When you're a freelancer, it can feel as if you have to do everything. Luckily, with 150+ things you can delegate, this couldn't be farther from the truth!
This list of freelance business tasks that can be delegated to a team member, partner, specialist contractor, or virtual assistant is as much as a reminder for me as it is for you!
When you’re freelancing, you wear all of the hats in your business. You’re the owner, bookkeeper, accountant, creator, designer, copywriter, videographer, photographer, social media specialist, account manager, project manager, marketer, and salesperson — and those aren’t even all of the roles you may claim.
For some weird reason, many freelancers feel like asking for help is a sign of weakness, a lack of ability, or even failure.
When I was new to running my own business, I never asked for help. I felt like me doing everything, regardless of how terrible it made my days, was just me proving to the world that I could do it — that I was capable of being a business owner and building a successful business.
It’s a stressful, exhausting, and totally unfun place to be in your business.
When I finally shifted my mindset to see asking for help as a good thing and a way to always show up as my best self for not just my clients but my family and friends, I turned my focus to figuring out what tasks I could get off my plate and who could help me.
Outsourcing, delegating, and even automating business tasks ensures your time is spent doing the highest-level, most strategic, meaningful, impactful work — work that generates revenue, builds your brand, and moves you closer to your bold goals.
Unfortunately, because I was used to wearing all of the hats, making all of the decisions, and doing all of the work, I had also gotten really, really comfortable with all of the money. I was making way more money freelancing than I ever had with a regular job but at this stage of freelancing, outsourcing, delegating, and getting help actually feels like taking a pay cut.
I mean, yeah… you’re not doing as much work as you were, but you’re still working your tail off and now you’re making less money. It’s a sucky place to be. But the thing is, this is a false belief. Trust me, I know from experience.
The Truth: Asking for help, hiring trusted partners, growing a team, and delegating tasks that aren’t aligned with your genius work increases focus and productivity and frees up your time, which can then be redirected to things that will increase revenue like:
- Building systems and processes into your business
- Creating new free offers to engage your audience and grow your email list
- Networking and building relationships
- Investing in training and workshops and completing courses to improve your skills and your operations (so you can raise your rates)
- Developing extraordinary client experiences
- Reevaluating your packaging and pricing to improve profitability
- Investing in lucrative partnerships
- Creating new recurring revenue streams through courses and memberships
- Developing a marketing plan and executing it consistently
The Bottom Line: The “I have to do everything” mindset is incredibly dangerous because it holds you back from all of the possibilities that await you. When you’re so bogged down in the daily doing of low-level business tasks and things outside your genius zone, you risk missing out on amazing opportunities, losing awesome clients, and hitting a plateau.
Freelancers who never ask for help are also those who set big goals and make big plans but are too busy to take action. As a result, one year later they find themselves still in the same place doing the same things dreaming the same dreams. Don’t let that be you!
Browse the list below to discover more than 150 different things you can delegate in your freelance business.
Then remind yourself that outsourcing, delegating, and getting help is a sign of strength, confidence, and courage. It shows that you believe in your business, you’re committed to its long-term success, and you’re owning your role as the owner.
Personal Distractions To Delegate
There’s a reason why so many executives and celebrities have personal assistants and people to help them get even the most menial tasks done. Hiring help for personal tasks can feel like a luxury reserved for those with a certain level of income or success, but that mindset is usually held by people who don’t yet understand the value of their time.
A Super Basic Example: Let’s say cleaning your house takes three hours a week and hiring a cleaning service costs $300/month. Now let’s say you make $125/hour, which means you earn $375 in three billable hours. Hiring the cleaning services frees up your time to do billable work and you actually come out ahead by $75.
As you can see, when you understand the value of your time, getting help makes a lot more sense. Simply hire someone who loves to do the task you want to delegate at a rate that’s lower than your hourly rate. Then you can feel great about asking for help with things like:
- Running personal errands like picking up your dry cleaning
- Yard maintenance like pulling weeds, mowing the lawn, and pruning the bushes
- Grocery shopping and restocking household supplies
- Housekeeping and organization
- Tackling last-minute tasks like picking up a birthday present you need for tonight
- Pool maintenance and cleaning
- Sending thank you notes
- Preparing, addressing, and mailing your holiday cards
- Checking the mail and weeding out junk
- Sending birthday cards
- Scheduling and confirming personal appointments
- Meal prep and cooking
- Washing and vacuuming your vehicles and wiping down the interiors
- Laundry and ironing
- Being the taxi for all of your kids’ lessons and activities
- Washing and putting away the dishes
Low-Level Business Tasks To Delegate
Low-level business tasks are the secret saboteur of freelancers around the world.
