A Capacity Assessment Tool for Solopreneurs Ready to Delegate
A few months ago, I learnt about micro-outsourcing from Justin Welsh's Saturday Solopreneur newsletter. He defined it as a strategy where business owners hire freelance specialists to handle specific, recurring business tasks.
While reading, I envisioned this strategy as part of an integrated system that starts with capacity assessment—after all, how can we effectively delegate tasks without first understanding our current workload and identifying the areas where we need the most support?
A Common Delegation Mistake
When overwhelmed with business tasks, many solopreneurs rush to delegate work to virtual assistants without first evaluating those tasks to determine the type of attention that they need.
A virtual assistant is such a valuable team member for a solo online business owner and can significantly reduce your workload, protecting your mental energy for your own zone of genius in your business.
Nowadays, many virtual assistants do more than administrative tasks, specializing in niche areas such as tech support, social media marketing, and customer service. This makes it even more crucial to understand which tasks should be delegated and to whom.
How to Assess Your Capacity in 6 Steps
Free Notion template for solopreneurs
Think of these steps as the what, when, why, who, and how of your capacity assessment.
Step 1: Task Audit
Identify what you spend your time doing by making a list of your tasks. Consider tracking your time for a week to identify your repetitive, time and energy-consuming tasks.
Step 2: Time Audit
Document how long it usually takes you to complete each task and how frequently it needs to be done.
Step 3: Impact & Expertise
In Justin’s article, he recommends prioritizing your task list by determining the impact the task has on your business and the level of expertise required to execute the task.
Step 4: Task Role
Think about who would be best suited to handle each task based on their required expertise level and impact. Tasks requiring basic expertise and having low impact are good candidates for delegation to junior contractors or entry-level virtual assistants.
Tasks needing intermediate expertise might go to specialized contractors, while high-impact tasks requiring expert knowledge may need to stay with you or go to more specialized consultants.
Step 5: Delegation Status
Assign a delegation status (can delegate, needs review or do myself) to each task based on your analysis thus far. This step provides clear direction and helps you identify which tasks to delegate first. Consider starting with tasks marked "can delegate" that have low impact and basic expertise requirements if you’re hiring for the first time.
Step 6: SOPs
Now that you've identified which tasks to delegate, you can start writing instructions in the form of standard operating procedures (SOPs) or task guidelines for your future hire. These don’t need to be extremely detailed as the best person to write an SOP is the person that will be owning and performing the task. I’ve included an SOP template that you can use for guidance in the capacity assessment Notion template.
By following these six steps, you'll gain clarity on your current workload and make better decisions about which tasks to delegate. This approach ensures you're not just offloading work randomly but strategically choosing what to delegate and to whom.
To help you implement this in your business, I've created a Notion template that guides you through each step.
If you’d just like to duplicate the template, get it here.
If you’d like to get the template and also join my email newsletter 💌 — click here.
To recap, here’s your capacity assessment checklist:
Identify tasks
Document task duration and frequency
Determine task impact on business and expertise required to execute
Assign a role to the task
Assign a delegation status
Write SOPs for delegated tasks
