A small business owner’s honest reckoning with the surprisingly steep learning curve of outsourcing tasks she thought would be simple

Every business podcast I have ever half-listened to while doing the washing up has told me the same thing: hire help, delegate the small stuff, protect your time for the work only you can do. So I hired a virtual assistant. Wonderful woman, genuinely lovely, based a few time zones away, extremely competent by every account I could find online. I have now spent, by conservative estimate, eleven hours over the past three weeks explaining tasks to her that would have taken me perhaps ninety minutes total to simply do myself.

The Onboarding Document Took Longer Than Any Task It Describes

I started, sensibly I thought, by writing a detailed onboarding document explaining my business, my processes, my tone of voice for customer emails, my preferred way of formatting an invoice. This document is now nineteen pages long. It took me two full days to write. I have delegated tasks that individually take four minutes each, and I have spent two entire days writing the instructions for how to complete them correctly.

The Email Tone Situation, Specifically

I asked her to handle basic customer service emails, providing several examples of “my voice” for reference. The first batch of emails she sent came back reading like extremely formal legal correspondence, all “further to your recent enquiry” and “please do not hesitate to contact us.” Lovely, professional, and absolutely nothing like how I actually talk to my customers, who are used to me signing off with things like “thanks so much, you’re a legend.” I spent an entire afternoon writing feedback on tone. An afternoon. On tone.

The Task I Genuinely Thought Would Be Simple

I asked her to update product descriptions on my website, a task I estimated would take her perhaps twenty minutes. It took three days, four rounds of revisions, and a genuinely surreal video call where I attempted to explain, in real time, the specific difference between “cosy” and “snug” as descriptive words for a blanket, a distinction I did not know I held such strong opinions about until I was forced to defend it out loud to another human being.

Where the Actual Time Savings Are Supposed to Kick In

Every article about delegation promises this gets easier, that the upfront investment in training pays off exponentially over time as your assistant learns your business and needs less oversight. I am choosing to believe this is true, largely because the alternative, that I have simply added an entire second job of explaining my first job to someone else, is too depressing to sit with for very long on a Tuesday afternoon.

The Small Signs of Progress

To be fair, and I want to be fair here, week three has genuinely gone more smoothly than week one. She sent an email yesterday that actually sounded like me, or at least close enough that I didn’t need to rewrite it entirely. She updated a product description without four rounds of “cosy versus snug” negotiation. I am choosing to interpret this as the promised exponential payoff finally, tentatively, beginning to arrive.

What I Would Tell Past Me

Budget for the training time honestly, because it is real and it is significant, and do not expect delegation to save you time in month one. It might, if the podcasts are to be believed, save you time eventually. For now, I remain in the trenches of explaining my own business to someone else, one increasingly detailed document at a time, and trying to trust that this is, somehow, still the more efficient path forward. Further small business diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with additional London business coverage available at prat.uk.

SOURCE: https://prat.UK/