When owners do work below their pay grade

You always hear that everyone in your business should be making the best, highest use of their time. But one of the biggest offenders of this objective are the agency owners themselves.

How often have we found ourselves doing low value administrative work that we could easily have someone else do? Perhaps we do it to “save money” or because it is just easier or because we don’t trust someone else to do it as well as we do.

The reality is that agency owners need to start with themselves in the drive to improve efficiency and profitability. Tracking the things that you do that aren’t as valuable as the hourly rate that you command will help you identify the things that you should delegate.

In this episode, Chip and Gini talk about how to identify these tasks, determine the best candidates to get off your plate, and the impact it can have on you and your business.

View Transcript

The following is a computer-generated transcript. Please listen to the audio to confirm accuracy.

Chip Griffin  00:00

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m Chip Griffin,

Gini Dietrich  00:04

and I’m Gini Dietrich,

Chip Griffin  00:05

and we are going to use our absolute best abilities are our top skills and we are going to earn top dollar from today’s episode. Yes, we are right after this. So today we have a question for you. And it’s a question that Ginni found in her hunt for a topic so that we wouldn’t just sit here for 30 minutes, dead air or our charming banter. We thought we would actually give you a little bit of substance in this episode, maybe

Gini Dietrich  00:46

we’ll see at least three or four minutes. So Darryl Salerno, who is the owner of second quadrants, quadrant solutions, and a big proponent of financial management for agency owners, says, I have presented on financial operations or management skills more than 700 times to more than 10,000 pr professionals. In each session, I asked if anyone is doing work below their pay grade? The response is virtually unanimously. Yes, every time. So the question for you is, are you doing work below your pay grade? Of course, yes, I am. I very much do not like it. But yes. But But my first

Chip Griffin  01:35

question is, if Darryl has given this presentation to 10,000 pr professionals, were they not listening?

Gini Dietrich  01:45

Right? Well, perhaps he asked the question. It’s kind of like when I speak to PR professional and I say, how many of you went into PR because you hate math, and 99% of the room and pulls up their hand. And then we talk about how data and measuring your your work is not math, it’s reading numbers. And so you I try to change that mindset. So perhaps it’s the same kind of thing. He asked the question, he helps people understand that they are doing work below their pay grade, and that needs to change.

Chip Griffin  02:15

No, I guess what my point was simply that if he’s educated 10,000, people are still doing his stuff. And there are just so many PR folks out there agency folks out there who don’t have a good handle on the financial side of things I was. That’s all I was getting at. Derek. Apparently, I you know, I flubbed that one. So

Gini Dietrich  02:38

maybe there’s I don’t, but

Chip Griffin  02:39