6 ms·

Delegate or die: the self-employed trap

423 points by razin 16y ago

cyrus_ 16y ago
I really like the advice about asking your employees to keep a manual where answers are kept. Way better than trying to start with some sort of comprehensive statement of principles.
StavrosK 16y ago
To be honest, though, you already had 98% of the delegation problem solved. The biggest hurdle isn't telling employees "here's what we stand for, I trust you to make decisions according to our philosophy". The biggest hurdle is to actually find people you can trust with it. It sounds like you already had a team of competent, skilled people whom you just micromanaged, and then realised they were competent enough to act on their own and let them. This is trivial compared to actually finding such people (at least for me, I guess).
- sivers 16y ago
  Actually my hiring policy was ridiculous. Because I was "too busy to bother", I'd just ask my current employees if they had any friends that needed work. Someone always did, so I'd say, "Tell them to start tomorrow morning. $10/hr. Show them what to do." And that was that. To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in the warehouse. But I even did this same approach when I needed a CTO. ("Anyone have a friend who's good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK - tell him to start tomorrow.") But maybe that they were friends-of-friends helped with the trust part.
  - edanm 16y ago
    I wonder why hiring isn't done this way more often? Specifically the "friends-of-employees" approach.
    - StavrosK 16y ago
      I'm guessing it's because, in sivers' case, he didn't really need extremely skilled labour? Or maybe people just try to overoptimise when "good enough" will do very well.
    - kleinsch 16y ago
      Everywhere I've worked, the first step to hiring a new developer is to ask all the good developers if they have any friends that are also good and interested in work.
    - _delirium 16y ago
      It's relatively common for tech companies to try to encourage employees to recommend people, with a ~$500-$2k bonus if you refer a friend who ends up getting hired. Not sure if it's actively taken into account on the hiring-decision side, though, or if it's just seen as a way of getting in more applicants.
      - mnutt 16y ago
        The last company I worked for (hot startup in NYC) was offering a $10k bonus for referring a friend. Or at least that was what it was up to when I left, for all I know it could be higher now. It still beats the cost of a headhunter.
      - patrickk 16y ago
        Not just tech companies. Investment banks also. Probably many other industries too. As the cliché goes, "Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery".
      - bartonfink 16y ago
        From my perspective, most referral bonuses aren't big enough to make it worth my while to try to get a friend in the door. When I know that my referral saves them $20k on a headhunter fee, getting < 10% of that rubs me the same way a nickel-an-hour raise would.
        acangiano 16y ago
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    Second that strategy, I've used it to good effect. One but though, I also found one guy like that that wanted to bring his friends on board when there was a need for more people and they were simply not good enough and this led to him quitting as well.
  - jedberg 16y ago
    This is how youtube got most of their initial employees. Since all the core people were from PayPal, the first 100 or so people were pretty much all ex-PayPal. It worked out pretty well for them.
  - lsc 16y ago
    friends of employees have been my best hires. My very best employee was a friend of an employee who was looking for work. he ended up being better than the people I had known and worked with in the past. Random chance, maybe? but I think it works better than people think. I think employees put more thought in to it than we give them credit for when they are asked for recommendations. Don't we all know that one person who is really good but unemployed because s/he isn't very confident?
    - goombastic 16y ago
      Didn't work so well for us. My boss ended up hiring someone a team-member recommended off of LinkedIn. The new guy pretty much ended up making the team go bust because of stuff he did with clients. I later enquired with the guy who recommended him if he even knew the guy. Turns out, he was just an arbitrary LinkedIn connection with equally arbitrary recommendations. Sucked big time. My advice: figure out how well the team member knows the new guy before you decide. Also check if the guy doing the recommendation is doing it because of religion, language, or some other crap. Also, I don't hire team members' wives or boyfriends any more.
      - megrimlock 16y ago
        Yes. The majority of "recommendations" we receive were provided as a polite favor to someone's former co-worker, relative, neighbor, etc. These are rarely better than random applicants, perhaps because they trying to exploit social connections rather than relying on the strength of their work. It's important to sniff out these obligatory "Sure, I'll pass your resume on" recommendations from truly vouched-for "We must hire this person" statements that can be truly valuable. Also, be wary of recommendations from people who work in a different part of your company. They may think they understand what you do when they don't, and use up your time with unqualified recommendations. Learning how to politely decline can save a bunch of time.
      - lsc 16y ago
        "My advice: figure out how well the team member knows the new guy before you decide. Also check if the guy doing the recommendation is doing it because of religion, language, or some other crap. " seems like good advice to me. My "Best hire ever" was the roommate of someone who worked for me at the time, and, as usual I kinda eased into the relationship, with short and well-defined contract gigs at first. But yeah, it is important to know the motivation of the recommending employee, and to do some evaluation of your own. But in my experience, it's a pretty good place to start.
  - 16s 16y ago
    You sound like an awesome guy to work for! I love your hiring philosophy. No, I'm not joking ;)
  - banditaras 16y ago
    Our best hires are friends of our employees. In fact it works so well when we want to hire someone we think of job ads as a waste of time. And there is some explanation to that: Good employees (and you'll surely have one) have friends on the same level. If your company / environment / team is good then employees are happy and try to convince their friends to join so that they can work together. We have 17 employees and only 3 of them have been hired through job ads.
