The "Camcorder Method" bypasses writing SOPs. By recording a task, founders create a video asset that a new hire can watch, learn from, and then use to document the official process themselves. This confirms their comprehension and saves the founder's time.
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For a solo founder, documenting the brand's voice, tone, and strategy into a 'brand bible' or playbook is a critical pre-hiring step. This living document ensures that even a temporary or part-time hire can operate authentically, minimizing missteps and accelerating their impact.
Before hiring for a critical function, founders should do the job themselves, even if they aren't experts. The goal isn't mastery, but to deeply understand the role's challenges. This experience is crucial for setting a high hiring bar and being able to accurately assess if a candidate will truly up-level the team.
The most efficient delegation method is using your voice, which is 2-3 times faster than typing. By sending voice notes to an assistant between meetings to capture takeaways and action items, you can process work in real-time and prevent tasks from accumulating into a daunting end-of-day list.
Instead of traditional classroom training, Stone would take new salespeople on live sales calls. They'd observe him, attempt a pitch themselves, and receive immediate feedback. This rapid, immersive cycle built competence and confidence quickly, even for those without a college degree.
It is almost always faster and better to do a task yourself once. However, this is a trap. The "cardinal sin" is failing to invest the extra upfront effort to delegate and train someone, which unlocks compounded time savings and prevents you from ever having to do that task again.
Effective delegation isn't just handing off a task. It's about codifying your personal preferences and decision-making process into a repeatable algorithm. This allows an assistant to replicate your desired outcomes autonomously over time, moving beyond simple task completion to genuine leverage.
Don't wait for a large budget to learn delegation. Start with inexpensive tools like ChatGPT to practice offloading tasks and articulating needs. This 'ladder of leverage' allows you to build the core skill of delegating, making you far more effective when you eventually hire human assistants and chiefs of staff.
The young founder hired an experienced executive who became a mentor and effectively his boss. He learned more from observing this leader's actions—how he interacted with people and approached problems—than from direct instruction. This demonstrates the power of learning through osmosis from seasoned operators.
Founders often feel guilty delegating tasks they could do themselves. A powerful mental shift is to see delegation not as offloading work, but as providing a desirable, well-paying job to someone in the developing world who is eager for the opportunity.