The Decision You Keep Avoiding

Here is a scene. You built the company. You made every call for five years. Now the company cannot make a single call without you.

That is not loyalty. That is a bottleneck. Not a character flaw.. a decision you have not made yet.

I talked with Cameron Herold recently. He scaled 1-800-GOT-JUNK from 2 million to 106 million, then spent the next 19 years building COO Alliance around the exact problem we talked about.. the founder who cannot let go.

I asked him the direct question. What is the number one thing we are doing to stay the bottleneck in our own business.

His answer was not what I expected. Not hiring. Not time management. Focus.

"If you take light and disperse it, it lights up a room," he told me. "But if you take that same light and highly focus it, it becomes a laser beam."

Most founders run on dispersed light. Social media in one tab, the news in another, three mastermind groups pulling three directions, a stack of books everyone insists you read this month. None of it is wrong. All of it is diffuse. And diffuse light does not cut through anything.

Here is the reframe that stuck with me. You do not have a hiring problem. You have a decision you are avoiding: who runs this without you.

Most founders answer that question with a task. Hire an assistant. Buy software. Block a Friday for "strategic thinking." None of that touches the real decision.

Cameron's line on this was blunt, and he did not soften it: "If somebody says, I can't delegate this because I don't have anyone to do it.. it's because you actually suck at delegation."
Not an insult. A diagnosis. Nobody trained us to interview, to onboard, to run a one-on-one, to hand off a project and get back what we actually needed. So we default to doing it ourselves, and we call that being hands-on.

The Four Rules of Delegation

Cameron gave me the fix in four rules, and I am giving them to you exactly as he gave them to me.

One. Tell the person exactly what you need back when the project is done. Not "handle this." The actual result, specific enough that they know when they are finished.

Two. Tell them how little time you want them to spend. Cameron's example: "I need you to clean the office because we have people coming in tomorrow" leaves the door open for someone to spend eight hours chasing perfect. "Clean the office, don't spend more than 30 minutes" gets it done in 29. He put a number on what that saves: seven and a half hours.

Three. Tell them how little money to spend, whether that is subcontractor hours, software, or tokens to run the work through AI. Time and money both need a ceiling or the project expands to fill whatever room you leave it.

Four. Confirm they actually have the skill and the confidence to do the work. If they do not, that is not a delegation failure. That is a coaching job you now know you need to do.

Cameron was direct about what happens when you skip these four. "They miss those four massive things on getting the result, and then they sit down and go, oh, my team's terrible, I have to do the work myself. Well, no. You just don't understand delegation."

Hiring in the Right Order

We talked next about when to make the bigger hires. His answer surprised me, because most founders jump straight to "I need a COO." Cameron's sequencing is simpler. First, an executive assistant, the moment you notice you are doing work below your effective hourly rate.. booking flights, managing your inbox, scheduling. Second, a "second in command," which might be a general manager, a director of operations, or eventually a COO, once you stop having time to grow the people who report to you.

He drew the line between those roles cleanly. A director is someone you tell what to do. A VP is someone you decide the direction with, together. A true COO walks in already owning the P&L, understanding cash flow, bringing strategic insight without you supervising every step. Know which one you are actually hiring before you write the job description.

Then I asked him the harder question. What decisions do founders avoid the longest, even when they already know the answer.

Firing.

"If you went to a doctor today and found out you had a cancerous tumor in your lung, you wouldn't leave it there for six months," Cameron said. "So many entrepreneurs find out that Bob isn't doing a great job, or Bob is driving everybody crazy, or Bob doesn't live the core values. But they keep him for six more months, or three more months, or one more month. Bob is a cultural cancer."

Sometimes founders delay because they have never done it before. More often, Cameron said, it is because they still need to be liked. That need for approval is exactly what keeps a cultural cancer alive past the point everyone else in the company already sees it.

Are You Actually Moving the Business?

We talked about how to tell if you are actually building the business or just staying busy in it. Cameron's test is an ROI analysis on your own calendar. Look at every project on your plate this week. Is it driving revenue. Is it driving margin. Is it making your customers or your employees happier. Or is it just busy work that gives you the feeling of progress without the result.

He was equally direct about AI here. AI can produce a beautifully formatted four-page report from a meeting when the only thing anyone needed was three bullet points. "AI can often expand, not because it's doing anything wrong, but because it's so good at producing content, it can actually make people busier versus more productive." And AI cannot replace the one thing every leader still has to do: decide the next action. That is not a data problem. That is judgment.

Delegation Beyond Business

Then Cameron turned the conversation somewhere I did not expect. Delegation is not only a business skill. It applies to your whole life.

He described his own Vivid Vision.. a full written paragraph describing exactly what his life looks like three years from now. Not just revenue targets. What he does for fun. What he does for fitness. What he and his wife are building together. What he is doing for spiritual growth. He reads it, checks it against his actual weeks, and adjusts.

"You can't have perfect balance every day and every week of the year," he told me. "I almost see you and I like elephants standing on a teeter-totter." Some weeks tilt fully toward work. Some weeks tilt fully toward the people he loves. The system is not balance. It is trust that you will come back and correct course.

That is the real thread running through this entire conversation. Delegation is not a management technique. It is the decision to stop being the only person who can move the business, or your own life, forward. Cameron made that decision at 1-800-GOT-JUNK and again in COO Alliance. He is still making it in Georgia this week, deliberately scheduling a cooking course, a photo shoot, and a hike so that work does not fill every hour just because he let it.

So here is the test for you. Open your calendar. Count the deals, the hires, and the fires that only get resolved because you personally show up. That count is your bottleneck score. If it is more than three this week, you already know the answer. You are avoiding the delegation decision, not the deal itself.

The fix is not "hire better." The fix is pick the one person, write the four rules into your next handoff, and give them Steps 6 through 8 of your own operation this month.

You do not have a team problem. You have a decision you have been avoiding. Decisions close. Avoidance compounds.

Watch how Cameron fixed it. Catch the Full video here:https://youtu.be/Ny8lTdQl_j0

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Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