How to delegate effectively: 6 proven strategies from building a $6-figure agency
I haven't been more passionate about hiring virtual assistants than I am now.
When I started my marketing agency back in 2021, I did what I knew at the time: I hired everyone full-time. Looking back, the logic seemed airtight. We had leads and clients lined up, the revenue was guaranteed, and I was confident we'd manage the expenses because we had the income to support it.
How we started
The 2 years felt like a success. We made $six-figures in sales in our first 6 months, the team was growing, clients were happy, and I felt like I was building my dream business.
But then something unexpected happened. The expenses ballooned. And they grew almost as fast as our revenue, which meant our profit margin was constantly shrinking. I was running faster and faster just to stay in place. The operational costs mounted: salaries, benefits, taxes, office overhead, and management infrastructure. I eventually found myself buried under both the literal costs and the invisible managerial overhead that came with managing full-time employees.
I had confused growth with profit, and revenue with success.
Here's something founders don't talk about enough: when people start working full-time for you, something fundamental shifts in their behavior, and in yours. Expectations change on both sides: Employees expect stability, predictability, benefits, professional development, career pathing. There's an implicit psychological contract that gets signed the moment someone goes full-time. And while that's not inherently bad, it creates fixed costs and inflexibility at a stage when most businesses need both agility and lean operations.
That's when I realized, maybe the problem wasn't the people I hired. Maybe it was the structure I hired them into.
Test before committing
This is where my thinking completely shifted. Instead of hiring full-time immediately, I started working with team members on a part-time or contractual basis first. This simple change solved multiple problems at once:
First, it gave me time to truly evaluate whether someone was a good fit, not just for the role, but for our culture and working style. It's easy to make a good impression in an interview. It's much harder to sustain that over months of real work, under real pressure, with real complexity.
Second, it allowed potential team members to evaluate whether they actually wanted to work with me. Too many people accept full-time offers thinking they'll love the role, only to realise weeks in that it's not what they expected.
Third, and most pragmatically, it kept our cost structure flexible. We could scale up and down based on actual workload and revenue, not on hiring optimism.
The bigger pivot
By 2024, I was running a lean, efficient operation. But I kept thinking about all the founders I knew, solopreneurs, small to medium enterprises, even early-stage startups, who were facing the exact same problem I had faced. They were hiring full-time too early. They were drowning in overhead. They couldn't afford dedicated team members, yet they desperately needed help.
That's when I had my lightbulb moment: my marketing agency was fun to run, but it wasn't my real value. My real value was what I'd learned about building lean, scalable teams through strategic delegation and hiring.
So in 2025, I completely flipped the model. What started as a marketing agency is now a talent agency, helping founders hire Marketing Specialists and Virtual Assistants. Why? Because I genuinely believe VAs are the secret weapon for solopreneurs and SMEs. They're flexible, scalable, and cost-effective. And when you hire them right and manage them well, they can do 80% of the work that a full-time employee does at a fraction of the cost.
But the VA piece was just the symptom of a larger philosophy I'd developed about how to lead, communicate, and delegate effectively.
My mindset shift
The seed for this entire transformation was planted back in 2022. I was on a plane, and I listened to a Tim Ferriss interview with Sam Corcos, the founder of Levels, a metabolic health company. I replayed that interview three times, each time writing more notes.
In that conversation, Sam shared insights about leadership, communication, and organisational structure that fundamentally shifted how I think about building teams. A few specific lessons stood out and became the foundation for everything I do now, and I’m happy to share them with you:
Six leadership principles that transform teams:
1. Treat your team like adults
This sounds obvious, but it's rare in practice. Most organisations, especially younger ones, operate on a management style that borders on parental. We handhold employees through every step, we second-guess their decisions and we create permission structures where they need approval for everything. Then, when they make a mistake (which they inevitably will because they're not trusted to make decisions) we get frustrated.
But let’s remember: we hired professionals. They have skills, experience, and judgment. When you treat them like children, they perform like children. When you treat them like adults capable of independent thought, something shifts. They step up.
The shift from "Can you do this?" to "Here's the context; I trust you to figure out how" is massive. It changes the entire dynamic of the relationship.
2. Close the loop
This is something David Allen, the productivity guru behind "Getting Things Done," calls managing your "open loops." Your brain is designed for having ideas, not for holding them. Every incomplete conversation, every unresolved task, every unclear status update creates a mental burden that drains energy and reduces clarity.
