How To Do More In 4 WEEKS Than Most People Do In 4 Years

Summary

• I've built and sold three businesses by 28 and now manage over a $500 million portfolio. The secret to fast growth is learning to delegate effectively.
• Delegation is crucial, but many people struggle with it. They tend to either micromanage or abdicate responsibility completely, neither of which works.
• A leader should evaluate managers by the department's improvement under their supervision. If the department stalls, it might be due to poor delegation.
• Delegating involves more than just handing off tasks; it requires training and empowering others to lead.
• You can't grow if you always try to control everything yourself. By delegating authority, you create leaders rather than just task doers.
• Balance between control and growth is necessary. Empowerment may feel like stepping back to move forward, but it accelerates progress eventually.
• Avoid being a "perpetual abdicator," which means neglecting responsibility entirely. Leaders must provide feedback and set expectations.
• Delegation should be 80% focused on what only I can do best, and 20% on filling gaps where no one else is available yet.
• Delegate with clarity and ensure everyone understands what good results look like to avoid confusion and inefficiency.
• There are four zones of delegation:
  • Done or deleted: For low-importance tasks that require low competency.
  • Informed progress: High-importance tasks needing constant updates and feedback.
  • Informed results: Low-importance tasks requiring high skill, monitored by results.
  • Don't delegate: High-importance, high-competency tasks that are essential to the business.
• Learning when not to delegate is vital. Some roles, especially those involving strategy or irrevocable decisions, should be done personally.
• Use a framework with axes for importance and competency to categorize tasks and see what can be delegated.
• Analyze tasks weekly or monthly and assign them within the appropriate quadrant, ensuring “do it yourself” tasks are truly necessary for personal handling.
• Effective delegation leads to a more empowered team and sustainable business growth without compromising quality.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting small by breaking down your tasks. Take some time to look at everything you do weekly. Make a simple list with two columns: importance and skill needed. This will help you understand what you can let others do.

A good way of doing this is using the four zones of delegation. First, look for low-importance tasks that don’t need much skill, like ordering supplies. Let those go to someone else. These tasks are in the "Done or Deleted" zone.

For tasks that are important but don't need high skills, like checking on a project’s status, put them in the "Informed Progress" zone. Let someone else handle them, but keep getting updates to ensure they're going well.

If a task requires high skill but isn’t super important, like monthly reports, it falls into the "Informed Results" zone. Here, you can delegate the task, only reviewing the results at the end.

Finally, there are tasks that are important and need your skills, like making big company decisions. These should stay with you in the "Don't Delegate" zone.

Training your team is necessary to make this work. Take time to show them how you want things done. This will seem slow at first, but it makes your team stronger in the long run.

Remember, you want your team to be leaders, not just do tasks. Give them the power to make choices. This way, they grow, and so does your business. Start with small steps and soon you will see big changes.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Business is hard and if you want to hand something off and have it done well you have to learn how to properly delegate"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you delegate tasks you create followers if you delegate Authority you create leaders"

– Leila Hormozi

"What you have to understand is that you only have so much attention"

– Leila Hormozi

"You either have growth or you can have control it is very difficult to have both"

– Leila Hormozi

"Intelligence is the speed of learning"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

