Owning a small home services business is no walk in the park. From sourcing supplies and marketing to fielding customer calls to actually providing your services — be it lawn care, pest control, or painting — you’re called upon to wear a lot of hats. But maybe, just maybe, you don’t have to. By delegating certain tasks, you can prevent burnout and free yourself up to focus on what you do best.
For example, a third-party 24/7 answering service could help you field customer calls, allowing you and your staff time off during evenings, weekends, holidays, and vacations — all without missing a beat. Rather than risking the loss of a potential customer by sending them to voicemail, taking advantage of 24/7 phone coverage can be the difference between winning their business and losing them to a more responsive competitor.
Benefits of Delegating for Home Services Providers and Small Business Owners
Effective delegation can aid you in increasing efficiency — boosting your productivity and that of your team, improving your staff’s skill levels by giving them more room to hone their specialties, and freeing up time for you to expand your business and enjoy the fruits of your labor.
How Your Company Benefits
Your business can benefit from effective task delegation in several ways, the most obvious ones being increased efficiency and the resulting boost in revenue.
Boosted Productivity and Efficiency
Suppose your business specializes in lawn care. On a good day, you might hope to mow about 10 to 12 lawns. However, say you’re hit by a flurry of customer calls that take up most of your morning. And then you sit down for an hour or two in the afternoon to work on marketing materials and search engine optimization (SEO) for your website, so that more people interested in lawn care can find out about your services.
This way of managing your tasks either chops your actual lawn care hours in half or bleeds into your evenings, weekends, and holidays, reducing your productivity levels and making burnout inevitable.
Instead, you can outsource content marketing and website SEO to a third-party digital marketing service, delegate daytime calls and emails to a virtual assistant, or invest in after-hours phone coverage. This reduces the load so you can focus on your lawn care services during the bulk of your working day. You can maximize the number of lawns serviced per day without missing a beat in any of the other areas needed to keep business running smoothly.
A Better Bottom Line
Taking our hypothetical lawn care company as an example again, it’s obvious to see how servicing more lawns per day will lead to increased revenue.
But here’s another way you’ll benefit your bottom line: Implementing measures like 24/7 phone coverage will ensure that you don’t miss any potential customers who call — especially not to a competitor who picked up the phone when you couldn’t.
How Your Staff Benefits
Delegating tasks ensures that your employees are free to focus on honing their specialty skills, instead of being bogged down by a never-ending flurry of miscellaneous tasks. Painters can focus on painting. Gardeners and landscapers can focus on pruning hedges and mowing lawns. Apartment cleaners and maintenance workers can focus on keeping homes and appliances clean and functional.
Happiness-Induced Productivity
A 2019 study conducted by researchers at Oxford University found that workers are 13% more productive when they’re happy. By delegating away busywork, you can empower your employees to home in on their primary area of focus, whether that’s mowing lawns, painting walls, zapping pests, or crunching numbers.
Improved Staff Retention
A happier employee is not only more productive, but they’re also more likely to stay for longer periods of time. A high turnover rate can be bad for business, as having to constantly hire and train new workers can be time consuming and expensive.
If your workers feel they’re able to focus on what’s important to them and improve their skills as members of your crew, they’ll stick with you for the long haul, helping you keep business booming and customers satisfied.
How Customers Benefit
Existing and potential customers can benefit from your services when you delegate tasks and free up time and resources to respond in an effective manner.
Greater Responsiveness
Finding new customers and keeping existing ones happy are the bread and butter of any business. By delegating tasks like phone service and customer support, you ensure your customers are always able to reach your business and book appointments — even when you and your staff might be away pruning hedges, conducting a home inspection, or installing an HVAC system.
Even when it’s 8 p.m. and you’re at home after a long day’s work, your business can stay running and be ready to respond 24/7 while you and your team are resting.
Focused, Quality Services
When staff members are free to focus on their specialties, they bring their best work and high energy levels to your customers. Delivering consistent, quality results will keep your customers happy and returning to you time and time again for your services and expertise.
How You Benefit
Finally, let’s talk about you. You’re the owner and the one running the show. It’s hard managing the myriad tasks that come with owning a small business. But when you delegate tasks and prioritize efficiency, it’s not just the company, the customers, or your employees who benefit — you do too!
Focus on Expansion and High-Level Strategy
Delegating away busywork frees you up from the details so you can focus on the bigger picture and brainstorm strategies for further expansion and customer acquisition. After all, time is money, and transferring certain tasks to other staff members and third-party services gives you a lot more of it.
Also, let’s face it: Just because you’re capable of wearing several hats doesn’t mean every hat is your personal specialty. Outsourcing a task or two to a dedicated staff member or third-party specialist not only frees up time for you to focus on more pressing issues, but it also means the quality of the work goes up.
Reduce Stress Levels
Less busywork equals more free time to focus on what matters and get things done, which equals significantly reduced levels of stress. Instead of running around from house to house or lawn to lawn while simultaneously fielding calls, stay focused on what you do best and let a designated specialist take care of the rest. More free time could also translate to more vacation days for you to travel, pursue other goals and hobbies, and spend time with the ones you love.
Mentor Your Staff and Gain Their Trust
With more headspace, time, and mental clarity, you can serve as a mentor and guide for the members of your staff. Not only will you gain their trust and loyalty by doing so, but they’ll also benefit from an expert’s guidance and advice, thereby improving their skills and helping your business grow in quality.
Mentoring your staff can also enable you to recognize and nurture especially promising employees who could grow into supervisory roles in the future, helping you and your business with higher-level strategy and responsibilities.
Conclusion
The day-to-day work of running a home services company involves a multitude of tasks that span advertising, marketing, customer acquisition, sourcing and managing supplies, customer service and support, and of course, the actual service you’re providing. Working hard and smart means sharing the many hats you may have been frantically putting on and taking off.
Whether you need to hire a new staff member or outsource a piece of your day-to-day operations to a third-party service, effective task delegation results in greater productivity, work-life balance, satisfaction and skill growth for you and your staff, and ultimately a more profitable company.
A particularly effective way to grow your business and not miss out on potential customers is to outsource after-hours phone services. More than 1,000 home service professionals are enjoying the benefits of Slingshot, a 24/7 sales and customer support answering service specializing in calls, texts, web chat, and emergency dispatching.
Slingshot customers enjoy an average threefold boost to customer conversion rates, a 25% increase in overall sales opportunities by adding after-hours and weekends, and up to a 40% boost in annual sales. We’re here to help you keep your business running and ready to respond — all day, any time.