When you leave loops open at work (ex., a task that's been assigned but never confirmed as complete, a decision that was discussed but never finalised, a deliverable that was sent but never acknowledged), both you and your team members stay partially mentally engaged with that task. It's like having a browser tab open forever.
So again, let’s always close the loop. When a task is complete, update the person who needs to know. When a decision is made, confirm it's understood. When feedback is given, confirm how it will be implemented. This simple discipline eliminates so much unnecessary cognitive overhead.
3. Lack of communication brings lack of performance
This might be the most important principle on this list. So many performance issues that look like competence problems are actually communication problems. The employee wasn't lazy, they just didn't understand the full context.
The antidote is to overcommunicate with context, not with condescension.
Bad example: "Hey, can you send that report to the client by the end of the day?"
Good example: "Hey, can you send the updated sales performance report to the client by end of day? I need you to include Q3 numbers, double-check all CRM data against the source files, and add a note that this is specifically for their board meeting tomorrow, they'll be presenting to investors."
The difference between these two isn't just the extra words. The second version provides context that builds competence. Your team member now understands the why behind the task. They know what level of quality is required and what it's being used for. They can make intelligent decisions about priorities and execution.
4. Memo vs. meeting culture
Sam Corcos and Jeff Bezos (at Amazon) championed this approach, and it's something most organisations get completely backwards. The instinct is to call a meeting to share information. A quick sync call, a rapid alignment session, “just 30 minutes of your time”.
Except that those 30-minute meetings multiply, interrupting deep work. They require everyone to be present at the same time, which breaks focus and violates time zones and different working styles.
The better approach is to use memos for sharing context, reasoning, and background information, and to hold meetings only when you need to make a decision or align in real time on something that requires dialogue.
When you start using memos for what memos are good for, something remarkable happens. People actually read and absorb the information more carefully. They have time to think, and can share asynchronously if they have questions. PLUS, you create a written record of your reasoning and decisions, which makes it far easier to avoid the classic game of “pass the message.”
Meetings should be purposeful and dedicated to making decisions, not the default communication tool.
5. Think by writing
This is in relation to the memo culture. Writing is a discipline that separates clear leaders from confused ones. If you can't clearly write your thoughts, you haven't thought clearly yet. Writing forces precision, and organising your ideas in a logical sequence. This is why I now require memos for strategy, not just for communication. The act of writing is where the real thinking happens. If you can't write a clear memo about your strategy, your strategy probably isn't clear.
6. Embrace asynchronous communication
This is the counterintuitive secret to scaling a team. Most leaders think that good communication means constant real-time contact. Slack messages are answered instantly, calls are scheduled immediately, and everyone in the same time zone works the same hours. But that's actually terrible for trust and autonomy. It's a form of micromanagement disguised as communication.
Real trust looks like this: you explain the task, provide context, set the deadline, and then let your team member work independently. They don't need to check in with you constantly, nor do they need approval for every micro-decision. They deliver the work, and you review it.
Asynchronous communication also respects different working styles and time zones. Not everyone does their best work between 9 and 5. Some people are night owls. Some have childcare responsibilities. Some work best in deep, uninterrupted blocks. When you embrace async communication, you unlock all of that potential.
Putting It All Together: The New Model
These six principles inform everything about how I now hire and manage teams. It's why I moved away from full-time hires and toward part-time and VAs. The irony is that this approach isn't new. The best leaders have been doing this for decades. I'm just finally following their playbook instead of reinventing the wheel. That's the mindset shift that changed everything for me.
Ready to Build Your Lean Team?
If you're ready to start delegating to a Virtual Assistant but aren't sure where to begin, I've created something that might help.
Download the FREE Executive Delegation Playbook: 50 Tasks to Delegate to Your Virtual Assistant
This playbook breaks down exactly which tasks are worth delegating, organized by impact and complexity. Instead of guessing what to offload, you'll immediately identify the highest-impact tasks that are eating your time and preventing you from doing what only you can do.
Whether you're a solopreneur drowning in admin work, an agency owner buried in operations, or a founder scaling your first hire, this playbook will show you the exact tasks that made the biggest difference in my business, and in the dozens of other founders I've worked with.