  - Jayasimhan 16y ago
    A tangential thought: I deeply appreciate the process of selecting the right people for the business. I also think that the idea of "random hiring" has some juice in it for small businesses. When someone goes through layers of interviews and then gets selected, their expectation from the company gets higher. They have a feel that they are the 'chosen one' for the job. But when someone is hired at random, he/she knows she is just filling an open slot. The expectations are low. Such employees can be moulded the way the organization wants him to perform. Also, This is even better than the interview process in one aspect, that it is not enough to prove the worth on the first day, but he/she now needs to sustain the performance level at the job.
  - rwhitman 16y ago
    I honestly think the current tech bubble will be sunk by how overly picky most startups are these days about hiring
  - robyates 16y ago
    Hiring friends-of-friends seems rather common actually, especially for startups and small companies. (This is the whole reason why people join LinkedIn, right?) From the job seekers' point-of-view, this is "It's not what you know, it's who you know." I'm all for recommendations, but sometimes it seems it's more about networking (i.e. having a good friend refer you) than about your actual skills. There are probably plenty of talented people out there who just don't have the right connections to get jobs.
  - kunley 16y ago
    This is actually how every small company I know started hiring when they've had less than 20 people. Seems the rule not the exception. At least in my country.
zeynel1 16y ago
This seems a better explanation of "process" than attempted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105
maheshs 16y ago
I read somewhere "If you are the candidate of work it is difficult to delegate".
dave1619 16y ago
It seems like the author built a good system for operations that required little of his time, so he could focus on innovation. It's interesting that in order to delegate operations, he had to build a system (or manual in this case) to train people and keep standards consistent. Derek - I'm curious how you handled innovation. Was it by yourself? Or did you have a team for that?
- sivers 16y ago
  The innovation was really just me. It was usually just looking at places where our operations were very un-optimized or ineffective, and figuring out a way to do it better. That better way usually meant me programming some new aspect to the site, or our in-house intranet systems that ran everything. But sometimes it led to a whole new public-facing feature. Examples: http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/02/14/3035318.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/02/14/3035318.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/12/31/3116514.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/12/31/3116514.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/07/31/4461455.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/07/31/4461455.html
  - dave1619 16y ago
    In retrospect do you think you could have innovated better with a team? Or would it have just distracted you?
    - sivers 16y ago
      I'm a natural introvert. I prefer to work alone. It seems the 1% inspiration --> 99% perspiration ratio is kept, this way. But really it's just that I like being alone.
stellar678 16y ago
What did you do to keep the manual clear and organized enough to be useful? Many companies I've worked with have an internal wiki for information like this, but things seem to go south pretty quickly and it becomes hard to distinguish stale content from relevant content.
- sivers 16y ago
  Actually, the new people learning it would clean it up. If they found anything hard to understand, we'd apologize and ask them to make it easier to understand for the next person. Since they had just felt the pain of it being unclear, they were in the best position to fix it.
- stefanobernardi 16y ago
  Next time I'll have this problem I'll probably start using something like http://www.mindquilt.com/ http://www.mindquilt.com/ I see so many questions getting asked each day and so much knowledge getting dispersed, tools like this could really make a company go faster imho.
tristanperry 16y ago
Great advise. And I too recommend The E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber; it's definitely a great book and can really help to establish in one's mind the right way to go about working on your business and not in it, a key distinction.
DevX101 16y ago
I agree with the importance of delegating, but perhaps the work-at-home, not getting any questions after two months was also related to a major employee problem Derek mentioned somewhere in another post: employees began to feel as if he was too distant, they were doing all the work, etc, etc. If I recall correctly, there was mutiny brewing among the employees and was the main reason he decided to sell the company. This doesn't take away from what I think is great advice in this post, but maybe those employee issues were inevitable side effects from the super-delegation approach.
- sivers 16y ago
  Yeah - different lesson, so different story. I learned, the hard way, that over-delegation can lead to abdication.
cookiecaper 16y ago
I learned about this at one of my old corporate employers. One of our local contractors was ostensibly doing very well, and I presume he was making a lot of money, but when he wanted to go on vacation, he couldn't leave for over eight months because of his obligations that he had to personally fulfill for clients. Seeing this and thinking about the futility of being self-employed in the name of freedom but running your business such that you are more trapped than a normal "working-for-the-man job" in almost every sense, I decided I would always delegate aggressively when I had the opportunity to do so in my own businesses. What's the point in having millions of dollars if you have never the time to enjoy any of it? Also, a company that is overly dependent on one individual is unable to ever exceed the capacity of that individual; he becomes a bottleneck that slows (usually to a complete stop) the growth of the whole company. In a few years when he finally cracks, the whole thing goes down with him. I'm glad Derek found this out before it all collapsed; many business owners don't.
