Five Questions to Help You Finally Delegate That Task You've Been Hanging Onto

Look, I get it. You started the company. You know your products, your processes, your customers better than anyone else. You've built systems from scratch. You've put out fires nobody else even knew existed.

So when something important comes up, of course you handle it yourself. Because you know it'll get done right. And honestly? It's usually faster to just do it than spend 30 minutes explaining it to someone else who's going to come back with questions anyway.

But here's what happens over time. You end up buried. Your calendar is nothing but tasks that keep the lights on but don't actually move the business forward. And the work you started this company to do? The strategic stuff, the growth opportunities, the parts you're actually good at? That keeps getting pushed because you're too busy being the only person who knows how to fix every problem.

I see this all the time with manufacturers in the $3M to $20M range. The owner or leadership team is still deeply involved in day-to-day operations because "nobody else can do it" or "it's just easier if I handle it." And meanwhile, growth has stalled because there's no bandwidth left for anything new.

You can't scale like that. Something's got to give.

So how do you know what's actually worth handing off? Here are five questions I walk clients through when they're trying to figure out what to delegate.

1. Could someone else on your team do this? Even if they won't nail it the first time?

Notice I didn't say "do it perfectly." Just... do it.

Most things don't need to be perfect. They need to be done well enough. And if someone on your team could handle it at 80% of your level, that's still 80% of the work off your plate.

Plus they'll get better. Maybe the first time takes longer or needs some cleanup. But the second time? Third? They'll be running circles around what you could do because they're focused on it and you're not.

I had a client who was still approving every quote that went out. Every single one. His reasoning? "I've been doing this for 20 years. I catch things others miss." Fair enough. But he was also spending 10 hours a week on quotes instead of talking to the two potential acquisition targets he'd been ignoring for months.

We set up approval thresholds. Anything under $50K, his estimator could send. Anything above, he reviewed. Freed up half his week. And you know what? The error rate didn't change.

2. Are you actually the best person for this?

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it.

Maybe you're great at troubleshooting production issues. But is that really the best use of your time when you've got a production manager whose literal job is handling production issues?

I'll be blunt: a lot of business owners confuse "I'm good at this" with "I should be doing this." Those aren't the same thing.

If the task keeps pulling you away from higher-value work and someone else could reasonably handle it, you're not the best person for it anymore. You're just the person who's always done it. There's a difference.

3. Would someone on your team actually benefit from taking this on?

Delegation isn't just about clearing your plate. It's also about developing your people.

When you hand off something meaningful, you're giving someone a chance to grow. To prove themselves. To contribute at a higher level.

And your best people? They want that. They want to be challenged. They want to feel like they're moving up, not just doing the same job year after year.

If you're hoarding all the important work because you think you're protecting them or because you haven't had time to train them, you're doing the opposite. You're holding them back. Eventually they'll leave to find a place where they can actually grow.

So ask yourself: who on your team is ready for more but hasn't gotten the chance yet? Who would jump at the opportunity if you actually offered it?

4. Does this keep interrupting your day?

If a task keeps yanking you out of whatever you're trying to focus on, that's your answer right there. It needs to be delegated.

Approving quotes. Fielding questions from the floor. Handling vendor problems. Dealing with customer escalations. Whatever it is, if it's constantly breaking your concentration, it's not the task that's the problem. You are. Because you're the bottleneck.

You need to empower someone else to own it. Set the boundaries. Give them authority to make decisions within certain parameters. Then let them handle it.

Every time you're the one who has to weigh in, you're training your team to wait for you instead of solving problems themselves. That doesn't scale.

5. Should you just outsource it?

Not everything needs to be done in-house. And not everything needs to be on your payroll.

Marketing. Bookkeeping. IT. HR administration. I see manufacturers all the time trying to handle these internally because they think it'll save money. What actually happens is they end up with a mediocre version of each function because nobody has the time or expertise to do it right.

Sometimes the smartest delegation decision is admitting you need outside help. Especially for specialized work that's not core to what you actually manufacture.

What actually happens when you delegate

Most business owners worry about the same thing: "What if they screw it up?"

Look, sometimes they will. Not catastrophically. But yeah, mistakes will happen. You'll need to clean something up. You'll need to provide more guidance than you thought.

But you know what else happens?

You get your time back. Your team steps up. People surprise you with how capable they are when you actually trust them with something important. And your business gets more resilient because it's not entirely dependent on you being available 24/7.

I worked with a client last year who was convinced he was the only one who could handle customer technical issues. We started tracking his time. Turns out he was spending 15 hours a week on support calls. We trained two of his engineers to handle tier-one issues. Gave them scripts. Set up escalation criteria. Within a month, he was down to maybe 3 hours a week on only the most complex problems.

Did the engineers mess up a few times early on? Sure. But they learned fast. And now that manufacturer has redundancy they didn't have before.

Start somewhere

You don't need to overhaul everything at once. Pick one thing this week. Run it through these five questions. If it checks even one box, hand it off.

Then do it again next week.

Over time, you'll claw back hours of your week. You'll get back to the work that actually matters. The strategic thinking. The business development. The reason you started this thing in the first place.

And if you're not sure where to start or how to build systems that don't require you being involved in everything, that's exactly what we work through in a Growth Engineering Session. We'll look at where your time is actually going, figure out what's keeping you stuck in the weeds, and map out a plan to get you out.

Schedule one and we'll figure it out together.

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