today I'm going to teach you how to do more in 4 weeks than most people do in 4 years I know this because I built and sold three businesses by the age of 28 leading to a $100 million net worth and now by the age of 32 I've a portfolio valued at over 500 million and I use these exact principles to scale fast you become a multiplier and the way to become a multiplier is to learn how to get other people to do things for you most people actually don't know how to delegate it's really how much do you delegate and how do you decide on how much you delegate most people lean towards one end of the spectrum or another either you do everything yourself or you abdicate responsibility and everyone else does everything when I was running gym launch I had brought in somebody as a leader of a department and that person was over three four very important departments that person was very smart very competent however he held on so tightly to everything and I think he felt anxious handing things off he was always worried that people weren't going to do it like he could and when he did hand things off he didn't give them the proper resources and then what he was fearful of would actually happen which is that they didn't do it as well as he wanted it to be done he felt like that was a poor reflection on himself what I noticed is that his departments all moved very slowly and so as I see that revenue is stagnating I thought to myself the problem is probably this person generally how i rate a manager is if I put them over a department does it get better or worse objectively and what was happening is they were all going in the wrong direction so what happened was I had a meeting with this guy and I was like listen I've looked at everything that you're doing I've looked at everything your team's doing and what I'm recognizing is that you're not delegating anything you're trying to do everything and you are a bottleneck for your team I realized he wasn't the best for the team because he looked at me and he said well I can't give them anything cuz they're all stupid and I was like well if you are the one who hired all these people then what does that mean about you right but the reason that none of his delegation had been successful was because when he did delegate he didn't properly train people I'm sure a lot of you can relate to this a lot of the times what happens is that when you yourself are incredibly capable you are a highlevel individual contributor the better you are at doing work the harder it feels to delegate because the bigger the Gap and so what it means is that you have to do more training and often you have to delegate to more than one person for example if I wanted to delegate my entire job it is very unlikely that I'm going to find somebody that's going to take my whole job from me right I'm probably to find multiple people train them up watch them over time time and it's going to be a slow painful process and this is why it's so hard for people are so good at something to delegate as much it is for people who aren't as good at something because it feels like it's so much harder and it takes so much longer but what happens is that then you keep your team small you can't grow the business and ultimately you end up with a job rather than a company when something is new when you're trying something new or when you have a new person it makes sense to hold on tight nobody's going to be able to birth something out of thin air better than the founder themselves that makes a ton of sense but at some point what you will recognize is that the bottleneck to your growth is not you doing more of the thing it's the fact that you don't know how to get more of the thing off your plate and so what happens is those people that lean too far in this direction they hold on to everything what they often do is they delegate tasks rather than Authority if you delegate tasks you create followers if you delegate Authority you create leaders the reason for that is because you're essentially delegating the doing versus the thinking in the beginning that works well well because it's like okay I don't need people to be making decisions and critically thinking I need people to be my hands but at some point you cannot add any more hands and then what you find is that all day every day you're just delegating tasks for people who you have trained not to think things through what I had to realize over time as I was growing my own business is that you can either have growth or you can have control it is very difficult to have both and so what you do is you give up control and you trade it for growth in order to build your company when you delegate and start to empower new leaders what happens a lot is that it feels like you take two steps back to take 10 steps forward delegation in the beginning takes more time and more work but long term it pays off more than if you do it yourself right then on the other end of the spectrum we have leaders who do nothing and delegate everything one of my portfolio company CEOs is what I would say a Perpetual abdicator what that means is that you disregard give something away and take no responsibility for it and so what happened was I thought they were doing a fantastic job overseeing the marketing and sales department but immediately what that person did is wanting to bring the professional manager which I totally support him like yes let's bring professional managers but what they missed he didn't talk to them he didn't give them feedback and he just said well because you're a marketing sales professional I brought you in do your work that's not how it works either you see some people are highly uncomfortable doing things like being in the mess of things the thing about a leader who abdicates responsibility is that they tend to overhire and they tend to not have a company that functions super well because nobody knows what good looks like because nobody set the ground rules for what good is there's a lot of people who just delegate sooner because they're stressed because they're uncomfortable because they think this is what I'm supposed to do business is hard and if you want to hand something off and