KevBurnsJr 16y ago
This level of communication is hugely important not just to employers but employees as well. I want to know that my boss trusts me enough to let me make these sorts of decisions. Bad managers will not bother to rise to this level of communication - or in some cases will purposefully withhold it in order to maintain their dominance.
rokhayakebe 16y ago
This is a technical problem. In companies the same questions get answered forty times. I finally gave up and spent a weekend writing an app that fixed the problem for me.
melvinram 16y ago
Sivers, I'm in the process of doing this exact thing myself. I'm creating on average 5 training videos a day since my business is pretty much all web and information based. I've already started being a lot more productive. One thing that I hadn't thought of was having them create the training themselves. The first draft of these videos are fairly crude as it's mostly a brain dump and I'm figuring out the best way to explain what is in my head. This means sometimes I spend 15-20 mins to create a 5 minute video or 2 hrs to create a 22 min one (example from yesterday) when you take into account retakes and editing. I could just create a crude one and just have them create the clean version after they learn it. It would save me at least an hour a day. Not too shabby. Thanks for that. Mel
- johnohara 16y ago
  Do you script your dialog or roll free?
  - melvinram 16y ago
    First draft is always free roll. For 2nd (and usually final draft), I create an outline which I use as a visual inside the video itself. This part is just inside Textmate with the font size increased to like 20px or something gigantic. The narration is always on the roll but I usually remember the phrasing from the first draft and only tweak what needs changing.
seltzered 16y ago
Derek, you've been a huge inspiration for me, but I remember hearing you say at a conference that your employees started to hate you a while after working remotely -- to the point that you shutoff the website for a few hours to realize you needed to sell the company. Do you have any thoughts on what can be done to keep rappore up amongst employees in the office while still working remotely? NOTE: sorry I don't remember where you said it, might've been towards the end of your lessconf presentation http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-sivers-speaks-at-lessconf2009 http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-sivers-speaks-at-...
- JayNeely 16y ago
  I'm not Derek, but as a remote-working team member for a business that has many other remote-working team members, this is a similar problem I've been trying to solve by encouraging use of a private twitter-like network through Status.net (free) or Yammer (paid). It provides that ambient awareness of what coworkers are up to / thinking about, gives you an easy way of soliciting helpful but non-essential feedback without adding to email overload, and allows for realtime information sharing. It's potentially a good substitute for in-office community when that's not an option.
  - seltzered 16y ago
    Good to know. I know some other companies (e.g. Facebook) use IRC as another way to keep folks communicating. I've been in a position where I've practically been a one-man software team for half a decade, but my boss has basically told me I can't work remotely even though a couple other senior folks do. I've tried helping ease the fear of me not being there by creating canned responses for other coworkers to follow, and getting a support system in place. New plan now though is to bleed a little, find a new job, and opt to not work remotely ONLY if I'm going to gain a good mentoring/apprenticeship experience from the people I work with.
- sivers 16y ago
  Yeah, that's a different story I'll figure out how to properly tell some day as a lesson in what NOT to do. I'm still trying to extract some lessons from that and think what should have been done differently. But if an employee has low morale, (whether working remotely or not), I'd only suggest this: Is there another job inside the company they'd rather be doing? If so, help them do that. If not, let them know it's time to go! Many people will need a push out the door, for their own good, if they're in a rut. Give them clear warning, of course, in case they're in a temporary rut, let them know that this low-morale rut may cost them their job. But if they're still in a funk after months, you've tried to help but it's not helping, and it's hurting business, then let them go. I had to fire a few people in this situation, including my VP!, and most told me a year later that it was the best thing for them. That they really were in a rut and needed to be pushed.
mono 16y ago
No need to read the article. The title is all you need to know!
mableflapster 16y ago
hmm, this smells kind of familiar. Some of it is almost a direct quote from page 110 of "4-hour workweek". Good advice for sure, but I question the originality.
gord 16y ago
Dereks post are invariably excellent.. Im sure Im not the only person expecting him to publish a physical book with all these articles in one place. Title?
markessien 16y ago
One important thing in delegation, I find is to not fix things yourselves, even when they would be easy to fix for you. Explain the theory behind it and let them fix it themselves, next time they do it better. Also, if you over-delegate, make sure you have properly consolidated power at the top. When your employees get too independent, they start to get ideas about creating their own company or they start refusing to take instructions.
beagle3 16y ago
Not a lot of love on HN for Tim Ferriss, but his first book "The 4 Hour Work Week" is a great discussion of the self-employed trap.
tedroden 16y ago
Love this idea. I build my entire business around it: http://www.fancyhands.com http://www.fancyhands.com
MrFlibble 16y ago
Hire smart people and let them do their job. If you can, after a few weeks break in period turn them loose and step back unless a serious problem arises. Micromanagement = Macrofuckups
eliben 16y ago
My experience is that this applies to "normal" management as well, not only self-employed. A manager of a team above some size can't possible know and control everything. Either he finds a way to delegate, or his team will be disfunctional.
mise 16y ago
How does the "micropreneur" achieve this? Is it the cheap personal assistant? Most things seem too technical for that, and I wouldn't want to be obliged with hiring one for so many hours each week.

