isn't yet, and occasionally it's never.

If your name is on the work and the work is the product, like a custom cabinetmaker or a one-chair barber, then handing it off may be handing off the very thing customers pay for. You can still hand off the books, the scheduling and the supply runs.

If your margin can't carry a wage, a new hire just turns a hard job into a hard job with a payroll problem. And if you're a one-person shop, you like it and you're clearing a good living, you're not failing. Stay small on purpose.

If you do hire, file correctly before day one. This is what to have in order.

For everyone else, the test is simple. If a customer has ever been let down because you were stretched, you've waited too long. Pick the one repeating task that eats your best hours, write the page, and give it away this month.