Dave Ramsey - Delegation: The Most Rewarding, Frustrating . . . Awesome Part of Running Your Business

The saying is trustworthy: If anyone aspires to the
office of overseer, he desires a noble task.

1 Timothy 3:1

English Standard Version

Copyright 2022 Lampo Licensing LLC

Published by Ramsey Press, The Lampo Group LLC

Franklin, Tennessee 37064

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without the prior approval of the publisher.

Dave Ramsey, The Ramsey Show, Financial Peace, Financial Peace University, and The Total Money Makeover are all registered trademarks of Lampo Licensing, LLC. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations are from The ESV Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version), copyright 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Editorial: Jackie Quinn

Cover Design: Weylon Smith and Chris Carrico

Interior Design: PerfecType, Nashville, TN

Ebook formatting by Mark DAntoni, eBook DesignWorks

ISBN: 978-1-942121-76-3

Printed in the United States of America

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Run. Run. Run. Every day, from the minute you roll out of bed in the morning to the minute you collapse back in bed at night, it feels like youre running a race. A demanding, exhausting, unforgiving race. But... its a race youve chosen.

Or so you thought.

You wanted to be an entrepreneur, to have your own company and contribute to the world in your own unique way. So you built a business. And with it came the title CEO: chief executive officer. It had a nice ring to it.

Then your business grew. And your CEO title grew too: chief everything officer. Before you knew it, you were wearing a fifty-pound firefighter suit underneath your business casual attire and racing from small campfires to full-fledged infernos. All. Day. Long.

And thats not counting all the fires that seemed to flare up after hours. You cringe just thinking about all the times youve sat on the sidelines at your kids sports events or in the audience at their school music programs, only half tuned in to the shots made or the solos sung because youre on your phone catching up on Mayday emails you couldnt get to during the day. And you cant even bring yourself to think about how many times youve had to cancel date nights with your spouse because you needed to work late.

Now youre just plain tired, and youre not sure how much longer you can run. Or if you even want to. But you keep gutting it out and telling yourself youve come too far to only come this far. You keep holding on to the hope that theres got to be a better, more sustainable way.

As a young entrepreneur, I found myself caught between exhaustion and hope too. When I was at this stage in building my business, I was delivering books out of the trunk of my car. I was helping to unload boxes off the truck with the rest of the team after we got done doing a live event. Nobody on the team had just one job. No one ever said, Thats not in my job description, because we all had to do everything. Id get home after work and fall on the couch exhausted, and my wife, Sharon, would ask, What did you do today? And Id say, I have no freaking idea! and sink even further into the couch, like the weight of the entire world was on me.

You see, when youre running a small business, doing everything is your job description. Youre just trying to make payroll on Friday. Youre watching cash flow like a hawk. Your time-management skills arent great at this stage because you just run from one on-fire thing to the next. Deep down you know you need help, and you even make feeble attempts at delegating. But in the end, you create more of a mess, and you conclude that its just easier to do things yourself.

That was me. I was building Ramsey Solutions, trying to grow my team from seven to twenty team members but still running in all the lanes and doing all the things. I told myself, Its because I care somuch and No one cares as much as I do. But something was off. Something was broken.

Turns out... I sucked at delegation!

Or so I thought.

What I realized is that I really wasnt that far off at all. I just needed to get really clear on what delegation is and isnt. Then I could better develop a process to do handoffs well. Once I got that figured out, I could intentionally and strategically stop doing and being all the things and start empowering my team to carry more of the weight so we could scale. Its made all the difference.

Maybe this is you right now. Youve got your hands and head in all the things, and youre teetering on the edge of burnout. You know something needs to change to get to the next level in your business, but you dont know how to effectively do the handoffs that will get you there. Or you might just be too scared to hand something off at all because youve always been the person whos done the thing your business is built on.

Consider this book your road map. In the pages ahead, Ill break down the concept of delegation and show you how to strategically apply it to your companys growth. Youll learn when and how to intentionally delegate and, in turn, develop healthy expectations and boundaries for yourself and your team. But I want to warn you: once you start delegating, youll wonder how you ever lived and worked without it!

Are you ready? Lets do this!

The best analogy I can give to show you what delegation is starts with a story about the Ramsey kids as teenagers.

When Denise, Rachel, and Daniel hit their teenage years, Sharon and I discovered that the single greatest thing they wanted was to be treated like adults. Of course, my constant response to this was, Then freaking act like an adult! Believe me, I had the same goal too: for them to become adults so that someday theyd leave. Having a thirty-year-old living in my basement was never part of my plan. But like every teenager, they struggled some days to reach the goal because in their fifteen-year-old bodies also lived a four-year-old and a thirty-four-year-old. And depending on the day or the circumstance, Sharon and I had no idea which one was going to come out. It was like they had multiple personalities. (If youre a parent of a teen, you know what Im talking about.)

To help the three of them navigate their teen emotions, decision-making, and the freedoms they said they wanted, I came up with the rope teaching metaphor. The rope was a great way for them to visualize the levels of trust they could build with us and other adults. I told them that as their dad, I had an invisible rope attached to them. With every trustworthy thing they did, I would lengthen the rope. That meant if they were actually going where they said they were going and doing what they said they were doing, I lengthened the rope. That also meant if they lied about anything or chose to do what their friends said and not what their parents said, I shortened the rope.

For example, if we agreed they could go to a movie and that Id pick them up outside of the theater when it was over, but then they called after the movie to tell me theyd decided to go to McDonalds instead...