423 points by razin 16y ago

I really like the advice about asking your employees to keep a manual where answers are kept. Way better than trying to start with some sort of comprehensive statement of principles.

StavrosK 16y ago

To be honest, though, you already had 98% of the delegation problem solved. The biggest hurdle isn't telling employees "here's what we stand for, I trust you to make decisions according to our philosophy". The biggest hurdle is to actually find people you can trust with it. It sounds like you already had a team of competent, skilled people whom you just micromanaged, and then realised they were competent enough to act on their own and let them. This is trivial compared to actually finding such people (at least for me, I guess).

sivers 16y ago
Actually my hiring policy was ridiculous. Because I was "too busy to bother", I'd just ask my current employees if they had any friends that needed work. Someone always did, so I'd say, "Tell them to start tomorrow morning. $10/hr. Show them what to do." And that was that. To be fair, this was a mail-order CD store, so most of my employees were in the warehouse. But I even did this same approach when I needed a CTO. ("Anyone have a friend who's good with Linux? Yeah? Is he cool? OK - tell him to start tomorrow.") But maybe that they were friends-of-friends helped with the trust part.
- edanm 16y ago
  I wonder why hiring isn't done this way more often? Specifically the "friends-of-employees" approach.
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    I'm guessing it's because, in sivers' case, he didn't really need extremely skilled labour? Or maybe people just try to overoptimise when "good enough" will do very well.
  - kleinsch 16y ago
    Everywhere I've worked, the first step to hiring a new developer is to ask all the good developers if they have any friends that are also good and interested in work.
  - _delirium 16y ago
    It's relatively common for tech companies to try to encourage employees to recommend people, with a ~$500-$2k bonus if you refer a friend who ends up getting hired. Not sure if it's actively taken into account on the hiring-decision side, though, or if it's just seen as a way of getting in more applicants.
    - mnutt 16y ago
      The last company I worked for (hot startup in NYC) was offering a $10k bonus for referring a friend. Or at least that was what it was up to when I left, for all I know it could be higher now. It still beats the cost of a headhunter.
    - patrickk 16y ago
      Not just tech companies. Investment banks also. Probably many other industries too. As the cliché goes, "Imitation Is The Best Form Of Flattery".
    - bartonfink 16y ago
      From my perspective, most referral bonuses aren't big enough to make it worth my while to try to get a friend in the door. When I know that my referral saves them $20k on a headhunter fee, getting < 10% of that rubs me the same way a nickel-an-hour raise would.
      - acangiano 16y ago
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Second that strategy, I've used it to good effect. One but though, I also found one guy like that that wanted to bring his friends on board when there was a need for more people and they were simply not good enough and this led to him quitting as well.
- jedberg 16y ago
  This is how youtube got most of their initial employees. Since all the core people were from PayPal, the first 100 or so people were pretty much all ex-PayPal. It worked out pretty well for them.
- lsc 16y ago
  friends of employees have been my best hires. My very best employee was a friend of an employee who was looking for work. he ended up being better than the people I had known and worked with in the past. Random chance, maybe? but I think it works better than people think. I think employees put more thought in to it than we give them credit for when they are asked for recommendations. Don't we all know that one person who is really good but unemployed because s/he isn't very confident?
  - goombastic 16y ago
