4 builders who never spoke to each other · contested
Hire part time for the job you hate first
Delegate whatever annoys you most and repeat until you like the work that is left, starting with the easy repetitive tasks and buying back hours a day or two at a time rather than waiting for full time volume. Readiness comes from the work being predictable enough to write down, not from a balance in the bank, and where procedures already exist onboarding is mostly handing over access. Whether it raises income at all is disputed, and so is whether you want to be an employer.
Where this splits
Delegation is presented as the way out of twelve hour days, against a freelancer who tried it and found handing work out ate the margin until the extra revenue was not worth having.
7 claims against 1
Arvid Kahl · Brian Casel · Cory Zue · Justin Jackson · Zach Swinehart
Delegate the work you hate, starting part time
- 01Hire for the job that annoys you most, and repeat until you like all the work left.
- 02Hire part time. Kahl's own mistake was assuming a hire only made sense at full time volume, which kept him working twelve hour days rather than delegating.
Delegating can eat the margin without raising income
Do not assume delegation raises your income: hiring out the work can eat the margin until the extra revenue is not worth having.
- 03Buy back your own hours with part-time help so your time can shift to the marketing and strategy work only you can do.
- 04Hand off the easy repetitive work first and audit where your hours go, so the time freed goes into the activities that actually bring work in.
- 05If you already keep standard operating procedures, onboarding a hire is mostly handing over access to the documentation, and delaying the hire costs more than the onboarding would.
What it returned
Zue brought on a contractor one day a week after five years alone, citing raising the project's bus factor from one and freeing his own time for marketing, at a cost that visibly dented that month's profit.
Delia tried both a course and handing work to others: each left her with thin margins and little to show, and she stayed stuck near 10k a month.
Rob Walling says outright that he could not have built Drip alone, and both he and Nathan Barry moved past solo founding to reach seven figures.
Sources
- The Mindset Shifts That Took Me From Freelancer to Productized Business Owner - Double Your FreelancingBrian Casel · doubleyourfreelancing.com · Create Predictability · 2015-09-02
- Episode 147: “I can't get past €10k/month Freelancing…” — Solving $100k→$200k/yr Bottlenecks, With Delia Monk - Double Your FreelancingDelia Monk · doubleyourfreelancing.com · AI-Generated Summary: · 2024-10-01 · dissenting
- [Coaching: Maia #5] — Booked Out a Month in Advance!!! 🎉 + Case Study Interview Updates + How to Delegate Tasks to Staff - Double Your FreelancingZach Swinehart · doubleyourfreelancing.com · AI-Generated Summary: · 2024-01-03
- You want more than product/market fitJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Company/founder fit · undated
- The Bootstrapped Founder Newsletter Episode 39 – August 7th, 2020 – The Bootstrapped FounderArvid Kahl · thebootstrappedfounder.com · How and Whom to Hire · 2020-08-07
- TailwindsCory Zue · coryzue.com · Tailwinds · 2022-08-03
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
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