What to hand over first: finding the work that still waits for you
The short answer
Hand over first the recurring workflow that costs you the most hours and hands over most cleanly: routine, repeated, and easy to show by example. It is rarely the most important work you do. Keep the work that genuinely needs a founder, such as pitching and pricing while you are small, and hand over what surrounds it.
Step 1: list the hats you still wear
Write down every kind of work you still do in a normal week. Not projects: the recurring jobs. Inbox and email, scheduling, invoicing and chasing, CRM updates and follow-up, customer questions, onboarding, admin and paperwork, chasing people and deadlines, reporting, website fixes, sales calls. Most founders find ten to twelve.
Step 2: put an honest number of hours against each
Rough is fine. Hours per week, for a normal week rather than a bad one. Multiply by about 4.33 for a month.
Step 3: put a price on your hour
Divide the yearly income you are aiming for by about 2,000 working hours. That is what an hour of your time is worth. Multiply it by each job’s monthly hours and you have the monthly cost of wearing that hat. The hat calculator on the audit page does this sum for you, in your browser.
Step 4: score how cleanly each one hands over
Some work hands over cleanly: it repeats, it follows a pattern, and you can show someone five real examples of it done well. Inbox triage, scheduling, invoicing and CRM upkeep usually score high. Some work hands over with a little setup: customer questions, onboarding, reporting. Some work is founder work for now, most often sales calls while the business is small.
Step 5: pick the one with the most hours that hands over cleanly
Rank by hours lost, weighted by how cleanly each hands over, and take the top one. One. Handing over three things at once means none of them is handed over properly.
Signs you have picked well
- You can describe what “done” looks like in one sentence.
- You can find five recent examples of it, including one that went slowly.
- When it goes wrong today, you are the one who notices, chases and fixes it.
- It comes round every week whether you have time for it or not.
What to keep
Keep what genuinely needs you: the decisions, the pricing, the relationships only a founder can hold. The point of handing over the rest is to protect time for those.