
Delegate or die: the self-employed trap - razin
http://sivers.org/delegate
======
StavrosK
To be honest, though, you already had 98% of the delegation problem solved.
The biggest hurdle isn't telling employees "here's what we stand for, I trust
you to make decisions according to our philosophy". The biggest hurdle is to
_actually find people you can trust with it_. It sounds like you already had a
team of competent, skilled people whom you just micromanaged, and then
realised they were competent enough to act on their own and let them.

This is trivial compared to actually _finding_ such people (at least for me, I
guess).

~~~
sivers
Actually my hiring policy was ridiculous.

Because I was "too busy to bother", I'd just ask my current employees if they
had any friends that needed work.

Someone always did, so I'd say, "Tell them to start tomorrow morning. $10/hr.
Show them what to do." And that was that.

To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in
the warehouse. But I even did this same approach when I needed a CTO. ("Anyone
have a friend who's good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK - tell him to start
tomorrow.")

But maybe that they were friends-of-friends helped with the trust part.

~~~
edanm
I wonder why hiring isn't done this way more often? Specifically the "friends-
of-employees" approach.

~~~
_delirium
It's relatively common for tech companies to try to encourage employees to
recommend people, with a ~$500-$2k bonus if you refer a friend who ends up
getting hired. Not sure if it's actively taken into account on the hiring-
decision side, though, or if it's just seen as a way of getting in more
applicants.

~~~
bartonfink
From my perspective, most referral bonuses aren't big enough to make it worth
my while to try to get a friend in the door. When I know that my referral
saves them $20k on a headhunter fee, getting < 10% of that rubs me the same
way a nickel-an-hour raise would.

~~~
eftpotrm
Then I'm not sure you're the person to be working as a startup employee.

~~~
lsc
Really? I'd expect a startup employee to be more interested in, ah,
'extracting value' than a regular employee. I mean, you've gotta have /some/
reward for all that risk.

(I mean, it's different if it's a company that wouldn't have paid a headhunter
anyhow; but I think the grandparent was objecting to the difference between
what you are paying the headhunter and what you are paying the employee, more
than the absolute amount you are paying.)

~~~
eftpotrm
Extracting (appropriate) value, yes, but how and when becomes the issue. If
the company is going through a cashflow issue - far from unheard of in a
startup - insisting on extracting the full value of your pound of flesh there
and then would be counterproductive. Equally one's startup should be
increasing in value by more to than the cost of the hire so again it could
very well be in your interest as that sort of employee _not_ to extract the
full value if to provide the lead for free could permit a far earlier hiring
than would otherwise be the case.

~~~
lsc
eh, if you can afford to pay a headhunter $18K, you can afford to pay your
employee little more than a grand. (Most programmers, rightly or wrongly, once
they judge a few recruiter-arranged candidates, believe that recruiters bring
no value, so the very idea that you are using a recruiter implies waste.)

On the other hand, like I said, if you can't afford to pay the headhunter,
then your employee shouldn't whine about not getting a recruiting bonus. I've
personally referred many people who got jobs, and I don't think I've ever
gotten more than a free beer out of the deal.

------
DevX101
I agree with the importance of delegating, but perhaps the work-at-home, not
getting any questions after two months was also related to a major employee
problem Derek mentioned somewhere in another post: employees began to feel as
if he was too distant, they were doing all the work, etc, etc.

If I recall correctly, there was mutiny brewing among the employees and was
the main reason he decided to sell the company.

This doesn't take away from what I think is great advice in this post, but
maybe those employee issues were inevitable side effects from the super-
delegation approach.

~~~
sivers
Yeah - different lesson, so different story.

I learned, the hard way, that over-delegation can lead to abdication.

------
seltzered
Derek, you've been a huge inspiration for me, but I remember hearing you say
at a conference that your employees started to hate you a while after working
remotely -- to the point that you shutoff the website for a few hours to
realize you needed to sell the company.

Do you have any thoughts on what can be done to keep rappore up amongst
employees in the office while still working remotely?

NOTE: sorry I don't remember where you said it, might've been towards the end
of your lessconf presentation [http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-
sivers-speaks-at-...](http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-sivers-
speaks-at-lessconf2009)

~~~
JayNeely
I'm not Derek, but as a remote-working team member for a business that has
many other remote-working team members, this is a similar problem I've been
trying to solve by encouraging use of a private twitter-like network through
Status.net (free) or Yammer (paid).

It provides that ambient awareness of what coworkers are up to / thinking
about, gives you an easy way of soliciting helpful but non-essential feedback
without adding to email overload, and allows for realtime information sharing.
It's potentially a good substitute for in-office community when that's not an
option.

~~~
seltzered
Good to know. I know some other companies (e.g. Facebook) use IRC as another
way to keep folks communicating.

I've been in a position where I've practically been a one-man software team
for half a decade, but my boss has basically told me I can't work remotely
even though a couple other senior folks do. I've tried helping ease the fear
of me not being there by creating canned responses for other coworkers to
follow, and getting a support system in place. New plan now though is to bleed
a little, find a new job, and opt to not work remotely ONLY if I'm going to
gain a good mentoring/apprenticeship experience from the people I work with.

------
cookiecaper
I learned about this at one of my old corporate employers. One of our local
contractors was ostensibly doing very well, and I presume he was making a lot
of money, but when he wanted to go on vacation, he couldn't leave for over
eight months because of his obligations that he had to personally fulfill for
clients. Seeing this and thinking about the futility of being self-employed in
the name of freedom but running your business such that you are more trapped
than a normal "working-for-the-man job" in almost every sense, I decided I
would always delegate aggressively when I had the opportunity to do so in my
own businesses.

What's the point in having millions of dollars if you have never the time to
enjoy any of it? Also, a company that is overly dependent on one individual is
unable to ever exceed the capacity of that individual; he becomes a bottleneck
that slows (usually to a complete stop) the growth of the whole company. In a
few years when he finally cracks, the whole thing goes down with him.

I'm glad Derek found this out before it all collapsed; many business owners
don't.

------
stellar678
What did you do to keep the manual clear and organized enough to be useful?
Many companies I've worked with have an internal wiki for information like
this, but things seem to go south pretty quickly and it becomes hard to
distinguish stale content from relevant content.

