By Ryan Berry

One of the hardest transitions for a business owner is realizing that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it.

In the early days of a business, the owner does almost everything. You answer the phone, send invoices, make sales calls, order supplies, solve customer problems, update the website and probably take out the trash at the end of the day.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. When you're starting a company, there usually isn't anyone else to do it.

The problem comes years later when the business has grown, employees have been hired and the owner is still doing many of the same things.

Think about what an hour of your time should be worth to your company. I'm not talking about what you pay yourself.

I'm talking about the value you can potentially create during that hour. If you own a $1 million, $3 million or $10 million business, there are probably things only you can do that could have a significant impact on the future of the company.

You might be able to develop an important relationship, recruit a key employee, negotiate a major contract, identify a new opportunity, solve a strategic problem or make a decision that creates hundreds of thousands of dollars in future value.

Yet it's surprisingly easy to spend that same hour doing something you could pay someone $20 or $25 an hour to handle.

The math sounds obvious when you put it that way. In practice, delegation is much harder. Sometimes we keep doing things because we're good at them. Sometimes it's because we enjoy them.

Sometimes we don't trust anyone else to do them correctly. And sometimes it seems faster to simply do something ourselves than explain it to another person. That's especially true when you're busy.

Training someone to take over a task might require three hours today, while doing it yourself takes only 30 minutes. So you do it yourself. Then you do it again next week. And the week after that. A year later, you've spent 26 hours avoiding the three-hour investment that could have removed the task from your plate.

There's another reason owners hold onto lower-value work: it feels productive. Answering emails, checking invoices and solving small problems gives us an immediate sense of accomplishment. We can look back at the end of the day and see everything we completed.

Strategic work doesn't always feel that way. Spending two hours thinking about where the company should go next doesn't produce a neat checklist of completed tasks.

Having lunch with someone who could become an important relationship might not produce anything immediately. Working through a new organizational structure might take weeks before the benefit becomes obvious. The highest-value work an owner can do is often the work with the least immediate gratification.

This doesn't mean business owners should walk around believing every task is beneath them. Sometimes the owner needs to jump in and help.

If the office is short-staffed and the phone is ringing, answer it. If a customer has a serious problem, get involved. If the trash needs emptied, empty it. Leadership isn't about refusing to do certain work because you're too important.

The difference is whether you're helping temporarily or whether you've accidentally built a permanent job for yourself doing work someone else could own.

A useful exercise is to look at your calendar from the last two weeks. Go through everything you did and divide those activities into a few categories.

Which things absolutely required you? Which things could someone else have handled with the right training? Which things probably didn't need to happen at all? Most owners will find at least a few surprises. You may discover you're spending five hours a week handling something that could easily be delegated. That's 260 hours a year.

Freeing up even half of that time gives you more than three full 40-hour workweeks to spend working on the business instead of inside it.

Of course, delegation doesn't simply mean handing someone a task and hoping for the best. You need to explain what success looks like, provide the information they need, establish boundaries around what they can decide and create a way to check that the work is getting done. You may also have to accept that another person won't do everything exactly the way you would. That's okay. If someone can accomplish 90 percent of the result without requiring your involvement, that may be far more valuable than you personally delivering 100 percent.

As the company grows, the owner's job has to change. Your greatest value eventually isn't your ability to complete tasks. It's your ability to make decisions, develop people, allocate resources and determine where the organization should go next. If you never make that transition, you can become the most overqualified and expensive employee in your own company.

There's also a bigger question hiding underneath all of this: What would you do with the time if you actually got it back?

Delegation isn't particularly useful if the five hours you free up simply become five more hours checking email. You need to intentionally move that time toward higher-value activities.

Maybe that's meeting with your leadership team. Maybe it's talking to your biggest customers. Maybe it's reviewing the company's financial performance. Maybe it's developing a new revenue stream. Sometimes it might simply mean leaving the office earlier so you can return the next day with enough energy to make better decisions.

The goal isn't to work less for the sake of working less. It's to make sure the time you spend working matches the role your business needs you to play now, not the role you played when you started it.

Your company doesn't need you to be the person who can do everything. It needs you doing the things that create the most value and building a team capable of handling the rest.

Question of the Week: What are you still doing every week that someone else could be doing just as well—or well enough—without you? ■