Managing your office and dividing the workload

[Karen Margrave]

Rebuilding our business after the crash we decided to do much of the work ourselves to keep costs down. I have experience in office administration of both real estate and construction offices, John does project management, bids, cost breakdowns, and bookkeeping. Michael does design, cost breakdowns, and some project management. 

However; in growing the business it's going to be time for us to begin hiring others soon for some of the tasks, (general office help and bookkeeping) and allow us to do the things that are harder to hire others to do (finding land, figuring out future projects, finding financing, etc.)

I'm always curious how to others manage their businesses.  How do you manage yours? 

How many people are on your team, how do you spread the workload, etc.? 

What parts of your business do you hate doing, and cause you the biggest headaches? 

@Lynn Currie  @J Scott @Jon Klaus @John Blackman @Kenneth Bell and others. (fee free to tag others) 

[Lynn Currie]

This is a BIG question! I've have another business and this was the absolute hardest thing for me to learn.

I'll start with the end: Learn to unload the things you hate onto someone else. If you hate them, you probably aren't good at them.

With that said, here's how we manage things:

• I manage all of the construction, design, real estate aspect of the business. With the exception of property management, I love it all. Looking at properties, working through what to do with a piece of property, overseeing the construction. None of this feels like work to me.
• My business partner manages the finance side of the business. I like to look at the end result of a well-done spreadsheet, but don't want to do all of the work that goes into looking at it a zillion different ways. She loves that part.
• Both of us have an assistant. Hers is an MBA, spreadsheet guy. Mine is a construction guy. 
• We sub-contract everyone else - CPA/bookkeeping, crews, architects, etc.

Running it this way keeps us lean and out of the business of managing a business. We are able to spend our time focused on managing the real estate and building the business.

When my business partners and I started our other business, we were the folks that did everything. We had to learn that, in order to keep our eye on making the business successful, we had to stop doing that. Our first hire was a bookkeeper. The mental energy that it took for us to do the bookkeeping was huge. Once we got someone in that role that was good and trustworthy, we could focus on other things. Through the years, we hired for many other positions. 

There are a few books that were life changing for me. They made me do things differently and see my role in a different way:

• The E-Myth Revisited - this is all about learning to setup systems so you can grow.
• Getting Things Done - I live and die by my GTD lists. Not only do they ensure that I don't drop the ball on anything, I actually feel more secure and peaceful by using them.
• StrengthsFinders - this was part of my journey to stop trying to focus on doing things that I'm horrible at, and focus on my strengths. 

The other thing that I do is run a paperless office This is based on the Getting Things Done philosophy of filing everything, but it's done paperlessly. I moved to this after a particularly painful state comptroller audit. The audit itself ended okay with us not getting into any trouble, but the time spent of finding paper documents in archived boxes for all of the backup that the state wanted took a week's time for two employees. Today if there is an audit, I can produce all docs in seconds. I've gotten many requests to do how-to videos on my system, including my methodology and the tools I use.  I plan to do so soon.