have it done well you have to learn how to properly delegate I look at it as the goal of somebody in leadership is really to spend 80% of their time doing only what they can do and only what they can best do and then 20% of their time is going to be spent firefighting and doing that doesn't matter so I'll give you an example of where I spend my time right what's my 80% 80% of my time business growth strategy building culture marketing content now what's the 20% of my time that I spend filling in the gaps or doing jobs that I don't have yet hired I would say diagnosing operational limitations prepping meetings legal resolving portfolio company issues those are all things that I don't think are the 80% but they are there because there's not anybody else to do them right now and so I am still doing those things and that's the reality of a growing business is that you're always doing part of somebody's job if things are growing quickly a lot of people what they do is they don't delegate they advicate if you don't ever do the thing or teach your team to do the thing then you cannot Empower them to do it right you are confusing them not helping them delegation is not the same as abdication a phrase that I like to use is that you want to be nose in hands off you want to know where all the bodies are buried but that doesn't mean you're the one digging them up every day delegation without Clarity and without an example of what good looks like just causes confusion and so the Manders that are all the way over here where they're abdicating they're not giving any instruction not Hands-On at all what they do is they often leave people confused because it's vague direction that they've given them and people don't know what to do and so they are actually really low production because when people don't have Clarity of what good looks like then they don't move as quickly so what that brings me to is the four zones of Delegation I have seen all sorts of Delegation Frameworks and I use this one because it's what helps me visually to figure out how do I delegate what do I delegate and to what degree do I delegate something Zone one is called done or deleted something of low importance and requires low competency to do I'll give you some examples of things that are not that important and don't take a lot of intelligence to do buying new office chairs for my conference room asking somebody to take out the trash would I prefer that they're done correctly yes of course I would prefer they're done correctly but they are not the most important things for me to be focused on and they also don't require a significant level of intelligence to do so this is where you delegate things that are not that important and don't require a ton of Competency to do so usually if you have people who are of lesser experience this is where you would give them Zone one things done or deleted these are things where you don't involve yourself in right so what I mean is that you delegate these things you give these things to people and you do not give a ton of training and you don't give a ton of context because they're not that important if they're not done perfectly and they don't require a ton of skill to do generally well some things are not worth taking the time to train someone thoroughly on because they might not be important to you or to your mission of your business which is why I call this done or deleted because either you give it to someone to get it done or the alternative is that maybe you say it delete it and I am a big fan of when I have things on a delegate is this the constraint right now for my business for myself for my day and sometimes I just let burn there are so many fires that occur in a business I ask myself this question which is is this a living room fire like the whole living room's on fire is this a curtain fire like the curtains to the living room on fire or is it a trash can fire which is like it's burning it sucks but it's contained itself and it will put itself out eventually and if it's trash can fire I would say that's what I consider what something you put in done or deleted which is it could burn and it can put itself out or I could just leave it and walk out the house and it'll be fine the second zone is what I call informed progress things that are of high importance but they actually require low skills or low competency to complete so an example of this would be is something as simple as a sales script there's a lot of people that could have the skill to write the sales script why is that important and why is that something that I would want to be looped in on so that I could give them feedback because that is the first conversation that anybody has with a customer and I take it seriously I think it's the first impression of our entire business and it can set somebody up for success or for failure as a customer of our business based on how it's scripted and so that's where we bring in informed progress this is where a leader will give this tasks to a teammate with the understanding that that teammate's going to give them visibility and regular updates into the task because the leader wants to constantly be giving them feedback so that when we get to the decision point or the end of the project it's not all done incorrectly because the worst thing that could happen is you give someone a task or project that is very hard to reverse and they get all the way to the end and you say oh my God we have to rebuild the whole thing if I don't know what the sales script says then maybe 3 months down the line I'm like what's going on all these people are complaining they're saying all the there's all this stuff breaking on the back end and now I've got this big mess I've got to clean up that's hard to reverse most people think you know what I hired all these people to do this they should be taking care of it right right but those people don't know what the rest of the business looks like if you're the founder if you're the CEO you're the head generalist you know how everything ties together and you know all the second order consequences of every single department so when something is important to the business but