~~~
sivers
Actually, the new people learning it would clean it up.

If they found anything hard to understand, we'd apologize and ask them to make
it easier to understand for the next person.

Since they had just felt the pain of it being unclear, they were in the best
position to fix it.

------
melvinram
Sivers,

I'm in the process of doing this exact thing myself. I'm creating on average 5
training videos a day since my business is pretty much all web and information
based.

I've already started being a lot more productive. One thing that I hadn't
thought of was having them create the training themselves.

The first draft of these videos are fairly crude as it's mostly a brain dump
and I'm figuring out the best way to explain what is in my head. This means
sometimes I spend 15-20 mins to create a 5 minute video or 2 hrs to create a
22 min one (example from yesterday) when you take into account retakes and
editing.

I could just create a crude one and just have them create the clean version
after they learn it. It would save me at least an hour a day. Not too shabby.
Thanks for that.

Mel

~~~
johnohara
Do you script your dialog or roll free?

~~~
melvinram
First draft is always free roll. For 2nd (and usually final draft), I create
an outline which I use as a visual inside the video itself. This part is just
inside Textmate with the font size increased to like 20px or something
gigantic. The narration is always on the roll but I usually remember the
phrasing from the first draft and only tweak what needs changing.

------
beagle3
Not a lot of love on HN for Tim Ferriss, but his first book "The 4 Hour Work
Week" is a great discussion of the self-employed trap.

------
dave1619
It seems like the author built a good system for operations that required
little of his time, so he could focus on innovation. It's interesting that in
order to delegate operations, he had to build a system (or manual in this
case) to train people and keep standards consistent.

Derek - I'm curious how you handled innovation. Was it by yourself? Or did you
have a team for that?

~~~
sivers
The innovation was really just me.

It was usually just looking at places where our operations were very un-
optimized or ineffective, and figuring out a way to do it better.

That better way usually meant me programming some new aspect to the site, or
our in-house intranet systems that ran everything. But sometimes it led to a
whole new public-facing feature.

Examples:

<http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/02/14/3035318.html>

<http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/12/31/3116514.html>

<http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/07/31/4461455.html>

~~~
dave1619
In retrospect do you think you could have innovated better with a team? Or
would it have just distracted you?

~~~
sivers
I'm a natural introvert. I prefer to work alone.

It seems the 1% inspiration --> 99% perspiration ratio is kept, this way.

But really it's just that I like being alone.

------
cyrus_
I really like the advice about asking your employees to keep a manual where
answers are kept. Way better than trying to start with some sort of
comprehensive statement of principles.

------
KevBurnsJr
This level of communication is hugely important not just to employers but
employees as well.

I want to know that my boss trusts me enough to let me make these sorts of
decisions.

Bad managers will not bother to rise to this level of communication - or in
some cases will purposefully withhold it in order to maintain their dominance.

------
tristanperry
Great advise. And I too recommend The E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber; it's
definitely a great book and can really help to establish in one's mind the
right way to go about working _on_ your business and not _in_ it, a key
distinction.

------
markessien
One important thing in delegation, I find is to not fix things yourselves,
even when they would be easy to fix for you. Explain the theory behind it and
let them fix it themselves, next time they do it better.

Also, if you over-delegate, make sure you have properly consolidated power at
the top. When your employees get too independent, they start to get ideas
about creating their own company or they start refusing to take instructions.

------
tedroden
Love this idea. I build my entire business around it:
<http://www.fancyhands.com>

------
eliben
My experience is that this applies to "normal" management as well, not only
self-employed. A manager of a team above some size can't possible know and
control everything. Either he finds a way to delegate, or his team will be
disfunctional.

------
rokhayakebe
This is a technical problem. In companies the same questions get answered
forty times. I finally gave up and spent a weekend writing an app that fixed
the problem for me.

------
MrFlibble
Hire smart people and let them do their job. If you can, after a few weeks
break in period turn them loose and step back unless a serious problem arises.

Micromanagement = Macrofuckups

------
mise
How does the "micropreneur" achieve this?

Is it the cheap personal assistant?

Most things seem too technical for that, and I wouldn't want to be obliged
with hiring one for so many hours each week.

------
gord
Dereks post are invariably excellent..

Im sure Im not the only person expecting him to publish a physical book with
all these articles in one place.

Title?

------
maheshs
I read somewhere "If you are the candidate of work it is difficult to
delegate".

------
zeynel1
This seems a better explanation of "process" than attempted here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105>

------
mono
No need to read the article. The title is all you need to know!

------
mableflapster
hmm, this smells kind of familiar. Some of it is almost a direct quote from
page 110 of "4-hour workweek". Good advice for sure, but I question the
originality.

