Research suggests that most lawyers spend only 2.5 hours a day on billable legal work. The rest of the time, they are wearing other hats: accountant, HR manager, photocopy repairperson, web designer, social media guru, IT director.

Today’s tip is simple: stop wearing all the hats.

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I’m not saying you should only do legal work. Not at all. You are the business owner. There are things you do, like setting your vision, making hiring decisions, and developing new business, that add value to your practice and drive your business forward. You must keep doing those.

But you wouldn’t expect your accountant to give you advice on drafting your motion to dismiss, or your dishwasher repair guy to file your trademark application, and yet we attempt to be Jacks or Jills of all trade in our businesses. We keep doing the things we just should not be doing.

We’ve talked about this before, in the context of delegating administrative and legal tasks to your juniors and employees in your firm. You can read that article here, because that is important. I want you to think about it even more broadly: what can you outsource completely to the experts?

Categorize your tasks into four areas.

We like to categorize tasks using this diagram. You as the business owner and attorney, are going to keep everything in Quadrant 1 and, over time, completely stop doing everything in Quadrant 4.

You are going to delegate everything in Quadrant 2 as soon as you can. It may take time, but you don’t like that stuff anyway, so there’s a good incentive to delegate it.

The problem is Quadrant 3. It is so tempting to hang onto the things that we enjoy, even when we know we are not really the right people for the job.

Do you REALLY want to do these tasks?

We had a great call a few weeks ago with one of the Founding Members of the Practice Accelerator Membership, the new community we’ve created. She does her own accounting even though she is not an accountant. She is a busy solo attorney who recognizes that doing her own accounting is not the best use of her limited time. But she is still reluctant to outsource it because she likes to stay in control of it and she likes doing it. That is squarely in her Quadrant 3.

My Quadrant 3 includes graphic design. We are now outsourcing the design work for several of our projects. I could do it myself, and I like that kind of thing, but I am not the right person for that work. It takes me far too long and while the outcome is OK, doing it distracts me from the other work I need to do to keep our business moving forward.

It’s OK not to be great at everything you need to do to run your practice.

The trick is to recognize which of those things you can and should outsource. If you are saying to yourself, “Sure, Karen, but I don’t have the budget,” think again. There are low-cost outsourcing options all over the world, from virtual assistants and accounting experts to robot receptionists. Compare what you would spend with what you could earn. There is a significant opportunity cost to doing tasks you really should be outsourcing to others.

You can hire people for just a few hours a week, and use those hours to accomplish much higher-value tasks for your practice. And if you absolutely can’t outsource it, then find yourself a coach or mentor to give you some advice. It’s OK NOT to be great at everything. It’s OK to ask for help.

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Thanks a lot everybody! See you next week.