Thank you all for your input, I really appreciate it!
I could really relate to that sentence from Derek Silvers: "I felt like I might as well just show up to work and sit on a chair in the hallway, just answering employees’ questions, full-time."
That's pretty much my job today.
Let me explain our business model in a bit more detail:
- We offer IT consulting services in high-cost markets, where English is not the local language
- In these markets, supply of top talent is very limited
- Our concept is to hire globally (to avoid supply issues, get better value for money), but still have everyone who interacts with the clients be local, so they can communicate in their local language
- Also, everyone interacting with the clients should be really, really, really good at what they're doing
- The client-facing people can then each manage a larger, global team behind the scenes, communicating in English
- Right now, I am the only one in such a client-facing position, but I am planning to hire
So, yes, the client-facing staff will always be a kind of bottleneck, but that's by design.
I don't want other team members communicating with the clients directly (with very few exceptions) because it would put us in a very different segment, the quality would lower etc.
As of today, we can delivery a quality most other companies cannot match, or at only 2-3x our prices.
Yes, I absolutely have to hire other people and delegate, but I want to do that once I have reached my capacity.
Right now, I still don't think it's the workload that's the problem. I thought it was, but when I started actually tracking my time, I realized that, on average, I only work 4-5 hours a day.
But the days are still super stressful because they are so unpredicatable and there are so many interruptions.
For example, unread emails stress me out. I get email notifications about code changes that my team have made. It's important that I check them, but it's not time critical. And I often get 3-4 emails about the same change (not sure how to reduce this number). Once I get to it, it takes me perhaps 30 seconds to have a look and decide that it's fine. So the work itself isn't a problem, but when I'm in the middle of something else and I get 3-4 emails about this change, or I see that I have 27 unread emails (when there were 0 in the morning), it stresses me out.
There is almost never anything really critically urgent where people can't work. They need answers from me, yes, but they would usually be able to just work on something else in the meantime.
Meetings aren't an issue either. I personally hate meetings with a vengeance, but we are currently working on a huge software project, where lots of questions come up all the time. Like: "What does this price field mean? How does the client use it? Why can the value sometimes be negative?"
In the beginning, I tried to do this all over email, but it took me AGES. I could spend a whole day just writing a single email to the client, because I'd have to include screenshots and write everything in proper sentences.
I then realized that it was better to just have 2 meetings with my team per week (Monday, Wednesday) and 2 meetings with the client (Tuesday, Thursday), and just collect all questions in the meetings with my team and ask the client directly. This way, I only had to write down the answers (as notes), so I could forward them to the team. That cut down the time spent on this process drastically.
All our clients are super nice. I don't even think they expect immediate replies (though they have of course gotten used to this).
I'm sure they would be happy to work with whatever new process we implement.
Anyway, long story short: I don't think this is a delegation issue per se because the way our business is set up, only a limited number of people should ever be speaking to clients, and these people should also review the work of the rest of the team. That is a natural bottleneck, but if one such person can manage a team of 10 others, then it will still scale.
Also, in the future, I may start hiring more local roles (for example, graphics designers), who will then also be able to talk to the clients directly.
But I don't think we're at that point yet, I feel that my productivity is simply much lower than it could be.
So I don't see hiring someone to help me as a good option yet. Hiring someone with my skillset would be extremely expensive (think $200k+ per year), so I'd want them to be productive and not waste half of their days, like I am doing right now.
So I feel I should first implement a system/process that works well (for example, move clients to a ticketing system instead of chat messages? Maybe have two quick 30-minute meetings every day where people can ask questions, instead of 20 chat messages spread across the day? Or maybe just mute notifications and only check them 2-3 times per day?) - and only then, when I feel I've increased my productivity, I'd like to hire someone to take over some of my work.
That way, there will already be a system that will work well.
If I just hire someone now to take over my work, I'm worried that they would just get just as stressed out as me and then quit. The context switching is extremely exhausting. If it was just one project, it would be fine, but when you have to juggle 3-4 different projects all the time, it gets exhausting for your mind really fast.
I don't know if that makes sense?
