There's one hire almost every SME owner has been avoiding for at least a year. Not because the business doesn't need it — because the owner has quietly decided they can't afford it, right before spending another week doing the job themselves instead of running the business. A 2023 study of US founders found they spend 36% of their working week on admin tasks — invoicing, scheduling, data entry, research — almost none of which is the reason they started the business in the first place.

Across more than 200 businesses Kevin has coached one-on-one, the owners stuck at the same revenue three years running almost always have one thing in common: they're still personally doing the job they should have handed off twelve months ago.

That sentence is true in the moment and ruinous over a year. The same research found 25% of founders say it's faster to do a task themselves than to hand it off, 27% keep tasks because they enjoy them, and 17% say they have no one to delegate to. Every one of those reasons is real — and every one of them is also how an owner ends up running a job instead of owning a business.

The research, a 2023 Time Etc / Censuswide survey of 251 US founders, also found founders with strong delegation habits ran businesses averaging roughly a third more revenue than founders who held on to everything. Delegation isn't a nice-to-have. It's a growth lever with a number attached.

Strategic coach Dan Sullivan and psychologist Dr. Benjamin Hardy built a simple reframe around this exact trap: when you hit a task you don't want to do, stop asking "how do I do this?" and start asking "who could do this for me?" The first question keeps you the bottleneck forever, because there's always another "how" to learn. The second question treats your time as the scarce resource it actually is.

Here's how to put it to work this week, with an AI-era twist: before you hire a human "who," check whether a tool is already a good enough "who" for the lowest-value slice of the task.

"What we achieved in the last 3 months working with Kevin would have taken 2 years. Kevin's assistance has been very inspirational to our staff. We have achieved changes and changes of thought patterns it could have taken 2 years in normal trading conditions."

— Chris, Global Culture

Owners almost always price the hire against their wage, not their value. A $30-an-hour admin task feels expensive to outsource when you're staring at a quiet bank balance — right up until you calculate what your own hour is worth doing the one thing only you can do: sell, lead, or decide. That reframing rarely happens alone, in the middle of a busy week. It's exactly the kind of outside, unemotional maths a coach brings to the table.

You get Kevin's big-brand thinking applied to your business, so the next dollar goes where it counts.

Be the owner who finally hands off the job you've been holding for a year, and spends your week on the work only you can do.