1: “I’m really sick of all the day-to-day stuff,” said Andre, the owner of a manufacturing company, to his friend Simon in Dan Martell‘s book Buy Back Your Time. “I think I need to hire an operations manager.”
“Okay, Andre,” Simon said. “But before you do that, talk to me about your day. What’s the biggest chunk of time you spend each week on something you hate doing, which just feels like work to you?”
As it turns out, Andre was spending 80 percent of his time doing computer-aided drafting, or CAD.
“Unless you love CAD—and some people really do,” Dan observes, “spending 80 percent of your time on computer-based drafting is a real drain.”
Simon’s advice to his friend? “Andre, you don’t need an operations manager. Instead, hire a CAD designer. Not only will that person be less expensive, but you’ll get eighty percent of your time back.”
2: To grow our businesses as leaders or entrepreneurs, our #1 responsibility is to maximize the amount of time we spend doing activities that energize us and generate value for our organizations.
“As the market pays us and our companies more,” Dan notes, “we have more money to buy back more of our time and energy, giving us more room to invest into what lights us up and makes us money, which makes us more money, creating the Buyback Loop.”
How do we do this? We begin by delegating or eliminating low-value tasks.
Next up? Identify those activities that we do really well but that no longer energize or motivate us. These tasks are meaningful and important.
Which doesn’t mean they are the highest and best use of our time.
Examples include onboarding, selling, marketing, and managing our team. “These tasks are high value,” Dan explains, “but they may not light us up the way they once did, so it’s less obvious what we do with these tasks.”
“Founders often think that they must do everything,” Dan notes. We convince ourselves that no one else can do the activity as well as we can.
Like Andre and CAD.
In fact, when we hire exceptionally well, we may find someone who does an even better job than we do. Because they genuinely love doing that activity.
3: Yesterday, we began our exploration of Dan’s framework for systematically transferring these tasks. He believes there are five specific “rungs” we should address sequentially.
We “start with the economic resources we have,” he suggests. “We identify the key hire we need to make, and then we transfer responsibilities to that key hire.”
Rung 1: Administration
Key Hire: Administrative Assistant
Feeling: Stuck
Ownership: Inbox and Calendar
“Without an effective administrative assistant,” Dan writes, “we’re spending enormous time and energy on low-value administrative tasks. Our inbox is dictating our day, as we receive dozens of pings and we spend our time forwarding them to other departments, approving invoices, and replying to calendar requests.”
Not smart.
“As soon as we hire an administrative assistant responsible for the two tasks of inbox and and calendar, we’ll immediately begin feeling less stuck,” Dan predicts.
Rung 2: Delivery
Key Hire: Head of Delivery
Feeling: Stalled
Ownership: Onboarding and Support
This rung is simply whatever it is we deliver to our clients.
Yet, “for many entrepreneurs,” Dan writes, “their company’s core product or service is emotionally difficult to outsource because they’re good at it, and they enjoy aspects of it—Elon Musk enjoys engineering. Steve Jobs loved aspects of design. Walt Disney actually enjoyed voicing Mickey Mouse. If we own a restaurant, we may enjoy cooking. If we run a construction company, we may enjoy drawing up the plans.”
For these cases, Dan recommends the “10-80-10 Rule. “We start by doing the initial 10 percent, then we turn it over to a team member who owns the middle 80 percent of the work, and then we return to finalize the last 10 percent, where we add our final touch.”
Entrepreneurs who are unable to replace themselves stall their companies ability to grow.
“Can you imagine Mark Zuckerberg still writing code for Facebook (now Meta)?” Dan asks. “I doubt world-renowned photographer Anne Geddes, home designer Joanna Gaines, or composer John Williams are doing all their own work. Instead, they’ve effectively learned how to maximize their abilities by setting the compass for creative endeavors, then trusting others to carry the projects to fruition.”
Rung 3: Marketing
Key Hire: Head of Marketing
Feeling: Friction
Ownership: Campaigns and Traffic
“Does this sound familiar?” Dan asks. “In the first quarter, we drum up new business with referrals, creating new partnerships, posting content, upselling current clients, running ads, sponsoring events, or whatever we do to bring people into our café, our law firm, or our platform. We see all the new customers, the new contracts, and the new revenue. Then we drop the marketing ball to begin executing on all the new business.”
What happens next? By Q3 or Q4, we’ve delivered all of that business, “but now there’s little new business trickling in. So we make a plan to hit marketing hard again in the first quarter of the next year.”
Q1: Marketing. Q2 and Q3: Execution. Q4: Business slows while we plan to refocus on marketing to start the following year.
Rinse and repeat.
How does this feel? We experience friction.
“Entrepreneurs can see growth; they can almost taste it. But every year, they feel like an airplane that revs its engines and accelerates, but just before takeoff, they lose speed, never getting more than a few feet off the ground. A business will never grow—at least not exponentially—in such a manner.
“Let go of marketing,” he suggests, “and put someone else in charge of ensuring that next month, next quarter, and next year, there’s still business coming in.
Rung 4: Sales
Key Hire: Sales Representative
Feeling: Freedom
Ownership: Calls and Follow-Up
Dan writes: “At the fourth rung, someone’s [now] responsible for administration (administrative assistant), another person is onboarding customers and ensuring our product or service is delivered on time (head of customer service or delivery). Finally, a trustworthy person is executing a predictable marketing strategy that drives consistent growth (head of marketing).”
The time has come to offload the responsibility of sales.
“Trust me—we won’t want to offload sales,” Dan predicts. “Most salespeople simply won’t be as good as we are. As the passionate founders, we can outsell anyone.”
And… one of Dan’s mottos is: “80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome.”
We may also be wrong about being the best salesperson.
“Once, I was handling twenty to twenty-five sales calls per week to keep growing my company,” Dan writes. “When I finally became frustrated enough with that workload (which took way too long), I hired Michael. I assumed I was a superior salesperson—why wouldn’t I be? So, I aimed pretty low. I figured Michael could manage half as many calls in twice the amount of time with one-third the close rate.
“I had the numbers all backward,” he writes. “He managed more calls, in less time, and outsold me.”
Rung 5: Leadership
Key Hires: All Levels of Leadership
Feeling: New Era of Production Called “Flow”
Collaboration: Strategy and Leadership
“Once we get to the leadership rung, everything’s just a tad different,” Dan observes. We “reach a level of freedom most entrepreneurs don’t even know is possible. I call it Flow.”
Key Hires: “At this level,” he notes, “we’re able to make the key leadership hires that run the enterprise without much involvement from us—a leader for marketing, delivery, sales, product development, etc.”
Other leaders are actively running the business. “It makes money without our day-to-day involvement,” Dan writes. “We’ve successfully replaced ourselves in all the other areas.”
Collaboration: “This is where it gets fun. Here, we get to strategize with other people. We meet on a regular basis with our leadership, collaborating on ideas. They’re running our business, hiring and firing, and putting out the fires. We’re a bystander who has enormous input but little responsibility.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Which high-value tasks am I still holding onto that no longer energize me, and what’s the next key hire I need to make to reclaim my time and focus?
Action: Review the five rungs of the Replacement Ladder and identify one area—administration, delivery, marketing, sales, or leadership—where I can delegate full ownership this quarter.