    Didn't work so well for us. My boss ended up hiring someone a team-member recommended off of LinkedIn. The new guy pretty much ended up making the team go bust because of stuff he did with clients. I later enquired with the guy who recommended him if he even knew the guy. Turns out, he was just an arbitrary LinkedIn connection with equally arbitrary recommendations. Sucked big time. My advice: figure out how well the team member knows the new guy before you decide. Also check if the guy doing the recommendation is doing it because of religion, language, or some other crap. Also, I don't hire team members' wives or boyfriends any more.
    - megrimlock 16y ago
      Yes. The majority of "recommendations" we receive were provided as a polite favor to someone's former co-worker, relative, neighbor, etc. These are rarely better than random applicants, perhaps because they trying to exploit social connections rather than relying on the strength of their work. It's important to sniff out these obligatory "Sure, I'll pass your resume on" recommendations from truly vouched-for "We must hire this person" statements that can be truly valuable. Also, be wary of recommendations from people who work in a different part of your company. They may think they understand what you do when they don't, and use up your time with unqualified recommendations. Learning how to politely decline can save a bunch of time.
    - lsc 16y ago
      "My advice: figure out how well the team member knows the new guy before you decide. Also check if the guy doing the recommendation is doing it because of religion, language, or some other crap. " seems like good advice to me. My "Best hire ever" was the roommate of someone who worked for me at the time, and, as usual I kinda eased into the relationship, with short and well-defined contract gigs at first. But yeah, it is important to know the motivation of the recommending employee, and to do some evaluation of your own. But in my experience, it's a pretty good place to start.
- 16s 16y ago
  You sound like an awesome guy to work for! I love your hiring philosophy. No, I'm not joking ;)
- banditaras 16y ago
  Our best hires are friends of our employees. In fact it works so well when we want to hire someone we think of job ads as a waste of time. And there is some explanation to that: Good employees (and you'll surely have one) have friends on the same level. If your company / environment / team is good then employees are happy and try to convince their friends to join so that they can work together. We have 17 employees and only 3 of them have been hired through job ads.
- Jayasimhan 16y ago
  A tangential thought: I deeply appreciate the process of selecting the right people for the business. I also think that the idea of "random hiring" has some juice in it for small businesses. When someone goes through layers of interviews and then gets selected, their expectation from the company gets higher. They have a feel that they are the 'chosen one' for the job. But when someone is hired at random, he/she knows she is just filling an open slot. The expectations are low. Such employees can be moulded the way the organization wants him to perform. Also, This is even better than the interview process in one aspect, that it is not enough to prove the worth on the first day, but he/she now needs to sustain the performance level at the job.
- rwhitman 16y ago
  I honestly think the current tech bubble will be sunk by how overly picky most startups are these days about hiring
- robyates 16y ago
  Hiring friends-of-friends seems rather common actually, especially for startups and small companies. (This is the whole reason why people join LinkedIn, right?) From the job seekers' point-of-view, this is "It's not what you know, it's who you know." I'm all for recommendations, but sometimes it seems it's more about networking (i.e. having a good friend refer you) than about your actual skills. There are probably plenty of talented people out there who just don't have the right connections to get jobs.
- kunley 16y ago
  This is actually how every small company I know started hiring when they've had less than 20 people. Seems the rule not the exception. At least in my country.

