Yesterday I talked about reaching a point in gym ownership where you’re just weary. You’re tired. You don’t enjoy it anymore. I also told you four things I’d do before I considered selling.

One of those was delegating out specific tasks. Today, I’m going to tell you my #1 tip for delegation. 

Repetition.

That’s it. It’s that simple. When you need to delegate tasks, look for repetitive tasks you do every day or every week. No matter how difficult or easy a task is, if it’s repetitive, someone else can learn it and take enormous amounts of things off your plate.

In 2013, two people in my gym handled anything that had to do with registrations, drops from classes, voicemails, emails or birthday parties: Me and my business partner, Angie. If you needed any of those things, you’d have to wait until we were done coaching and available to help.

Today, those would be some of the easiest things I would tell you to delegate over. Why? They involve repetition. The same process is followed each time we receive a registration, drop from classes or birthday party. While voicemails and emails can be a bit more complicated, 80 percent of them still usually involve the same topics. Once you systemize these areas and train someone on them, they can take A TON off your plate.

Needing more advanced delegation? Here are a few things our managers and directors have taken off our plates in the past few years – all repetitive tasks that they are now the experts on: 

  1. Recording daily sales and pulling reports so I know how much of our deposits to transfer to All Star fees and Summer Camp. I taught Mel how to track it and each week, it’s on her list of tasks.
  2. All Star competition registrations and communication with parents. We create a spreadsheet of arrival times, gather times, warm up, compete and awards times. It reminds parents of hair, parking info, venue and spectator info, etc. I get it when the parents get it because I didn’t have to micromanage any part of that process. It’s systemized and Ally has complete control over it.
  3. Systems themselves. I write systems if I’m the only one who knows how to do something. That means I write about two systems per year. It’s rare that I’m ever the only one in my gym to know how to do something. Once I conceptualize a program or idea, my staff creates the system, it’s reviewed, and then it’s filed so others can train on it. In fact, we even send it to Lexi so she can format it properly, proof it and post it to the systems Trello board!
  4. My email. Yes, you read that right. Every single email that’s sent to my personal gym email is filtered by my manager first. I have it set up to auto-forward to her. She’ll reply back to me with anything pertinent I really need to answer myself. Anything else: She takes care of it and replies back from her email. Need to train parents to email the gym? That’s one way I solved that!

So, no matter what it is – if it’s a repetitive task – that’s the first thing you need to delegate over. You’ll be able to teach it once or twice, and someone will take something off your plate that really adds up over time.