When to Delegate Roles in Business

When to Delegate Roles in Business

Sean: Before, I hop into that, cause I have a few questions about that. I want to ask, you mentioned earlier that the office manager is the one doing sales or closing the deals, which is amazing. And it’s really up to you. If you want to share this, I’m not gonna force you to share anything you don’t want.

But one of the most – because we are a group of learners. My listeners are entrepreneurs or people who want to make their side hustle, their main business, and they have no clue as well as to – how am I going to give commissions to my opener, my closer? What’s your commission structure look like with your salespeople and your office manager?

Chris: Sure. So the office manager, so no one really gets commissioned. The teachers get a percentage of every lesson, right? So they’re getting say 30% of the cash goes to them. But like the people who are working the phones in the office, I mean, they’re just, you know, like the office managers, just the office managers, I mean, it’s important.

I don’t want to diminish what she does, but she doesn’t get paid for closing the deals, per se you know. To a certain extent from the marketing funnels, we put people on, they sort of arrive pre-sold they’re ready to see, okay, does this fit? So yeah, we don’t pay, our telephone people, you know they don’t get a commission. They’re hourly workers.

Sean: Got it. And that is because of the business structure wherein you have -.

Chris: So this music lesson, I mean, dance classes are $68 a month. And music lessons are $152 a month. This isn’t like trying to get something to drop $10,000 where you got to bring them in the closing room. 

The real value of this is the lifetime value of a client. If someone spends $150 a month with you, $1,800 a year and they stick around for 10 years, they’re going to spend $18,000. You really sort of like playing a long game.

Sean: Right. Aside from taking your name off the wall, and stepping back on the sales process. What other things did you fully commission or fully delegate so that you can work on the business rather than in the business?

Chris: Yeah, well, and I think it was gradual, cause I started out doing everything. So the first thing I took myself out of was any kind of the front-end customer service type of thing and organizing the office. So that was kind of the first night that it was hiring other teachers to take some of the students.

And then, as the marketing became more complicated, you know, I got into doing websites, really digital marketing. We first started getting into it in 1996 and back then it was AOL homepage. There was no Google, Google that people forget, the Google didn’t exist. You really couldn’t find anything on the web.

So you had these weird AOL home pages and you know, or like what, like if you had a website that, you know, you could have like one page, not everybody had mean.

But for us, we said, okay, we built a website. We’ve held the whole region. So we, I learned how to build websites, not doing code, but like templates, right? Like whatever, Go Daddy website. We learn how to do that. And so as I learned that I learned what worked and what didn’t work. And that was something I found somebody to do for me. So someone else does the websites now I talked to them about it, but, and talked about the content and things like that.

But I stepped back from it. So gradually you sort of can step out of different roles. I’m very actively involved in our Google advertising and our Facebook advertising. Someone else actually does our Facebook advertising, but it’s, it’s something that I’m involved in as far as messaging and the images and what are we presenting to the customers, but I’m not the one actually uploading the picture and typing things in.

So you’re able to kind of, you still need to be there, but you’re doing maybe a different thing. Strategic work, I guess, would be the term to do this.

Sean: That’s really good stuff. Now, a lot of people are trying to figure out what I knew I did like, what are the things that I’m able to quit and, you know, you gradually quit stuff.

I quit being the janitor early on. I couldn’t be a customer service representative early on, so completely right in that. And how did you come upon the idea that I needed to evolve my marketing? So a lot of people, when they’re doing yellow pages, they get stuck with at yellow pages. Up to today, I know some people who are still using the digital yellow pages EYP, and they’re stuck there.

So how did you get out of your comfort zone and say,” I need to evolve my marketing, you know, being a door-to-door sales guy, tapping all of these sales and guitar salespeople ain’t working that well anymore?”

Chris: Yeah, well it became over the course of time and it was like right after I did the business cards and the sales that I did classified ads and newspapers.

It was a local newspaper in Chicago. Eventually, I was doing, I learned how to write. I bought a book on newspaper ads and I was doing full-page advertorials. You know, like giant, full page newspaper ads, where it was like the advertorial format where I basically wrote an article about myself. We did that.

We learned how to do things like door hangers. We learned, you know, we just started to experiment reading marketing books constantly. I don’t know if I might have a – I might have one of our door hangers here. I don’t know if I, but they’re stacks of stuff, here you go. So I happen to have one. So we put these on every door and we go into a town like, you know, it’s like literally, and I haven’t cause we’re going to do it again.

But you know, this side has the dance classes on it. And then this side has the music classes on it. And at the bottom we have our logo and everything. This is an older one. So this is before people use websites, we have a 24-hour info line. So you could call them here, like recorded information about the school.

We just kept adding these, and I’m one of those people who always has a stack of books. Still reading, marketing books, things like that. And so there were Dan Kennedy, Jay Conrad, Levinson. I mean, Jay Abraham, all these people were always had ideas and some of them were. You should be doing this like conceptual things.

And sometimes there were books where it was like, you should do this, you should hang up a door hanger and you know, here’s like 10 different things you can do. And so that was really helpful reading books about stuff like that. And then it’s funny cause during the pandemic we were shut down, you know, cause the COVID and it was the panic, it was panicking.

I was like, okay, well we need to do everything we can to get the business going, like keeping clients coming because we’re a super reliant on Google and Facebook and things like that. I mean, those are the biggies now. So we sat down one day and I started writing everything down. Okay. What’s every possible way I can do to get clients.

And so I was talking to her and then I started typing it, you know, I said, okay, well, I’m not going to handwrite. I’m going to type it. And I was writing, writing, writing. I was talking to a friend of mine, my graphic designer, Laura Hoffman. And she said, “wow, you just wrote a book on marketing.”

And I was like, “you’re right. I did.” So I actually wrote a note and I actually did create a book called marketing during tough times, 56 Ways to Market Your Business. That won’t break the bank. And it’s all these different ways to market your business that are free, you know? And so I literally, like, I just wrote down everything like, you know, business cards, banners, door hangers are in your postcards, public relations, you know, flipping through email marketing, blogs, podcasts.

Writing books, you know, doing podcasts, you know, the different places we would go and try to customer loyalty cards, referrals. We went after private schools, daycare centers, places of worship, like churches continuity programs. I mean, we, you know, I literally did them all. And so that was just how we kept the business going.

And so, yeah, it’s a book and your listeners can own. There’s an opt-in box on my website. I’ll just send you the book you get. It’s a PDF form and you guys are welcome to check it out.

Sean: Yeah, well, we’ll have that in the show and all this, I saw it on your website that you are

Chris: And its free, I was just giving it to anybody who wants to check it out, totally, you know.

Sean: That is amazing. And so this pandemic has proven to be a challenge by the way, kudos to you. You’re one of the very few people I know who is really good in music and loves music, and is a business person through and through. You read books, you keep on growing, you keep evolving your marketing methods. You turned everything into a system that works for you and you don’t even have to work in it. 

Now. That’s amazing. That is amazing. You’re proof that people who are creative, people love business and art can be business people.

Chris: Yeah. You know, when you think of Steve jobs, I love Steve jobs.

Like he didn’t go to business school. Right. He started like art and calligraphy and dropped out of school, right. But he wasn’t, he didn’t go to school for coding. He didn’t go to school for counting. Any of that, you know, everyone says what a terrible manager he was, he was mean one. But, well I think on the creative side of things, whether it’s already music or something like that, you need that creativity to see stuff that other people don’t see.

And its, you know, you’ll see – if your brain is trying to be creative, you’ll find creative solutions. You’ll find a solution.

Sean: Yeah.