zeynel1 16y ago

This seems a better explanation of "process" than attempted here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131105

maheshs 16y ago

I read somewhere "If you are the candidate of work it is difficult to delegate".

dave1619 16y ago

It seems like the author built a good system for operations that required little of his time, so he could focus on innovation. It's interesting that in order to delegate operations, he had to build a system (or manual in this case) to train people and keep standards consistent. Derek - I'm curious how you handled innovation. Was it by yourself? Or did you have a team for that?

sivers 16y ago
The innovation was really just me. It was usually just looking at places where our operations were very un-optimized or ineffective, and figuring out a way to do it better. That better way usually meant me programming some new aspect to the site, or our in-house intranet systems that ran everything. But sometimes it led to a whole new public-facing feature. Examples: http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/02/14/3035318.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/02/14/3035318.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/12/31/3116514.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/04/12/31/3116514.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/07/31/4461455.html http://cdbaby.org/stories/06/07/31/4461455.html
- dave1619 16y ago
  In retrospect do you think you could have innovated better with a team? Or would it have just distracted you?
  - sivers 16y ago
    I'm a natural introvert. I prefer to work alone. It seems the 1% inspiration --> 99% perspiration ratio is kept, this way. But really it's just that I like being alone.

stellar678 16y ago

What did you do to keep the manual clear and organized enough to be useful? Many companies I've worked with have an internal wiki for information like this, but things seem to go south pretty quickly and it becomes hard to distinguish stale content from relevant content.

sivers 16y ago
Actually, the new people learning it would clean it up. If they found anything hard to understand, we'd apologize and ask them to make it easier to understand for the next person. Since they had just felt the pain of it being unclear, they were in the best position to fix it.
stefanobernardi 16y ago
Next time I'll have this problem I'll probably start using something like http://www.mindquilt.com/ http://www.mindquilt.com/ I see so many questions getting asked each day and so much knowledge getting dispersed, tools like this could really make a company go faster imho.

tristanperry 16y ago

Great advise. And I too recommend The E-Myth Revisted by Michael Gerber; it's definitely a great book and can really help to establish in one's mind the right way to go about working on your business and not in it, a key distinction.

DevX101 16y ago

I agree with the importance of delegating, but perhaps the work-at-home, not getting any questions after two months was also related to a major employee problem Derek mentioned somewhere in another post: employees began to feel as if he was too distant, they were doing all the work, etc, etc. If I recall correctly, there was mutiny brewing among the employees and was the main reason he decided to sell the company. This doesn't take away from what I think is great advice in this post, but maybe those employee issues were inevitable side effects from the super-delegation approach.

sivers 16y ago
Yeah - different lesson, so different story. I learned, the hard way, that over-delegation can lead to abdication.

cookiecaper 16y ago

I learned about this at one of my old corporate employers. One of our local contractors was ostensibly doing very well, and I presume he was making a lot of money, but when he wanted to go on vacation, he couldn't leave for over eight months because of his obligations that he had to personally fulfill for clients. Seeing this and thinking about the futility of being self-employed in the name of freedom but running your business such that you are more trapped than a normal "working-for-the-man job" in almost every sense, I decided I would always delegate aggressively when I had the opportunity to do so in my own businesses. What's the point in having millions of dollars if you have never the time to enjoy any of it? Also, a company that is overly dependent on one individual is unable to ever exceed the capacity of that individual; he becomes a bottleneck that slows (usually to a complete stop) the growth of the whole company. In a few years when he finally cracks, the whole thing goes down with him. I'm glad Derek found this out before it all collapsed; many business owners don't.

KevBurnsJr 16y ago

This level of communication is hugely important not just to employers but employees as well. I want to know that my boss trusts me enough to let me make these sorts of decisions. Bad managers will not bother to rise to this level of communication - or in some cases will purposefully withhold it in order to maintain their dominance.

rokhayakebe 16y ago

This is a technical problem. In companies the same questions get answered forty times. I finally gave up and spent a weekend writing an app that fixed the problem for me.

