The Art of Delegating: Get More Done Without Burning Out

When we create our own company, we often start out having to do everything ourselves. Everything from filing our paperwork to creating our promotional copy to working sales — it’s all us.

There’s a certain romance to those early days. But as your company grows (which, one hopes, it will), all of those activities quickly become way too much for one person.

But the skills that built the company in the early days don’t include the big skill you need to learn now: delegating.

Learning how to delegate comes down to one all important insight.

A leader is responsible for their company, but that doesn’t mean they need to do everything.

Being responsible without being hands-on can seem like an alien concept to people who built their own company — but it is the ultimate survival skill. If you want to scale up without burning out, you have to learn how to delegate.

And if you want to bring in team members who are happy, satisfied, and effective members of a team — then you need to know how to delegate well.

How to Start

You can start delegating much earlier than most people think. Even in the early days, hiring a virtual assistant or paying gig workers to take care of minor tasks can be critical.

This does a few important things:

  • frees up your mental bandwidth and energy to focus on the vision and the fundamentals

  • gets you comfortable with the idea of delegating

  • gives you experience in sharing your vision with people on your team

  • teaches you how to cultivate others and empower them, rather than being a taskmaster


The sooner you get those four things started, the sooner you will be capable of running your company at any size.

But there is yet another bonus benefit it gives you early on. Delegating tasks that aren’t central to your mission keeps you head over heels in love with what you do. It prevents you from getting bogged down in the details.

At this point, it’s a good time to pay attention to how you treat people who are helping you. We’ve all had bosses and managers who simply did not respect what we were doing for the company — that leads to poor performance, sure, but it also makes people’s lives miserable.

Building the Team

Once you grow to the point of bringing in permanent team members, you’ll need to rely on these skills you’ve started mastering.

To really have the company thrive, you need to invest in the well being of your team. That means more than fair compensation (although it definitely means that, too).

People on a team want to be respected. And when you delegate a task to them, they need some level of autonomy — that way they are free to do things their own way, and find innovative strategies for doing things better.

In that situation, your eyes can be on the future, and your team can all be focused on the unique set of skills they bring to the table.

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