“If you personally want to grow as fast as your company, you have to give away your job every couple months.”

Molly Graham

If we begin solving any new puzzle in our companies with the intention that we’re going to give that job away in 3 months, then we set about solving it differently.

We no longer just need to solve the problem and acquire tacit competence ourselves, we need to discover the simplest repeatable recipe that solves that problem every time, capture that recipe, then hand it over to someone else.

In essence, our job as entrepreneurs becomes that of ‘Recipe Discovery’.

Once the recipe for a given problem is known, we should give that job away and no longer be involved with that problem.

This mindset can guide our approach to hiring and on-boarding. Many entrepreneurs struggle with hiring and delegation. That struggle might be because we don’t have any clear recipes to hand over, and thus all the competence is stuck inside our heads.

If we have a recipe book to hand over, then hiring and delegation become easier because we have a very specific recipe our delegate needs to follow, and we can asses their attributes and outcomes against our recipe.

Without a recipe to hand over, we’re not delegating, we’re abdicating. If we abdicate then we cannot complain that things didn’t go according to plan because there was no plan.