Can You Afford Not to Hire an Assistant?

by Graham Denton

Salespeople in general are incredible self-starters. Energy, drive, ambition, enthusiasm, obsession--call it what you will, if you make your living in sales and you're making a living, you've got more of it than the average person. This inner fire is one of the secrets of sales success. But it can also be an impediment. Your very enthusiasm for activity, for getting things done, can get in the way of your success unless you remember one thing: You cannot do everything yourself, and you'd better not try.

I'm relaying this tip from a person who ought to know. He's the Detroit selling phenomenon Ralph R. Roberts, for many years the top-producing real estate agent in the country. Convinced that all truly successful salespeople are entrepreneurs, not employees, Roberts draws a logical inference from that observation. To behave like an entrepreneur, hire an assistant. As he puts it in Walk Like a Giant, Sell Like a Madman, the peppery little memoir he wrote with John Gallagher, "If you don't have an assistant, you are one."

Roberts's point is that your selling day is filled to overflowing with routine tasks that you can perform if you want to, but whose performance inevitably subtracts from time with your customers. Everybody in sales knows what he's talking about. The "backroom details" and administrivia that in large businesses are delegated to administrative staff. Copy that model, Roberts says. Act like the business leader you are by hiring competent people to cover those details for you. And think of the expense as what it is--an investment in your growth.

Most salespeople don't do this, of course. Self-starters to a fault, we're so afraid of letting the details fall by the wayside that we convince ourselves that only we can perform them. It's the old Lone Ranger syndrome, where the sales pro is so completely an independent contractor that she has to stuff every envelope and answer every phone call herself.

That's bad time management and bad money management. If you doubt it, perform a simple exercise. List the number of things you do each week that a top-notch assistant could do as well or better. Be honest with yourself: You don't need to field every casual query or write every thank-you note yourself. Once you've made the list, estimate how many hours a week you typically spend on those tasks. Let's be conservative and say it's twenty.

Now ask yourself how much more money you could make if you had twenty extra hours a week to spend with your customers. If that figure is even slightly higher than the amount you would have to pay a half-time (twenty-hour) assistant, you're not making the most of your selling time. Or, to put it in negative terms, not hiring an assistant is costing you the difference.

Sure, Roberts is an exception. He now runs a company with dozens of employees, so he's got an entire building full of assistants, some of them with titles like "bookkeeper" and "public relations manager." But even when he was just starting out, he followed this principle.

When he was eighteen, working for a small real estate company, his "team player" duties included answering the phone; each agent in his company would take turns at this "floor duty," which consisted largely of taking messages for the other agents. Roberts said forget that. He found a high school student whose schedule was compatible with his own, paid her four dollars an hour (good money twenty years ago), and found himself, every week, with two extra days in which he could be showing people houses.

Outside of the large realty chains, this is still unusual. Roberts claims that nearly 90 percent of the nation's realtors have no assistants--they're still fervently independent, and therefore spread thin. "The superstars, on the other hand, usually have several." That's a lesson that can easily translate to all forms of selling.

How much is your selling time worth? Is it worth more per hour than a good assistant's wage? If you want to know whether you need an assistant--or can afford one--just do the math.