Half-Retirement™ is an alternative monetization technique vs. selling a business. The concept is simple to grasp. Instead of completely washing their hands of the business, the owner radically decreases their workload to two, half days a week but keeps the income stream. If you run the economics of holding onto the business vs. selling it, it’s a compelling case to keep it.
Half-Retirement™ is a systematic process to move from earning working income in the business to ownership income from the business. Just like you don’t decide to sell a business today and it’s done tomorrow, Half-Retirement™ takes time.
Some business owners discover the Half-Retire® process and latch onto the Half-Retire Mindset portion and pull a “check-next.” They grasp, comprehend, and execute the proper mindset needed for Half-Retirement™ and call it a day.
When a business owner is working through the mindset shifts, some of them end up with the notion, “I just delegate the work and then I will be Half-Retired™.”
We have a saying,
It’s never as simple as delegation,
and it’s not.
You already know what work you need to offload in order to Half-Retire®, and you know how to delegate. If it were as simple as “just delegating,” then you would have already taken action. Yes, delegation is part of the mix, but it’s not the be-all and end-all in the Half-Retire® process.
Let’s work under the assumption that you do the work you do for a reason. What are those reasons? Some of the common reasons we see business owners doing “the work” are:
- Skill deficit of potential delegees.
- It’s hard to delegate a series of five-minute tasks.
- No one else can BE the owner but you.
- No one else does the work the way you want.
- When you need it done fast, you are the go-to option.
- These tasks are a great place to start removing work because you stumbled into the work so that you can stumble out of it.
Working to effectively delegate some of your work is a great starting point to move towards Half-Retirement™. However, if you want to enjoy all the benefits of Half-Retirement™, treat delegation as Phase One of the process, not the entirety of it.