As a “gold star chore chart” kid who will now add something to a to-do list after completing it just to be able to check it off, I can safely say that completing low-level “anyone can this” tasks make you feel like a productivity superhero because you get to check more things off of your to-do list.
The Tough Truth: Low-level tasks — typically used as a way to justify procrastination on something else you need to get done — waste your time, cost you money, and prevent you from making more money.
Taking three hours to organize Dropbox files, when you bill at $125/hour, means that you’re spending $375 on digital file organization instead of making $375. So stop procrastinating and stop keeping yourself busy making fake progress. Instead, delegate things like:
- Purchasing office supplies and keeping them stocked
- Booking and confirming meetings and events
- Purchasing networking event and conference registrations
- Searching for the right stock images
- Booking business travel and making reservations
- Checking voicemail and triaging responses
- Data entry
- Keeping your CRM up-to-date
- Reviewing domain name revewals
- Checking email and triaging responses
- Reviewing and managing inquiry form submissions
- Ordering company swag
- Monitoring social media for brand mentions
- Moderating blog comments and deleting spam
- Organizing and archiving digital files
- Research for content creation
- Gathering statistics and facts for articles and presentations
- Sending client appreciation and thank you gifts
Tasks To Delegate To A Graphic Designer
Tools like Canva and apps like WordSwag have put the power of graphic design in the hands of every person around the globe. But just because you can use these tools to do your own design doesn’t mean you should.
As a professional designer, I could tell you that hiring a graphic designer will produce better results and better elevate the perception of and value of your brand. And while I do believe that, the more compelling argument is that hiring a professional designer will save you time and help you make more money.
Most business owners that do their own design do it because it’s fun — they get to be creative and play with colors and typefaces and imagery. Often, they get so immersed in making their design just right, that they lose track of time and hours go by, sometimes over multiple days. Therein lies the problem…
The Truth: Business owners will balk at paying a professional graphic designer $350 to design an ebook cover and create the 3d imagery for marketing. But they won’t blink an eye at spending six or more hours of their own time playing with the design in Canva, trying different typefaces, and searching for stock imagery because they enjoy it.
Again, if that business owner charges $125/hour, it means they spent $750 on the ebook cover design. That’s not only $400 more than the professional designer’s fees, it’s $750 in billable work that didn’t get done — and I guarantee that the design work isn’t as good as what a professional would have created.
Is design fun? Oh yes. It’s why I got my Bachelors Of Science in Graphic Design and chose design as my career. Should you be doing your own design? Oh no, not if you want to work less and earn the same amount or even increase revenue!
Check out the things a professional designer can help you with:
- Logo and identity design: business cards, letterhead, envelopes, notecards
- Designing and formatting documents like ebooks, reports, booklets, and whitepapers
- Crafting tips sheets, checklists, printables, and free downloads
- Producing 3D imagery and product bundles for your offers
- Creating tradeshow signage, booths, vertical banners, and promotional materials
- Designing branded featured images for pages and posts on your website
- Creating proposal, document, contract, change order, and invoice templates
- Designing slide decks for your webinars and presentations
- Crafting a custom branded Zoom background
- Creating handbooks, manuals, worksheets and workbooks
- Desinging your information products or physical product packaging
- Assembling and styling your press kit or media kit
- Designing your brand’s social media cover images and YouTube video images
- Creating event programs, signage, name badges, handouts, workbooks, order forms
- Producing a collection of branded imagery for your social media feeds
- Creating artwork for promotional products and branded apparel
- Designing marketing materials like brochures, postcards, stickers, and flyers
Tasks To Delegate To A Web Designer/Developer
The great thing about platforms like WordPress and Squarespace is that they give business owners total control over their websites. Unfortunately, this is also the bad thing about these platforms. Once again, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. Tinkering with your website, testing plugins, formatting content, optimizing pages, creating sales pages, and building opt-in funnels isn’t the best use of your time.
A professional web designer or developer can not only get things done faster but get them done at a higher quality so you no longer have to worry about things like programming bugs, security issues, site crashes, and broken features — all which lead to lost sales, lost clients, lost opportunities, and lost revenue.
Do yourself a HUGE favor and build a good relationship with a trusted web designer and developer so they can help you with things like:
- Website design and new feature additions
- Website support and maintenance, including uptime monitoring and regular backups
- Reviewing And Creating Website Analytics Reports
- Creating new web forms
- Set up automation for repetitive digital tasks
- Adding new products to your e-commerce store
- Updating your website content
- Building opt-in boxes for email marketing list building offers
- Third-party software integrations with your website
- Creating landing pages and opt-in pages for marketing campaigns
- Publishing and optimizing new blog posts, videos, or podcast episodes
- Creating sales pages for information products, courses, memberships, and events
- Producing pop-ups, floating bars, scroll boxes and more
- Finding and fixing broken links
- Identifying opportunities to build internal links
- Building out an online course or program membership
- Setting up e-commerce capabilities to fit your offers
- Search engine optimization (SEO) — not all offer this service, but many do!
