Delegation is the single most impactful skill you can learn as an entrepreneur.

But it’s SO hard...

Who wants to delegate something and have their customer get subpar product or service?

It’s brutal at first 😭

Inevitably, when you delegate any new task, you get let down.
You don’t know who to hire 🤡

Don’t have process or training 🤷🏽‍♀️

You don’t know what incentives to use 😤

It’s so much worse than if you’d just done it yourself...
You have to deal with short term pain—worse service for your customers than you would have provided—and it’s easy to just give up.

“Forget it, I’ll just do this myself”
But if you keep going. Keep tweaking...

Hire the right people 👩‍💼

Create a process 📗

Add the right incentives 🎯

It starts working.

Suddenly you can serve 10x the number of customers.

You go from being the player to being the coach...
Building a scalable machine instead of operating it.

Your output goes from whatever you can singlehandedly produce to infinite.

Suddenly, you have time to think, starategize and plan.
Your job becomes to hire great people, give them a playbook, and incentivize them to achieve.

Cut the bad ones when they show up.

Ensure your values are enforced.

Set an example and lead.

But you don’t actually PRODUCE anything anymore, if you’re doing it right.
“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!”

–Michael Gerber

Here’s how I think about it: medium.com/flow/lazy-lead…
*hiring

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More from @awilkinson

7 Sep
New Business Alert 🚨

A friend and I started a fun little business I wanted to share.

It’s super simple:

1. In British Columbia—where I live—the government uses an algorithm to set property values each year 🏡
For example, my home value is guesstimated based on:

- The average price that similar houses in your neighborhood have sold for
- The age of your house
- Whether you have a water view
- Etc
The average house price in BC has jumped like 3x in the past decade, so people are paying a LOT more property tax.

2. This automated number is then used to calculate your annual property taxes.

The number is usually ROUGHLY right but, but often it makes mistakes.
Read 8 tweets
1 Sep
In 2019, I set out to do something simple:

Recreate the local newspaper in digital form, by creating a simple daily newsletter focused on Victoria, Canada, my home town 📰

I hired a journalist and we started sending out a quick summary of what’s happening every day at 7AM...
We wanted to give people a quick overview of what’s happening (news, events, sports, arts) in 2 min or less.

Something you can skim over your morning coffee, like the front page of the newspaper, to feel more informed.

I figured it would be a short lived goofy experiment...
After all, local/community news is dead, right?

Nope. Not at all...
Read 14 tweets
15 Aug
Real estate agents are one of the most egregious examples of misaligned incentives:

“It’s just 2.5%”

If I came to you and said “hi I’d like $25,000 for unlocking a few doors over a few weeks” you’d tell me to pound sand.

But a few % sounds like nothing so people go for it...
“It comes out of the sellers pocket”...

Not true. If you don’t use an agent then you should be able to lower the price by the equivalent amount...
“They help you negotiate a better price”

Rarely. As a buyer, $100k savings to you REDUCES your realtor’s fee, so they have an incentive to convince you to pay MORE...
Read 5 tweets
14 Jul
We never had venture funding, or even access to bank debt, in the early days.

Because of this, Chris and I were maniacal about keeping costs down.

We'd negotiate EVERYTHING.

Furniture. Credit card fees. Software. Leases. Coffee beans. Paper.

You name it, we negotiated it.
At first, it was painful.

We didn't know how to negotiate without upsetting people.

But over time, we built out a friendly process and mastered it.

We realized that by just calling around to different places and asking nicely, we could often save 10-30%...
It worked for software, credit card processing fees, web hosting. All sorts of stuff.

And it made a big difference.

Every dollar saved was an extra dollar to hire more people, grow faster, and start more companies...
Read 15 tweets
11 Jul
For the first 5 years running my companies, I had no clue how accounting worked.

If we had more money on day 30 than day 1, we were winning.

I was like a ship captain navigating by pointing the bow at land...
It mostly worked, but there were maps, and instruments that could have gotten me there 5x faster.

I was just some random guy in Canada running a tiny business, but I often meet people running huge (esp VC backed) businesses who don’t understand how to read a P&L + balance sheet
Like sea captains lost in shark infested waters, during a tyfoon, trying to navigate by gut.

True insanity.

When I finally sat down to figure it out, it only took 2-3 hours to understand the basics I realized...
Read 4 tweets
22 Jun
Over the past few years, Holly and I have been trying to figure out how to do philanthropy effectively.

We've made donations to various charities, but been frustrated by an inability to point at any tangible results from our donations.

It just kind of....goes into the abyss...
We know it probably helped somebody, but it kind of feels like a drop in the bucket.

We want our philanthropy to have a sense of purpose and to be able to know with confidence we are making tangible change.

Who'd have thought giving money away would be hard?
Generally, the options are:

1. Donate to large charities (no sense that you really made an impact, no way to point to any specific results).

2. Do it yourself and hire a team to vet individual opportunities (which is expensive and eats into amount you can give).
Read 20 tweets

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