Alex never wanted a team; being solo was the identity, and a $1M solo business felt rare in a way a $1M business with staff never would. This book is the story of surrendering that identity and discovering that a team is less an org chart than a machine you constantly maintain against decay.
Delegation, the fourth lever
For most of the journey Alex had three moves for any task: eliminate it, automate it, or do it himself. Hiring Nneka, a Philippines-based virtual assistant, unlocked a fourth: delegate. It was for everything that fell between the other three, the work too messy to automate cleanly but too repetitive to keep doing by hand.
The hard-won texture is in where delegation actually works. Daily and weekly tasks were the sweet spot, because the feedback loop was fast and frequent enough to catch errors, correct them, and not forget. Quarterly, yearly, and one-off tasks were better done himself. Personal life should not be delegated at all; outsourcing gifts and travel produced weird presents to family, a flight into one city while the hotel sat in another, and a hostel too bad to sleep in. Text and image instructions beat video every time, because he could edit a document, swap a screenshot, and search it, none of which video allows.
Several rules emerged that cut against founder instinct. Not everything that can be automated should be; some automations grew so brittle they broke constantly, and a human was more reliable, or a human could finish the last 10% an automation started. Not everything that can be strictly defined should be, because rigid definitions froze quality on tasks like client campaigns whose whole point was to keep improving. And you should not delegate as fast as possible; sometimes only the third or fourth time doing a task did he realize it could be done completely differently, automated, or dropped. Some things resist delegation entirely: going through the numbers manually every week sparked ideas and fired him up in a way automation never did, like insisting on lifting the weights yourself rather than bringing a crane.
The abstraction gradient of instruction
The most structural insight is that the further up the delegation ladder you go, the more abstract the instructions become, and this maps almost perfectly onto the hires. Tech automations were brutally literal: “left click the button that says Next, then left click Download CSV”, and if a label changed the whole thing broke. Nneka’s VA tasks were nearly as defined, but she could use judgment to catch a changed button and update the instructions herself. Joel’s client-management work was abstract: draft replies and reports from examples and heuristics. Rayvin’s copywriting was more abstract still: write campaigns that generate leads, guided by best practices and past winners. Jonathan, the operator, sat at the top: “run the day to day, handle edge cases, take the sales calls, close clients.”
Hiring on trust, not talent
Every hire happened a different way, and none by the book. Nneka replied within ten minutes and was hired inside twelve hours, on instinct. Joel was chosen almost entirely on character, an extremely warm person, and then trained over months of calls. Rayvin came through a job post with a writing exercise: 5 of 100 submissions caught his eye, and one was a clear winner who needed saying things only once. Jonathan, the operator, came through his personal network, a friend from Colombia met in a New York apartment.
Giving Nneka access to his Slack, Alex had the realization that reframes the whole book. He had not hired her because she was the best in the world; he hired her because she was competent enough, reliable, a good person, and fast to respond. Then the mirror: maybe he did not have to be the best at email marketing either, just competent, reliable, trustworthy, caring, and proactive. The same logic showed up as a buyer. Hiring an agency himself, he found he did not care whether they were the best, only whether he could trust them and believed they cared, and that a small message proposing a future idea reassured him more than a good week of results. The lesson he stole from a London barman who remade a late cocktail to get it perfect: soft skills and intangibles lifted client satisfaction more than any technological improvement did.
The founder as the last bottleneck
Delegation kept working and the founder kept being the problem. With Nneka and Joel handling leads and clients, Alex was still crafting, reviewing, and launching campaigns, the most creative and important tasks, and procrastinating on them so badly a ten-minute tweak took a week. He ghosted his own team; Joel, whose job was to bug him, had messaged back to back for a week while Alex ignored him or promised and did nothing. They lost a client because, precisely, Alex was late launching the campaigns. His conclusion was blunt: Nneka excellent, Joel great, Rayvin excellent, and “I am the bottleneck.”
Removing himself meant a self-audit heuristic, asking “am I iterating, perfecting, or procrastinating?” Creative procrastination meant polishing the accounting system while campaigns got no results; perfectionism meant building a week-long automation instead of a few-hours instruction doc for an employee; iterating, his only truly productive mode, meant doing the most important thing in a roughly efficient, inelegant way. He leaned on the idea that almost everything has a “next day version” you could ship or hand off tomorrow, and a filter that anything worth doing should satisfy at least two of three: it makes money, it is easy, it makes customers or team happy. Even hiring Jonathan the operator, on 10% of the service profits, did not fully end the chaos; entropy still leaked through the cracks, and an hour of morning firefighting was enough to drain his drive for the whole day.