melvinram 16y ago

Sivers, I'm in the process of doing this exact thing myself. I'm creating on average 5 training videos a day since my business is pretty much all web and information based. I've already started being a lot more productive. One thing that I hadn't thought of was having them create the training themselves. The first draft of these videos are fairly crude as it's mostly a brain dump and I'm figuring out the best way to explain what is in my head. This means sometimes I spend 15-20 mins to create a 5 minute video or 2 hrs to create a 22 min one (example from yesterday) when you take into account retakes and editing. I could just create a crude one and just have them create the clean version after they learn it. It would save me at least an hour a day. Not too shabby. Thanks for that. Mel

johnohara 16y ago
Do you script your dialog or roll free?
- melvinram 16y ago
  First draft is always free roll. For 2nd (and usually final draft), I create an outline which I use as a visual inside the video itself. This part is just inside Textmate with the font size increased to like 20px or something gigantic. The narration is always on the roll but I usually remember the phrasing from the first draft and only tweak what needs changing.

seltzered 16y ago

Derek, you've been a huge inspiration for me, but I remember hearing you say at a conference that your employees started to hate you a while after working remotely -- to the point that you shutoff the website for a few hours to realize you needed to sell the company. Do you have any thoughts on what can be done to keep rappore up amongst employees in the office while still working remotely? NOTE: sorry I don't remember where you said it, might've been towards the end of your lessconf presentation http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-sivers-speaks-at-lessconf2009 http://b.lesseverything.com/2010/2/3/derek-sivers-speaks-at-...

JayNeely 16y ago
I'm not Derek, but as a remote-working team member for a business that has many other remote-working team members, this is a similar problem I've been trying to solve by encouraging use of a private twitter-like network through Status.net (free) or Yammer (paid). It provides that ambient awareness of what coworkers are up to / thinking about, gives you an easy way of soliciting helpful but non-essential feedback without adding to email overload, and allows for realtime information sharing. It's potentially a good substitute for in-office community when that's not an option.
- seltzered 16y ago
  Good to know. I know some other companies (e.g. Facebook) use IRC as another way to keep folks communicating. I've been in a position where I've practically been a one-man software team for half a decade, but my boss has basically told me I can't work remotely even though a couple other senior folks do. I've tried helping ease the fear of me not being there by creating canned responses for other coworkers to follow, and getting a support system in place. New plan now though is to bleed a little, find a new job, and opt to not work remotely ONLY if I'm going to gain a good mentoring/apprenticeship experience from the people I work with.
sivers 16y ago
Yeah, that's a different story I'll figure out how to properly tell some day as a lesson in what NOT to do. I'm still trying to extract some lessons from that and think what should have been done differently. But if an employee has low morale, (whether working remotely or not), I'd only suggest this: Is there another job inside the company they'd rather be doing? If so, help them do that. If not, let them know it's time to go! Many people will need a push out the door, for their own good, if they're in a rut. Give them clear warning, of course, in case they're in a temporary rut, let them know that this low-morale rut may cost them their job. But if they're still in a funk after months, you've tried to help but it's not helping, and it's hurting business, then let them go. I had to fire a few people in this situation, including my VP!, and most told me a year later that it was the best thing for them. That they really were in a rut and needed to be pushed.

mono 16y ago

No need to read the article. The title is all you need to know!

mableflapster 16y ago

hmm, this smells kind of familiar. Some of it is almost a direct quote from page 110 of "4-hour workweek". Good advice for sure, but I question the originality.

gord 16y ago

Dereks post are invariably excellent.. Im sure Im not the only person expecting him to publish a physical book with all these articles in one place. Title?

markessien 16y ago

One important thing in delegation, I find is to not fix things yourselves, even when they would be easy to fix for you. Explain the theory behind it and let them fix it themselves, next time they do it better. Also, if you over-delegate, make sure you have properly consolidated power at the top. When your employees get too independent, they start to get ideas about creating their own company or they start refusing to take instructions.

beagle3 16y ago

Not a lot of love on HN for Tim Ferriss, but his first book "The 4 Hour Work Week" is a great discussion of the self-employed trap.

tedroden 16y ago

Love this idea. I build my entire business around it: http://www.fancyhands.com http://www.fancyhands.com

MrFlibble 16y ago

Hire smart people and let them do their job. If you can, after a few weeks break in period turn them loose and step back unless a serious problem arises. Micromanagement = Macrofuckups

eliben 16y ago

My experience is that this applies to "normal" management as well, not only self-employed. A manager of a team above some size can't possible know and control everything. Either he finds a way to delegate, or his team will be disfunctional.

mise 16y ago

How does the "micropreneur" achieve this? Is it the cheap personal assistant? Most things seem too technical for that, and I wouldn't want to be obliged with hiring one for so many hours each week.