doesn't require High skill we want to continue getting feedback from people so we can give them yes no maybe and help reroute them and give them feedback to get on track the third zone is informed results something not that important but actually requires a lot of skill to do doing our p&l statement each month now you would be like Le I think doing the p&l is very important would say that making sure that we make money is important but how you structure the p&l is probably a little bit less so to me every single email that our CS reps send out those are not important enough for me to continue checking on but they're important enough that I monitoring the results as long as it's not terrible it's going to be fine and even if it wasn't done correctly it's not going to not move the Beetle for the business even the setup for this video right now I just am going to see the results of that I don't need to check in every time that Jason is setting up the cameras and the lighting because in my opinion what's going to move the needle the most for the business as a whole is not this thing what you have to understand is that you only have so much attention you want to be doing informed progress being in the loop of the things that move the needle the most for the business and then for the other things that are not going to if done wrong impact the business greatly then those things we don't need to be kept in the loop of instead we just see the results and so we just ask people to give us the results once they are done for our p&l give me the summary of all the numbers for all the emails that are sent out by CS give me a report at the end of the week let me know how the video does when it performs and so these are things that I would rather look at the results and then adjust going forward it's not important enough that you need to fix it before it ships but once it ships and you see the result then you can say okay I'm going to give you feedback for next time the fourth zone is the don't delegate Zone and something very important and requires a very high level of Competency this is often when it's your job these are things that are very hard to reverse require someone with a ton of expertise and greatly impact the business these are things that we don't delegate company strategy when we buy a business hiring an executive signing any legal agreement I'll give you an example which is when we start acquisition. comom I thought to myself that I could hire people to do some of these irreversible things on my behalf and that I didn't need to be as nose in hands out on some of these things and I could just be nose out hands out and so we actually did a business acquisition where I let somebody on my team lead the entire thing and I just signed the contract afterwards and it was probably the worst mistake I could have ever made the terms were wrong there were things in the contract that I committed to that I would have never committed to and guess what can't reverse that so I learned the hard way that there are things in the business that you don't want to delegate if you're the type of leader that wants to empower your team this is usually one of the hardest things to understand but it is very important because there is professional manager mode and there's founder mode and if you're the founder you know how to do things better than a professional manager even if they come in with all these skills and all this experience you built it so you know how to break it they didn't build it so they don't know how it breaks and this is something that a lot of people don't grasp and they think that to get to the level that they see myself or other people with nine figure businesses that somehow we know less about the business I know just as much about the business if not more as the business grows and you just learn how to contain all of that and not explode these are the things that you do not delegate and this is what your job becomes the things that are high importance and not easy to reverse those are the things the CEO or founder does and that is what should make up the 80% of your time that you don't delegate other people I think the issue is that a lot of people feel guilty they're like well I want to give this person a shot you know the best way to teach your team is to demonstrate what good decision making looks like and then after they've seen you do it enough times for months or years maybe you bring them into those conversations they can help put together the strategy they can help execute an acquisition but those things take a lot longer to hand off than a lot of people wish they did there's some things that you just don't delegate and that is the job of the founder and so if we bring this all together what I want to show you guys is what this framework looks like and how you can apply it we've got on the horizontal axis importance we've got on the vertical axis competency and then you will see where we've got done or deleted we've got informed results we've got informed progress and we've got you do it your self so how can you apply this today intelligence is the speed of learning if you watch this video and you do nothing with it then that means you did not learn and that's why I want to put these steps together for you take this framework write it down right now and here's what I want you to do pull up all your tasks from either this last week or this upcoming week if you want to be crazy you can go through the tasks of last four you can make it a month and I want you to take those tasks and I want to put each task into one part of the quadrant once you have them under all different parts of the quadrant every part of the quadrant that is not you do it your self you put someone's name next to it because what I want you to see is all the things that you're doing that you could delegate to somebody and all the things that maybe you delegated and they're not going well because what you realize now is they should have been under you so here's what I want you to do use this quadrant apply it for this upcoming week and then what I want you to do is come back leave me a comment and let me know how it helped you