Fighting entropy, and why inefficiency is optimal
The book’s deepest metaphor is thermodynamic. Keeping CyberLeads in order felt like keeping a teenage bedroom tidy: one state counts as order, clothes in the wardrobe, but there are infinite states of disorder, so you must constantly fight to hold the line. He extends it outward; the smooth pavement, the garden, the city are not the natural state, the tree roots and the jungle are, and a business is a garden turning back into jungle the moment you look away, needing a full-time gardener.
This reframes apparent waste as design. The devil’s voice said he could work all day again, keep one cheap contractor, use cheaper tools, and save thousands a month, and the answer is that the savings would be less than two paying clients. The inefficiency is a shock absorber: it means you can afford someone getting sick or quitting, and enjoyable is optimal because a chill team keeps going and improving rather than burning out. The line in the sand is 80% margins; above that he tries not to stress. He realized he had mocked exactly this as an employee, sneering at bosses who did not know the team was not truly working eight hours, and now, on the other end, he understood they were right. The same lesson hit when a lead-forwarding automation broke: told to do it manually, Nneka took an hour to forward three leads, and Alex, disbelieving, tried himself and found it took hours, so he dropped everything and fixed it. Invisible work from the past was quietly paying dividends in the present.
Pirate ship or arbitrage machine
Success brought a persistent moral vertigo. The business hit more than $40k in revenue at around 80% margins with a global team, Jonathan in the US, Alex in Europe, Nneka, Rayvin and Joel in Asia, and clients from New York to Singapore. Half the days he felt like the captain of a small pirate ship with a loyal crew, a million-dollar bounty on his head. The other half he felt he had built a cold arbitrage machine, arbitraging currencies, taxes, countries, clients, and employees, his people building his freedom while stuck in their own lives.
He learned not to project his own ideals onto them. Dreaming up travel budgets, gym memberships, and a yearly retreat, he caught himself and stopped: Nneka had just bought a car, Joel was raising kids and opening a gym, Rayvin did not want to travel, so he should “stop trying to run a cult.” The only incentive that reliably worked was money, a base salary plus a monthly bonus per active client, with zero meetings and text-only communication. The counterweight to the guilt was concrete: Joel filming his two sons running through the house with toys bought from his last bonus, and the reminder that CyberLeads had statistically saved lives through malaria charities, most likely children.
Business is jazz, not science
The closing thesis is that Alex once read every business book believing business was a science he could study, and concluded most of it was bullshit. Hiring is not a science: luck, character, and skill each produced a good hire by a different route. Management is not a science: Nneka is reliable and TODO-driven, Joel needs heavy training then goes above and beyond, Rayvin needs no training but must be reminded. Incentives are not a science: the same money motivated Nneka toward a stable salary, Joel toward chasing bonuses, and left Rayvin unmoved even by a $1k-per-deal offer. Structure is not a science: he cycled through founder-handles-edge-cases, everyone-handles-their-own, and finally a barbell of specialists on explicit tasks plus one operator absorbing all the entropy. Sales and marketing are not sciences either; identical campaigns, word for word, produced wildly different results across clients, because it is about the messenger and a million uncontrollable things, not just the message. His warning on numbers is sharp: whoever quotes a total is hiding the average, and whoever quotes the average is hiding the median. Most things in life are jazz, and he has slowly learned to love that he can just jam.
Lessons worth keeping
- Delegation is a distinct fourth lever alongside eliminate, automate, and do yourself; reach for it on daily and weekly tasks where the feedback loop is tight, never on personal life or one-off work.
- Hire for trust, reliability, and care over raw talent; “competent enough and responsive” beats “best in the world,” and the same standard applies to you.
- Instruction abstraction rises with seniority: literal scripts for automations, judgment-backed steps for VAs, heuristics and examples for managers, principles for operators.
- Some inefficiency is optimal; it is a shock absorber against sickness, churn, and burnout. Alex holds a floor of 80% margins and stops worrying above it, noting the savings from cutting were less than two clients.
- The founder is usually the bottleneck; ask constantly “iterating, perfecting, or procrastinating?” and ship the “next day version.”
- Filter work by satisfying at least 2 of 3: makes money, is easy, makes customers or team happy.
- Money was the only incentive that reliably worked, base plus a monthly bonus per active client, with no meetings and text-only comms; do not impose your own ideals on the team.
- Numbers hygiene: a total hides the average, an average hides the median.
- One good automation quietly saved hours a day; invisible past work pays present dividends, so do not let it rot unnoticed.
Sources
- Read the full book: alexwest.co/book-nine
- Full text: startups-09-building-the-team
Part of the Solo Founder series.