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Price of Your Dream is Delegation

October 7, 2019

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This article is written by Ramanuj Mukherjee, CEO, LawSikho.

When I quit my big law job to pursue my vision for entrepreneurship and creating a great legal education company, I had very little money. I moved into an apartment in far away Navi Mumbai from tony South Bombay and reduced my rent threefold. I scrimped on many things, such as new clothes or socializing.

However, instead of spending my time trying to cook my food or cleaning, I hired someone to do those things for me, so I could focus on the work that was really important.

What if I didn’t?

My mother always wanted to start a side business, because her teaching job left her with a significant chunk of free time. Even if she could not work full time, was it possible to invest in a business? She always talked about it. However, it never happened.

I saw my mother unable to delegate even household work to a cook or a cleaner. She would have to micromanage every aspect of how utensils were cleaned, how the food was cooked, how the floor was cleaned and how much phenyl was poured into a bucket.

She wanted to do many things, like open a yoga studio or offer tuitions. But she never found the time to do so. Wonder why?

Because she refused to give up control over small things or pay someone a little extra to get things done well while she focuses on something more productive, more profitable.

A lot of you have the exact same problems as my mother. You are not growing in your life as much as you want to, because you cannot delegate.

When I was younger, I believed in working hard. I believed that solutions to most problems lie in working more and more hours. It worked to an extent. Working hard and spending insane hours at work certainly took me ahead of competition early on in my life.

So I tried to work even harder. I tried to focus even more. I tried to extract every ounce of effort possible from myself. I gave myself no space to breathe. I gave no time to my relationships, health or well being. I did that for years.

A friend told me, do you think CEOs of companies with hundreds of crores of turnover get there by working 24 hours a day? That is not possible, you have to find another way.

I heard it, and it appealed to me. But how? I didn’t know any other solution. It did not seem possible to me that I could stop working 14 hours a day. It did not seem possible to focus on other things like health and personal relationship without allowing everything to come crashing down at work.

But then I started to crumble. My health suffered. I got depressed. I was burnt out and devoid of new ideas and creativity. I was becoming a zombie. It was completely unsustainable.

Still, growth wasn’t happening as fast as I wanted despite my working all those hours.

What was I going to do?

I always knew the answer. In fact, I have been doing it since college. It’s delegation. I had to learn the art of effective delegation. And managing outcome when the work is done by a team.

I knew I had to delegate if I had to grow, but delegating is fraught with many problems.

It is not one thing. Let’s start with who. In any growing organization, or even in organizations that have already grown, usually, the hardest problem is people.

How do you hire good people? How do you train them fast? How do you keep them on board? How do you ensure that they are consistently performing?

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It is a lot. There is so much to learn in every step.

In fact, there are so many different roles to hire for. And the approach most change. What works for hiring legal content writers may not work for hiring a react native developer for our technology team.

How can I know who is a good developer and who is not? But it is my job to find an answer. It is very much part of the art of delegation. If I can’t do it myself I have to delegate it to someone. And still, it is me with whom the buck stops.

Do I want an HR professional in my organization now that we have almost 35 people working full time with us? If I want an HR professional, should I hire a person with 2-3 years of experience, or a complete fresher, or someone significantly senior? How much should be my budget? What would be the job profile of that person? What would be their performance metrics? How will I know if they are making progress week on week or not?

Do you get my problem?

It is also my greatest learning opportunity. Years and years of learning to delegate is what keeps LawSikho growing. It does not happen with money or investment. It does not happen with luck. It is sheer willpower to keep learning what works and what does not, sometimes from mentors, sometimes from books or courses, and then finally from pure trial and error when the rubber hits the road.

There is just a lot to learn on every turn when it comes to delegation, and it is perhaps the most amazing thing to learn.

And this is the challenge of building something, this is what it means to grow an organization, or to start a movement.

Every step is a struggle, but the journey itself is glorious and there is learning in every inch. Once you learn, there is no going back. The organization grows.

It is not only my own team members. It is also about finding outside partners, vendors or service providers and being able to delegate to them. We have trusted services that help us with printing hundreds of books and other things every month in time, to send to the hundreds of learners who buy our courses every month.

We have trusted sound and camera people to ensure that our events are well recorded so that my team can edit it later and put out on our YouTube channel. This has led to our YouTube channel being full of amazing content and really taking off in the last one month! Long way to go, we are just getting warmed up, but I can finally see things taking off.

On the contrary, our SEO or guest-posting efforts never took off. When I do it, I do it exceptionally well. However, I have never been able to delegate it. If I can find a way to do as well as we are doing with video when it comes to writing, I could easily double the outreach than what we have today!

That remains an unsolved piece of delegation puzzle I am still trying to resolve.

Another major challenge is that as a startup we have an extremely limited budget. We have so far chosen to not take outside investment, and grow as much as we can with revenues that we earn. It has not been easy at all!

It is a perennial balancing act. But it keeps us sharp and alert. It forces us to be frugal and innovate. It forces us to be creative.

Would you like to build your own practice and make it big? You will have to learn how to delegate.

Even if you run a solo practice, you cannot increase your profitability or maximize your earning potential until you start delegating some of the administrative or repeatable tasks to a team of secretaries, juniors or personal assistants.

If you want to build a law firm, you have to take delegation to a very different level. You would have to learn to find good lawyers, you will have to ensure that they perform and that clients are getting more than what they are paying for.

You will have to build a culture.

There was a time when I overly relied on incentives to get people to work, but then I realized that it was just a temporary solution and that it did not work very well. Culture is the answer I finally arrived at.

Delegation supported by an exciting culture can lead to amazing results. We are seeing this first hand at LawSikho. This is how we manage to do what top NLUs and well-funded organizations fail to do – teach lawyers practical skills on which they can get an immediate return on investment from the legal industry – whether by way of a better salary or the ability to get one’s, own clients.

If you want to grow your practice rapidly or build your own law firm, please check out the legal practice management course here. This kind of incredible program was not possible unless I could delegate a lot of the work.

I can comprehensively say that my growth almost entirely depends on my effectiveness of delegation, as of today. What about you?

I have seen perfectly good business opportunities being squandered or ruined due to the inability of the leaders to delegate effectively. Have you seen that too?

Do you know people who are bottlenecks of their own growth because they refuse to delegate, for whatever reason it maybe?

The common reasons for not delegating are fear of failure, stinginess with money, inability to trust, skepticism about your own ability to do what others do successfully, low self-esteem.

Even lazy people can succeed big time if they can master delegation. And you do not have to be rich to develop a mindset of delegation.

If you could start delegating today, what would you delegate to free up your time? What is your dream worth? Would you like to learn delegation to make that happen?

Would you like to delegate to us the function of your continuous learning and upgrading practical legal skills that can take your effectiveness as a lawyer miles ahead?

Check out these courses in which we are taking enrollments in the month of October:

Diploma

Diploma in Advanced Contract Drafting, Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Diploma in Cyber Law, Fintech Regulations and Technology Contracts

Diploma in M&A, Institutional Finance and Investment Laws (PE and VC transactions)

Executive Certificate Courses

Certificate Course in Companies Act

Certificate Course in Trademark Licensing, Prosecution and Litigation

Certificate Course in Labour, Employment and Industrial Laws for HR Managers

Certificate Course in Legal Practice Development and Management

Certificate Course in Advanced Criminal Litigation & Trial Advocacy

Certificate Course in Real Estate Laws