Tasks To Delegate To Bookkeeper or Financial Assistant
When you’re freelancing, you’re running a business. It may only be a company of one, but it’s still a legitimate company. As the business owner, you need to have a pulse on all of your financial numbers like inbound revenue, outbound expenses, open invoices, upcoming investments, gross and net income, profitability, and effective hourly rate, as well as how much money you have in the bank and how much runway you have if you suddenly needed to stop working.
Being on top of your finances, however, doesn’t mean you have to do all of the work. A bookkeeper or accountant can manage and track your business financials, run reports, and review them with you on a regular basis. These services include:
- Bookeeping
- Invoicing and collections
- Managing accounts receivable and accounts payable
- Making bank deposits
- Managing company payroll and bonus distribution
- Reconciling bank accounts
- Reviewing and tracking expenses
- Tracking affiliate earnings and managing affiliate payouts
- Creating financial reports
Tasks To Delegate To An Email Marketing Specialist
The money is in the list, the email list to be exact.
Nearly every freelancer I know understands the value of email marketing and knows the potential impact it could have on their business. They know that businesses that invest in email marketing generate more leads, close more sales, and make more money.
With that said, many of them still don’t use email marketing because they don’t have time, they don’t want to do it, they don’t want to set it up, or they don’t want the hassle of building an email list. With email marketing specialists like my friend Amy Hall ready to help you out and do it for you, that’s no excuse!
Email marketing specialists can help you with:
- Email marketing list management and reporting
- Creating email newsletter, client communication, and solo email templates
- Gathering the content for your email newsletter
- Creating, proofreading, testing, and sending your email newsletter
- Setting up welcome sequences for new subscribers and customers
- Composing up autoresponsers
- Configuring your email lists, segments, tags
- Configuring options for unsubscribing vs. updating email preferences
Tasks To Delegate To A Copywriter or Copyeditor
Writing is a critical skill to develop for any business owner. Many of the most successful digital entrepreneurs write their own copy because messaging drives conversions. Does that mean you have to do all of your own copywriting and create all of your own content? Nope. Not at all.
As important as writing is, not everyone wants to be a copywriter. In fact, many freelancers don’t like writing. If that’s you, stick to the writing only you can do and get a copywriter on board to help out with everything else. While copywriting isn’t cheap, great copy can yield 10X+ the results by persuading your audience to take action and hire you, buy from you, or get on your list and learn from you.
So hire a copywriter to write copy for you, find a copyeditor to polish up the content you create, or join a program like Content Creators Club and get monthly support for all of your copywriting content creation efforts.
Here’s what you can get help with:
- Writing website copy
- Producing blog posts or video scripts
- Writing case studies and client success stories
- Writing sales page and landing page content
- Creating powerful, engaging calls to action and micro copy
- Writing email newsletter content
- Creating the content for welcome emails and autoresponders
- Repurposing content into different formats
- Writing social media campaigns for new offer launches
- Crafting “made you look” social media ads
- Writing press releases
- Copy clean up, polishing, and copyediting
- Writing ebooks, course materials, and content-vased offers
Tasks To Delegate To A Social Media Specialist
Social media is the bane of every freelancer’s existence. On one hand, it’s a great way to stay in touch with friends, family, and clients. On the other, it creates extra work you barely have time for.
Today, businesses are expected to be active and available on whatever social platform their clients, customers, and future clients and customers are on.
When someone asks a question, sends a message, or tags your brand in a social post, they expect a response and they expect fast. Hubspot shares that “79% of customers expect a response to their social media posts within 24 hours. But, even though 63% of social media complaints are responded to within 24 hours, only 32% of people are happy with their response time. And, while 39% of social media users expect a response within 60 minutes, the average response time for businesses is about five hours.”
You are also expected to regularly post valuable, helpful, relevant, engaging content that is relevant to your audience.
From quote images and memes to jaw-dropping imagery and inspiring captions to personality-driven stories, reels, and live video, social media just added a lot of to-dos to your plate. Managing a brand on social media requires constant work. To expand your reach, gain visibility, build your brand, and get people to care about who you are, what you do, and how you can help, you have to consistently post great content, respond to comments, drive conversations, join conversations, add value, listen for brand mentions, and more.
