My clients are buying me. How do I delegate?

Where the question came from

A producer I coach pushed back on me this week. His clients are not buying a product. They are buying his brain and his consultative approach. He has a team that helps, but no matter how much he trains them, they will always think about things differently. So what did I think?

I absolutely agree that your client always starts by buying you. The conversations I have with the people I coach would not get replicated by somebody else I hired. They would just be different. But there are multiple levels to this.

There are levels to it

Take my own coaching. Say a client fires off an email: I'm really struggling. I could train my person to read that and know, that's an identity issue right there, let me remind him of what we built. Coordinating calendars? Somebody else can do that. Prepping for a question and reflecting back on all the notes? Somebody else could put that together. Every conversation I have had with a client is sitting in a Google Drive folder. Anybody could ask Claude or ChatGPT to go in and pull the past history.

They buy your ideas, not your execution

What people are really buying from you is your ideas. It's your intuition, your experience, your personality and your relationship that make them connect. Once they buy into that idea, how it gets implemented or executed, they don't know. That's just trusting you. If you build a team that can deliver what you promised the client, it doesn't matter who does it.

If it's a new strategy or a new idea, that's probably going to be you. That's what makes a great high-level consultant a high-level consultant: "All I do is sell these deals and then consult on strategy."

But I would bet a lot of what's tripping you up is the back and forth between the client and a vendor or a carrier, or the numbers. Somebody else can do 98% of that work most of the time. That's where you're fooling yourself a little bit, because anybody can do that. They may not approach it the same way.

You don't have to let go of all of it

This doesn't have to be wholesale. You can still look at it. It sounds like this: "I don't touch it until it's ready to be presented. Put it together, get it to me, and I'll do a final review. Then I'll either approve it and have you send it to the client so I can stay out of it, or I'll set up the call and talk to the client."

Start smaller than delegating everything. What are the most common menial tasks you get stuck in? Put an automatic rule on them: no matter what, I don't touch these anymore.

Time may be more important than perfection

For most of us it's not an issue of knowledge. We know what should be handed off. We really do think we can do it better. That feels awful to say, but it doesn't mean you're an awful person. It means you've done really well and been really successful. Let's say it's even true 75% of the time. I would rather it get done than put more stress on me to have to do it later.

And because of busyness and procrastination, there are times it's actually bad that you're the one doing this stuff. An account manager would actually be on it. Even if you do it amazingly when you do it, the fact that you put it off means you're not doing it as well as somebody else could. Time may be more important than perfection in the delivery.

On trust: the bar can't be "they do it as good as me." If you don't trust somebody, it should be because they intended to burn you or repeatedly burned you. If they made a mistake, you have to keep letting them make mistakes.

I hired my first part-time person eight years ago, and I've had to keep learning how to do this properly. Now I've built most of my systems and processes with AI, and I trust them 100%. That taught me something. It wasn't a matter of not trusting my people. I just hadn't given them the tools.

Change the promise up front

Do you know how many times I've let people down in my life because I overpromised with a good heart? I'll connect you with that person. I could refer you there. I can totally help you get that. Then I forget, or I just get busy, and it gets put off. So I've learned, for the most part, to stop even offering in the first place.

Start drawing better lines the moment you onboard a client. Probably baked into a lot of your language is: "If you need something, I'm here for you." That's not the right way to say it. It's: "If you need something, my team will be there for you." If you want to learn to build a rocket, as smart as he is, Elon is probably not the guy to sit and meet with. It's his lead engineer. Introduce your team: the specialists, the people who will always respond to an email and answer the phone.

Open the door a little farther over time

Put little checks in place. Right now it's only with certain people. Right now it's only certain things. Right now I need to review everything. Little by little, open that door a little farther. Eventually you don't need to see anything. Get to a place where your account manager gives you an update once a month on clients so you're not blindsided, and you meet with your client once a quarter.

You are going to keep building your book, and you will not be able to sustain it this way. Adding to your team won't help you at all if you're not willing to delegate more.

Where to start this week

Here's a great exercise. If you have Claude or Copilot connected to your inbox, ask it to scan your entire inbox and find the top 50 emails you could forward to an account manager right now. It will blow you away. It starts to relieve the pressure of "I have to do this all myself."

Then commit to a sprint. For the next 30 days, automatically default to delegating to the people you know you need to delegate to. If there's a handful you absolutely trust, start there.

If you own the agency and the whole pipeline still runs through you, it's the same trap one level up. More on that in how to stop being the pipeline.