Two years ago I got my first book ghostwritten by a team of Islamic scholars and ghost-published by a big-titty midwestern Christian woman. I did another a year later. The book ideas were mine and my name’s on the cover, but I didn’t do any of the work.
Six months ago I hired Judy, my community manager, and she’s taken like 80% of the work of running Copyskills off my plate.
Four months ago I told Irshad, my brother and business partner in Dropkick Copy, to take over all the marketing for the agency. We fleshed out our entire website, adding 20+ essential pages I’d been putting off for years. And we’re publishing and repurposing a new YouTube video weekly (we published one yesterday go look it up). Irshad also found an editor to handle all the post-production, so he can focus on ideas, scripts and repurposing.
Over the past 5 months, I’ve launched 4 courses. I did the work for only one of those. The remainder were handled by partners. Now I have assets I can sell over and over again. And I’ve got two more in the pipeline – the next one’s about AI 😉
I hate delegating. Even though I know all the self-help teachings like “who, not how” and “80% of ‘not you’ is amazing”, and I know logically they’re correct, I’ve resisted. I’m not the most productive guy and rate myself average in that regard, but nearly everyone I’ve worked with has been slower than me, has less attention to detail, and does not give as much of a sh*t as I do. You cannot coach give-a-sh*t. People either have it or they don’t.
But I got a taste of delegation. Now I don’t want to work any other way. The ghostwriting project was my first successful attempt. A complete accident, but that’s a story for another day. Once I experienced it for myself – “Hold up, you mean to tell me other people can do ALL the work and it only costs me MONEY?” – there was no going back.
I’m currently in the middle of one of those delegation projects. The only work I did here was negotiating a deal, setting up a funnel – all templated and SOP’ed – and pressing a button to turn on the sales promotion. Then I sat back and watched the sales come in. It’s a beautiful feeling.