If you are a professional horseman, I know you are skilled at: horse handling, horse grooming and most certainly, stall cleaning. Most professional horsemen tell me that they are magnificent muckers. When it comes to manure handling, no one can do a better job than they do. Often, teaching the help to properly clean and bed a stall is as thorough as the housekeeping staff training at the luxurious Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York.
However, getting the help to perform their duties as well as the Ritz-Carlton staff is a challenge for many professional horsemen. The hired pitchfork operators just don’t seem to pick up the finesse of the professional horseman. When this happens, the business owner, in a state of perfection overload, picks up the shovel and fork and cleans the stalls, too. Sometimes help is sent off to do other things around the farm, sometimes the help is sent off permanently.
The result is perfectly bedded and manicured stalls, perfect economization of bedding use and a perfect waste of the owner’s time.
Practicing the art of delegation is key to success in business. You can’t grow a business if you are doing all of the jobs in the business. The time spent swinging a pitchfork in the morning is opportunity time for creating revenue. This is time that should be spent with your hands on a telephone and a keyboard, not time to hide in a stall with pitchfork.
I hear the money argument of some horsemen at this point. The statement “I can’t afford to hire the stall cleaning done. It saves me money” is a common counterpoint to hiring and delegation.
You can’t afford not to delegate this work. Face it, it’s an entry-level job not requiring high pay. I’ll grant you the fact that it’s not easy to find the right people all of the time, but I know you can. As the business owner, your time is best spent producing revenue for the business like:
- Giving riding lessons
- Training client’s horses
- Training your horses
- Selling your horses
- Selling other horses on commission
When you change your thinking to be a Profitable Horseman, you will begin to ask yourself this question as you start each task: “Is what I’m doing the best use of my time, or should someone else be doing this?”
Once you adopt this habit, you will begin to notice an increase in your productivity for getting things done each day. Sometimes, the choice to delegate a task requires admitting that the reason you don’t want to delegate is that your enjoy the comfort from doing easy tasks that provide “see where you’ve been” satisfaction. “See where you’ve been” jobs provide instant gratification; mowing hay, cleaning stalls, dragging the arena and painting the barn are examples.
The most important tasks for the business owner often provide little instant gratification and much frustration. I offer you a simple sentence of advice when it comes to dealing with the frustration of being the business owner and the occasional mood of depression that can creep up on you. The advice is Get Over It!
Seriously, remember that every small business owner has the same type of problems to deal with that you do. Work on doing the important things in your business that make it grow and find good help to do everything else. It’s a formula for success . . . and more profit in less time.