Don't Delegate Your Customers

A delegate at one of my recent time management workshops was telling me he’d taken someone on to help in his web design business.  As he explained how he’d been so relieved to hand over a number of customer accounts, alarm bells started to ring.  Here’s why:

• Employing someone to manage any of your customer accounts is risky – especially if that person has similar skills to you.  What’s to stop them from setting up their own business once they’ve learned everything from you, and then ‘stealing’ those customers away from you?  

• You may have asked your employee (or freelance contractor) to sign an agreement not to set up in competition or steal your clients – but when you think about all the cost and effort  involved trying to enforce such an agreement – and that’s AFTER the damage has been done to your business - it’s a rather weak deterrent.
  
  
• While your customers may at first seem pleased that you’ve got someone in to help get their work done quickly, after a while they may feel a bit put out that ‘the boss’ is no longer handling their account.  Any valuable customer loyalty built up will soon be eroded. If they no longer have many dealings with you, they’ll soon stop asking for you. 

Of course you may be thinking to yourself that the person you’ve employed would never do such a thing; but is it worth taking the risk?

In a small business, delegating means getting someone to do the tasks you don’t like doing, or aren’t much good at.  Ideal areas are book-keeping and other administration – they need to be done, but don’t have to be done by you.

The whole point of delegating is to free up your time up to do what you’re brilliant at, and that includes nurturing the valuable relationship with YOUR customers.