Steve Davies Online

Barking Dog is the ultimate metaphor for those who are working below their pay grade.  Dogs bark, and it is a senseless, repetitive activity. It is what they do... one of the things they are bred to do. Barking represents all the low-level activities you do that could easily be done by somebody else at much lower cost.

There are solutions readily available to avoid wasting your time this way. If you have accepted the argument that working below your pay grade simply compromises your self-worth, then this is the concept for you. You will need, first of all, to identify the tasks that should be eliminated and then develop a plan to delegate them.  

There are two different but allied common Barking scenarios.  

Why have a dog and bark yourself? Is there somebody in your organization who could take over the tasks that you are handling that are below your pay grade? You need to identify what they are and find a way to delegate them to somebody else in your organization.  

Why bark when you can hire a dog to do it for you? If you cannot delegate because you do not have anybody you can hand the task down to then look harder and find someone. If you cannot find someone within your organization, then make an effort to find somebody outside your organization…it is a lot easier than you think.  

It is all too easy to continue doing tasks that are below your pay grade. Remember that the biggest obstacle to removing them is you…and you should carefully examine whether the difficulty you feel in letting go of the mundane things that you do  is really an excuse that you are putting up to keep “”the illusion of control” by doing everything yourself.  

If you can use existing employees to do the barking that is relatively simple, though the delegation still requires organizing. If there is not anybody, then you should hire somebody...and the excuse that you cannot afford the expense may not hold much water. Hiring somebody is easy to do in this economy, and they do not have to be full time or work in your office.  

You can hire a virtual assistant on a part-time basis to take care of tasks that can be handled remotely and do it for as little as $10 an hour. Advertising on Craigslist is inexpensive and effective, and you will find people who meet your criteria. One idea to build a decent connection with part time workers is to pay them a retainer that guarantees them a certain number of hours.  

Consider a retainer of $200 a month to guarantee 20 hours of work. If you fall short then the part-time worker is the beneficiary. If you use more time, then pay the extra time at the hourly rate. By making this kind of commitment, it gives you a chance to develop a better relationship; if it does not work, then it may have cost you a few dollars, but it brings with it the chance to develop into a more important business connection.  

I often get resistance to this concept, and many people feel that spending money hiring people simply is not justified. If your internal excuse clock is telling you that you can’t afford the additional expense, then go through the following Return on Investment Analysis exercise to show you the real opportunity cost of working below your pay grade:  

The Admin ROI Concept 

If you go through this exercise and understand the Admin ROI Concept then you will be ready and eager to delegate the barking.  

1.     Establish the value of your time  

If you have been following these articles, then you will already have gone through the exercise of identifying the value of your time. If you have not, then go to the article “Establishing the Value of your Time” and follow the steps laid out there. Once you have established the value of your time, then you can start to work through the Return on Investment Analysis 

2.     Identify the Task to be Removed  

Again, if you have been following these articles, you will know that there are several different methodologies for identifying tasks to be removed from your day because they are below your pay grade. You do not have to look at the articles to identify what needs to be removed from your day, but if it is helpful you can find them at www.stevedavies.com. However you do it, identifying things to be removed from your day is an essential first step. 

3.     Identify the Cost of Removing the Task  

Once you have identified the task to be removed, then you can identify what it would cost to hire somebody to take it over. That somebody may already be in your organization, and that makes the issue much easier. But if there is nobody, you may need to hire somebody external and incur an additional cost.  

4.     Identify the “Effective Time Factor”  

I accept that anybody that you delegate to will do the work much less efficiently than you would. Maybe what you can do in an hour will take somebody else three times as long, but that really doesn't matter. identify how much time you think you will save for each hour that you have somebody else do the work and come up with the “Effective Time Factor”.

5.     Calculate The Delegation ROI  

Having gone through the prior steps, this last one is really easy. Take the cost per hour of the new “employee” and multiply it by the “Effective Time Factor”. Then express that number as a percentage of the value rate for your time ….and you will see some spectacular numbers.  

A simple example will make this clear, and I will use one from my own experience when I first became a consultant. 

I was working hard to build up an income stream, and felt that it was inappropriate to spend money on an assistant when I had a surplus of available time. What I failed to realize was that if I made the investment in an assistant then the return would be extraordinary, and that I would be able to build my consulting practice much more quickly by implementing this important decision. 

I calculated that the value of my time was $350 an hour back then, and proposed to hire somebody at $15 an hour. I figured that she would take [with training] three times as long to do anything than I would and proceeded to go through the calculation. 

Based on the parameters outlined above, the calculation looked like this:

What this says is that my time is worth so much more than the cost of anybody else that I can reasonably hire, and the Return on Investment by doing so is a staggering 778%. Where else in your business can you get returns like that?   

There is one story that I would like to share here. I had a client a while back before I got so aggressive about this. He was a baker with a retail store and I was trying to help him with some issues in his business. I was due to meet with him one day, and when I called him to confirm he told me that he could not spare the time because he was driving the truck that whole week. 

When I asked him about this he told me that his driver was off, and that he couldn't afford to hire somebody else to drive the truck so he was doing it himself! This is a respectable argument if you are simply going to sit in the office and play computer games.... but if you plan to use your time to grow your business, then driving a truck at $12 an hour when you could be working on your business at over $200 an hour simply makes no sense. 

Are there examples in your business that reach this level of futility? If there are, have you identified them and what are you doing to hire a dog so that you do not have to bark yourself?

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