You know the evening. 10 pm, invoices still open on the screen. Tomorrow: three sales calls, a proposal to finish, and a new hire leaning into your doorway: "What do I say here?"

Handing things off is the obvious answer. The question is what first, and when. Hand off the wrong thing and you pay a salary to make the bottleneck worse.

Here's the test I use: one rule for when, four filters for what. 🌴 It takes ten minutes with last week's calendar.

I talked this through with Jason Balara on the Know Your Why podcast (July 2024). Listen to the full conversation: The Strategy Sprints Method with Simon Severino | Know Your Why #325

You became the bottleneck

There's a moment in every growing company when one more client means one more thing only the founder can do. You can't add the next project because you don't have time to start it.

Do nothing and the cost is quiet but real: the next client waits, your new hire waits, and your evenings stay booked.

That's the sign. We need to fire you from your own business. It sounds harsh. It's much easier than it sounds, as long as you do it in the right order.

Step zero: write it down

Nothing gets handed over until it exists outside your head. With our clients, it's three short documents: this is how we do marketing, this is how we do sales, this is how we do operations.

Once it's written down, you can hand it to one person per area and peel yourself out. Now it's not just you anymore. It's a business. It runs even when you're on vacation.

🐬 This is also why a new sales hire often stalls. The process they're supposed to run lives only in your head, so every call still runs through you. The page "this is how we do sales" is where you take back control: of the conversation, and of your calendar.

When to delegate: the 3-to-1 rule

The "when" is the easy question. Compare two numbers: what it costs to pay someone for one hour of a task, and what you earn in that same hour doing something else. When your number is three times theirs, delegate.

Here's the math I shared with Jason. In an hour of bookkeeping I get very little done, because I'm a terrible bookkeeper. In an hour of selling I could sell probably $15,000. At a 50% win rate, that hour is worth $7,500. A bookkeeper costs around $100 an hour.

That's far past three to one. Hand it over. Run the same test on anything that eats your evenings.

What to delegate first

The harder question is what. Should you delegate marketing, sales or operations first? Run these four filters.

1. The boring stuff. For me it was bookkeeping first, then invoicing and chasing who paid when. Everything that's boring basically I delegated first. You know exactly what's boring for you: the tasks that leave a bitter taste before you even open them.

2. Whatever breaks first. To find it, a sprint coach asks one question: if next week you triple the amount of new clients, which part of your business breaks first? If it's delivery, look closer: onboarding, customer success, account management. The part that cracks first is your next hire.

3. Operations, before marketing and sales. Delivery has to leave your hands at some point, because you need those 40 hours a week for marketing or sales to scale the business. You can't delegate scaling. Operations is also the easiest to hand off.

4. Your superpower, last. If you are amazing at sales, that's the last thing you should give out of hand. I've kept sales the longest, and I'm still one person in the sales team. Protect it. That's where your most valuable hours live.

🐯 When sales does get handed off, it gets split: appointment setting and closing deals are two different jobs.

The second sale belongs to delivery

One detail changes how you hand off operations: the first sale is done by the sales team, but the second sale is done by the delivery team. Clients who are so happy that they want to stick with you buy again.

So when you hand off operations, you also hand off a sales job. Train your delivery team to upsell and cross-sell, or that revenue stays on the table.

Use the slow quarter to build

Jason's listeners are mostly real estate investors, and in 2024 their market was slow. Your version is the quarter when deals stall and the pipeline goes quiet. My view: I love bear markets. When deals are flowing, you're just delivering. When it's quiet, the air clears and you finally have time for the heads-down work: the next thing to add, the next book, big strategic partnerships, the vision for the next three years.

The Strategy Sprints book itself was written in my own bear market, the pandemic, when I couldn't fly to clients. The point is to be fully positioned when the market turns, with your ducks in a row.

Start this week

If you only do one thing, do number 1 tonight.

1. Write one page per area. How we do marketing, how we do sales, how we do operations.
2. Run the 3-to-1 test on every task you did last week. Circle the ones far below your hourly value.
3. Ask the triple question. Three times the clients next week: what breaks first? That's the next hire.
4. Protect your superpower. Decide what you will keep doing yourself, on purpose.
5. Set it in your Monday Strategy, score it in Friday Learnings. One handoff per week. Every Friday you see one more thing that no longer needs you.

Picture a Tuesday evening a few months from now. The invoices went out without you. Your team ran onboarding. Your newest salesperson worked from a page you wrote. And you spent the day on the calls only you can lead. That's Sprintlife: control of the sales conversation, and the time freedom it buys you. 🌴

Listen to the full conversation with Jason Balara: The Strategy Sprints Method with Simon Severino | Know Your Why #325

Grab the free tools and write your playbook alongside other founders in the Sprint Club: https://www.strategysprints.com

Ready to accelerate now? Book a Discovery Call: https://calendly.com/strategysprint/discovery-call

Happy hunting.
Simon & The Sprinters 🐬⚡️🐆