Trusting the Process to Gain Time + Space with Heather Prestanski
Trusting the Process of Delegation to Gain Time and Space in Your Business
As a business owner, it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day operations and find yourself working around the clock. But this level of dedication and hard work can take a toll on your personal well-being and lead to burnout. That's what happened to Heather Prestanski, founder and creative director of Comfortable Dwelling.
Heather has had a long entrepreneurship journey, from starting an interior design business to opening a clothing company and a successful marketing business before returning to interior design. She used the principles from the Clockwork book by Mike Michalowicz and the Clockwork Accelerator program to grow her business and learn to delegate effectively, and the importance of trusting the process to gain time and space in daily operations.She was immediately drawn to the concept of delegation and the importance of trusting the process. She started implementing these principles in her business and saw a significant improvement in efficiency and productivity.
Stay open to learning and growing
At Run Like Clockwork, one of our values is continuous improvement. And Heather also believes in continuously learning and growing on her entrepreneurial journey. She chooses to spend at least an hour a day dedicated to learning and believes it can make a huge difference in your business.
So she was already accustomed to seeking out the information she needed in life and business. After dealing with a series of life-changing health challenges, she wanted to be prepared for her business to run without her if she needed to have additional surgeries and treatments. That’s when she found Clockwork. In 2021, the business faced several challenges, including supply chain issues and cash flow problems. This made it difficult for Heather and her husband to keep up with work, and they found themselves working seven days a week and barely seeing friends or family. It was a difficult situation, but they were determined to make changes and find a better way to manage their time.“Understanding that these challenges will still be around for a little while, and then making sure that you have time and space to recover and take care of yourself while your business is being taken care of in other ways is really a gift to yourself, to your husband, to your customers, and to your business,” Heather says. When she did her first time tracking exercise inside the Accelerator to find out where she was truly spending most of her time, she discovered that she was spending a lot of time “doing” in her business. Many entrepreneurs in that situation struggle to find the time to actually do the work to get out of the doing. Heather was working 7 days a week and remembered a time when all she and her husband would talk about was work. On her first time tracking worksheet, she learned that she had spent 96% of her time “doing.” “It would have been a hundred percent,” she said, “but only because I had worked those few extra hours on a Sunday to get some design time in, to do Clockwork.”So the first lesson, and arguably the most important lesson she learned from Clockwork and the Accelerator was that they needed to hire and delegate.
Learn to delegate
The Accelerator program helped Heather and her husband learn to hire the help they needed and delegate in their business, which allowed them to free up more time for themselves and focus on the most important tasks. By committing to the program and making strategic changes, they were able to take some time off and focus on their personal well-being.
Heather committed to taking her Sundays to work on Clockworking her business for four weeks — with the ultimate goal of getting to the point that she and her husband could take those Sundays off fully in the future.
Their first hire was a design assistant for Heather. Just two months into the program, Heather went from working 70 hours a week to just 30 hours. “I know that it would have been easier probably to delegate something small, like email or, you know, preparing presentation slides,” Heather said.“But in order to really create that time to commit to Clockwork, I knew that I had to get a large chunk of time off my plate ASAP. So I freed up eight hours a week, right from my very first week, by delegating out the styling.” For her, that was a scary thing to do because she’s a self-proclaimed control freak, but it turned out well. She still spent time adjusting things and answering questions, but it was much less time than she would have spent doing the work herself. It was an important lesson in the power of delegation for her.
Trust the process
As Heather was going through the Accelerator program, she found herself thinking at several points, “I know this, I’ve tried this before, it doesn’t work.”But she committed to doing the work and following the program. “I gave every single exercise and every piece of the program a really solid chance and put our best effort into it. And I think that was key because I find that everything [in the program] works together.” As Heather progressed with the program, she found herself promoting herself from designer to director in her company. That’s allowed her to step into a new leadership role. Because the business is no longer just her, she has been able to serve more people because she is able to bring in more designers to execute her creative vision.
She found that Clockworking is ongoing. It’s rare that you put a system or process in place, and it checks all the boxes and works forever. It takes practice, it requires tweaking, and things change as your business changes. But what Heather found is that if you commit to working the process, the process works. Early in her Accelerator journey, Heather and her husband took a fully unplugged vacation — only 10 days after hiring a junior designer. Heather was surprised at how easy it was to let go as she got more and more comfortable with Clockworking. “I think the biggest Clockwork win was when my junior designer, Laura, said to me that she couldn't believe just how organized and how business centric we are. And she said, ‘I can really see this business going someplace and I really believe in it.’ I love it.”