Susan Fennema:
Hi, my name is Susan Fennema, Chief Eradicating Officer, that’s “CEO” of Beyond the Chaos. I am based in McKinney, Texas, but our company serves nationally. I am one of the original founders who helped get Build.Grow.Learn. off the ground. That was a fun experience working with Joe and Brandon. Last year, I worked with Noella as she took over my operations role in that engagement.
I have been an operations leader for over 35 years. I am not increasing that number as I age. I have supported hundreds of small business owners through growth and scale. This year marks our 10-year anniversary, so we have extensive experience.
One big core problem I see when working with business owners is that the business owner’s growth requires a role shift. Most owners are buried in work they’ve outgrown. We start businesses because we are great at our trade and succeed in spite of ourselves. Now, we are buried under the weight of success, doing things we probably shouldn’t be doing anymore. This applies to leaders as well: if you’re not changing, you’re not scaling. Change is scary, but being comfortable means you’re not growing.
The biggest bottleneck happens when owners say, “I’ll just do it myself. It’s easier than giving it to someone else because I know how to do it.” Decisions pile up, limiting your ability to do revenue driving work, gain new clients, and help more people. It also limits your team’s growth, making them dependent on you and slowing their progress.
If you’re involved in everything, you have no strategic ownership of anything. Your head is down, focused on execution, instead of looking up to prepare for what’s coming. The costs are significant: slower growth, team dependency, frustration, burnout, and limited freedom. Many clients I’ve worked with haven’t taken a vacation in years, aren’t having dinner with family, and work all weekend. Businesses are started for freedom, but owners often find themselves trapped.
The question to ask: what are you still doing that your business should have outgrown you doing? We will dig into that next with an activity — an audit of your tasks.
Get a piece of paper or open a notebook. Take two minutes to write down five things you did in the past week. Examples: invoicing, project management, sales calls. Do it fast — I play the Jeopardy music in my head while people write.
Now classify your tasks into five categories:
- Revenue driving work (R): Sales calls, marketing plans, anything driving revenue.
- Leadership and strategy (L): Helping your team, making decisions, living out the vision.
- Operations and management (O): Building new processes, project management.
- Low value (X): Tasks that don’t fit into the other categories.
Let’s share examples. Beth has mostly operations tasks with one leadership. Andrew shared revenue-driving client work, two ops tasks like updating business address and bookkeeping, leadership strategy for internal training, and low value tasks: responding to emails. These exercises help identify where your time is spent.
Decision filters:
- Do yourself: Revenue-driving tasks that require your brain and set the strategy.
- Delegate: Repeatable tasks where consistency is more important than perfection.
- Delete: Low value tasks that have lost value or no longer move the needle.
Many owners are perfectionists. Delegation fails when you expect perfect execution. Low value tasks like email, bookkeeping, or day-to-day project management should be delegated. If delegation fails due to capacity, it’s a sign you need to hire. Bookkeeping, for example, can be outsourced inexpensively. You could hire a skilled assistant for $3–6 an hour. Brandon’s team can help with assistance.
Decide what to delete: identify your low value tasks and stop doing things that no longer move the needle. For example, maintaining six social media platforms when only one drives results. Consolidate messaging, update processes, and ensure actions align with what matters most.
Hiring decisions must consider skill gaps, capacity, and willingness. EOS refers to “get it, want it, capacity” as three critical elements for a role. Capacity combines time and ability to do the job. Hire the right person for the right seat at the right time.
Delegating now: One participant hired a contractor for client bookkeeping to focus on higher-level strategy. Beth manages project management but finds delegation challenging due to access and capacity issues. Not getting tasks done slows company scalability, income, and team morale.
Next three moves:
- Delegate one task: Block calendar time to create a process or make a video to hand off the task, especially for project management workflows that rely on you. Use Loom to show step-by-step execution and your expectations. Once done, move it into a project management tool.
- Identify the next role to hire: This may not be someone you can afford immediately. Consider future gaps and hire part-time, fractional, virtual, or contractor roles. Write the job description to ensure you find the right person.
- Schedule recurring reviews: Repeat this exercise monthly. Identify top tasks and sort them — delegate, delete the low value tasks, or handle yourself. Scaling is not about doing more, but firing yourself from doing the wrong things.
Even if your mission is simply helping people have better lives, growth and delegation allow you to serve more clients and free yourself for revenue driving work. Documenting processes is the first step; then streamline, template, and automate them. For example, a payroll process that took 5 hours was documented, reviewed, optimized, and reduced to 30 minutes without mistakes, saving $3,000 a month.
The hardest delegation challenges for owners often involve consulting-type tasks. Standardize your questions and process, record calls, and create templates so others can implement work without needing constant oversight. Sales and finance are often the last two things an owner should handle. Preparing your business for eventual transition or sale requires making yourself expendable in operational tasks while maintaining the vision.
Andrew Parks:
I’m curious, Susan, from your 35 years of experience, what have been the biggest impacts in delegation or tasks you waited too long to hand off?
Susan Fennema:
When I first started, I was good at asking the right questions to get the right direction — consulting work. The challenge was templatizing myself so others could execute. I recorded calls, created templates, and implemented a “ride along” process to train others. Over time, others could take over the work while I stayed focused on revenue driving strategy.
Andrew Parks:
How do you define lanes for delegation versus what stays on your plate?
Susan Fennema:
It’s important to document lanes clearly. For example, a contractor handles client bookkeeping while I focus on financial strategy. SOPs, project management, documentation, and clearly defined roles ensure nothing gets dropped and scale is sustainable.
Susan Fennema:
Remember: delegate, hire, delete, and repeat. Document processes, templatize, automate where possible, and use tools like Loom, Scribe, and AI to scale. Scaling isn’t about doing more yourself — it’s about freeing yourself to focus on revenue driving work and vision while empowering your team.
For resources, I offer a free owner activity spreadsheet at my site, and I will share slides and links if there are access issues — email me at susan@beyondthechaos.biz. Thank you for attending Build.Grow.Learn. 2025.