If you’re as exhausted as I am reading that, reach out to a social media manager for help. They love doing things like:
- Creating a social media strategy to generate leads and attract new clients
- Managing your social media accounts
- Optimzing your social profiles for maximum visibility
- Creating visual social media content like graphics, charts, memes, and quotes
- Researching the right hashtags for your brand
- Writing social media captions, posts, and calls to action
- Posting your social media content
- Sharing your blog posts, videos, or podcast episodes on your social accounts
- Creating and running social media ads
- Managing social media giveaways and promotions
- Uploading, optimizing, and publishing your YouTube videos
- Monitoring social media platforms for brand mentions and new opportunities
- Responding to inbound communications through social media
Tasks To Delegate To An Account or Project Manager
Even with all of my programs and courses and live workshops, I still love working 1:1 with clients. Clients are also the biggest source of problems in a services business because they’re a wildcard you don’t control.
Account managers and project managers can save the day by taking care of the day-to-day client communications and project minutiae. They handle everything needed to keep projects on track, on time, and on budget — the client management and project management. This frees up your time to actually be the business owner and work ON your business instead of IN your business.
Here’s how account managers and project managers can help streamline your projects:
- Client management and client communication
- Project management and keeping things on track, on time, and in budget
- Managing new feature requests, scope changes, and change orders
- Creating surveys and questionnaires
- Gathering testimonials
- Creating estimates and proposals and following up with leads
- Internal team communication and deadline management
- Sales calls and new business development
- Reporting and regular client status updates
Tasks To Delegate To Topical Specialists
Every once in a while, you’ll need to get things done that require someone with special skills — skills you don’t want to learn yourself or would never have time to master. In these situations, it’s best to find and hire a specialist whose entire career or business centers around the exact task you need completed.
I use this approach in my business for highly technical things that only need to be done once in a while. For example, I don’t work with enough clients who need complex, large-scale e-commerce work done to justify hiring a developer with that skillset, but I do have relationships with a few experts I can bring in when I need them.
Some of the things you may need to tap a specialist for include:
- Video editing and production
- Podcast editing and production
- Managing pay-per-click advertising and search marketing
- Livestream production
- Updating and building out your Google My Business listing
- Brand, product, and team photography
- Keyword research and search ranking opportunity identification
- Creating your business plan
- Documenting systems and processes to create an operations manual
- Transcriptions and captioning
- Developing an employee or team handbook
- Public relations and media relations
- Technical support or customer support
- Running backlink or inbound link building campaigns
- Event planning and event management
Tasks To Delegate To A Virtual Assistant
Honestly, nearly all of the tasks I’ve outlined in this post can be done by a virtual assistant with a specialty. Virtual Assistants can have a tremendous impact on the long-term success of your business and your overall sanity. What’s important to understand though is that the skills each virtual assistant brings to the table aren’t the same.
Some virtual assistants, also called VAs, do general back office, operations, and administrative tasks, and some specialize in people skills, research, and things like booking speaking gigs. Others, like my friend Phillis Benson of Virtual Partner, specialize in digital services and digital marketing, working in your website platform, or building out automation in software like Infusionsoft (now Keap), Ontraport, Groundhogg, LearnDash, and AccessAlly.
These days, you can find a virtual assistant with expertise and even professional certifications for almost anything you need help with, including…
- Sourcing and booking guests for your podcast, radio show, or web show
- Gathering information from future guests to prepare for their show
- Finding and securing speaking engagements for you
- Finding and securing interviews for you on podcasts, radio shows, and web shows
- Reviewing potential HARO opportunities
- Publishing, promoting, repurposing, and syndicating your content
- Manage your CRM, email marketing, and automations
- Creating and implementing a marketing plan
- Delivering client support and customer support
- Managing a product, program, course, or membership launch
- Creating launch content and marketing materials
- Managing your affiliate program and creating assets for affiliates
- Being the primary point of content for partnerships and joint ventures
- Running sales at events
- Taking care of the technical details and moderating the chat and Q&A for webinars and online trainings, workshops, and masterclasses
- Preparing presentations and slide decks
- Providing support for people in your programs, courses, and memberships
Own Your Role The Boss
As a freelancer, you’re a business owner and the boss.
You’re in charge and in the driver’s seat, and you get to call the shots. That means taking off some of the many hats you wear and giving them to amazing people who are excited to work with you and support you.
Remember, asking for help is a sign of strength, confidence, and courage. It shows that you believe in your business, you’re committed to its long-term success, and you’re owning your role as the owner. Hiring trusted partners, growing a team, and delegating tasks that aren’t aligned with your genius work increases your focus and productivity and ensures your time is spent doing the highest-level, most strategic, meaningful, impactful work — work that generates revenue, builds your brand, and moves you closer to your goals.
