How Much Should I Delegate to Others? Delegate the Why, Not Just the What

“How much should I delegate?” It’s one of the questions I hear most from course creators and membership owners. For a long time, I thought I’d already answered it.

I had a team of 13 people, and a project manager who was also my online business manager. On paper, I had delegated almost everything. And still, everything was running through me. Every decision and every “what do we do now?” landed right back on my desk.

I’m Eszter, your #LifeFirst Business Mentor, and what I learned from that season changed how I lead my whole team. If you’re asking how much you should hand over, this post is for you. Because I don’t think “how much” is the question that will set you free.

Why “how much” is the wrong question

Here’s what was really going on. I was delegating, a lot. But I was only delegating execution. Tasks with clear instructions, where nobody had to use their brain or make a decision. Nothing that needed judgment, because deep down I didn’t think the team would understand.

For someone to make good decisions in your business, they need to understand how it works and why you do things the way you do. I was only ever telling my team what to do. Never why.

That’s the gap. Not how much you delegate, but what kind.

Once you explain the why, something shifts. The person executing the task can suddenly propose a better solution than the one you had in mind. They stop being an executor and become a real, constructive partner.

This matters even more now. AI can take over pure execution tasks completely, so you don’t even need people for those anymore. I didn’t let my people go because of that. I moved them up. I’m giving them more authority, I treat them as partners, and I spend far more of my time explaining why we do things than explaining what needs to be done.

When the why only lives in your head, every decision has to come back to you. It’s a big part of why a business falls apart the second its owner steps away.

The day the why walked out the door

It got even clearer when my online business manager left, from one day to the next. She needed to put her family first, and I fully supported that decision.

But in that moment, I realised something. She was the one person who understood the why. The rest of the team still didn’t. When she left, the why left with her.

That’s when it hit me: it’s not enough for your manager to understand the why. Your executors need it too. Every single person on the team.

What delegating the destination looks like: our Life First Lab launch

This past summer, we launched Life First Lab. It was a brand new product, and it was only an idea in April.

Start from the result, not the task list

The old me would have said: “I need this landing page. I need these emails sent to this segment on this date.”

Instead, I sat down with the team and shared the final picture. This is the launch date we’re working towards. Everything needs to be up and running by the 7th of September. These are the goals. This is how many people we want inside, this is how many we want to convert into paying members, these are the prices they’ll pay, and this is the process we’ll use to bring them in.

Then I asked them to reverse engineer the whole thing from the result.

There was a lot to build: the landing page and emails, but also a community, an app, and all the space I needed to create the actual membership content, the whole 6-week training.

One ecosystem, one voice

I also made sure everyone was working in the same place. Same branding I’d always used. My own prompts for building pages and writing emails, which carry my language. And the exact same AI setup I use myself, connected to my Kajabi, where all my launches, my app and my systems live.

Because everybody worked inside the same ecosystem, the results came back on brand and in my voice.

What came back

During the process, the team came up with things I hadn’t even thought of. “Let’s do this as well. Let’s put it this way.” That’s what happens when people know where you’re going.

And me? I worked only 3 days in August while this whole launch was being built.

The result: 200 leads and 12 founding members from an email launch. That’s a 6% conversion, and every one of those 12 people is a reason to celebrate. They said yes to an idea that only lived in my head in April. They trusted me before there was anything to show them, and they helped me bring Life First Lab into the world. They’re my founding members, and I’m so grateful for them. They’ve now been inside for three months, and we’re opening the doors for our second round. If calm launches like that speak to you, Kent Westgaard and I talked about building chill launches that actually convert.

Don’t hire generalists, hire specialists

There’s one piece of delegation advice I really don’t agree with: “Just get one VA and give them everything you can.”

I run a VA agency, so I see this from the inside. I’d much rather you work with specialists, people who are professionals in their own area. You skip the training, and you can work with them the way I worked with my team on the launch: “This is where we’re going, and this is the date I want to be there by.” They lead the how.

For the Lab launch, we brought in an ad strategist. I have no clue how Meta ads are handled these days, and I didn’t need to. I told them where we were going and gave them the lead. (If ads feel like a mystery to you too, my conversation with Crystal Cherry on Meta ad strategy for coaches is a great place to start.)

Don’t train your Kajabi specialist to edit your videos. Don’t teach someone else social media from scratch. Hire the person who already knows it.

And if you already have a team? I’m not saying hire someone else. I’m saying elevate the ones you have first. Share where you’re going, so they understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Even someone very junior can grow inside their role once they can see the bigger picture. Louise Sandoval shared some brilliant ways to do this in our episode on the secrets to delegating like a pro.

A client on the edge of a million-dollar year

One of my clients came to me when they were just about to hit a million-dollar year. A family-run membership business, with two people working in it.

But inside, one of them was burning out creating content and serving the community nonstop. The other was overwhelmed trying to feed the system with new members, because people kept leaving. They were washing through the money, and washing through the people.

When we looked closer, members weren’t leaving because there wasn’t enough information. They were leaving because there was too much, with no framework for how to get through it. They felt flooded, like they’d never catch up.

So we reworked the whole system and gamified it. We showed members they don’t have to go through everything, only what fits where they are right now in their own business journey. (If you’re curious what that can look like inside Kajabi, Bastiaan, Agith and I talked about gamification as the key to engagement.)

The result: attrition went down significantly. At the same time, we built a funnel to bring in new members, so the founder could get off sales calls and spend his time on strategy. They now recycle far more of the content that’s already been created. And both of them have stepped back to spend more time on themselves and their family.

Money amplifies whatever is already there

I share this story because so many of us believe that once we hit a certain number, we’ll be done. “When I reach a million, I’ll have made it.”

It’s often not true. If you’re overwhelmed when your business makes a little money, more money won’t fix it. It will just amplify everything, and that includes the overwhelm.

That’s why I believe in building with your life first, and growing from there. It’s the only way you’ll truly enjoy what you’ve built.

Your first step this week: set your business GPS

Most of the time, we can’t tell our team what to do, or we jump from one thing to the next, because we’re not clear on where we’re going ourselves.

Think about it. You never take your car out of the garage and start driving without knowing where you’re headed. Most of the time, you even use GPS. Your business deserves the same.

So this week:

• Ask yourself: where do I want my business to be in 90 days?
• Choose three things you can do this week that move you closer to that 90-day goal. Make them tangible and specific. Not “post more on social media”, “write more emails” or “record more podcast episodes”. Specific.
• Put all three in your calendar.
• Share the big picture with your team before you share their next task.

If you’d like help drawing that map, my free 10-minute reset for getting out of the doer’s seat walks you through it.

Delegate the why, not just the what

So, how much should you delegate? More than you think. But the real shift isn’t in the amount. It’s in handing over the why and the destination, not just the task.

When your team knows where you’re going, they stop waiting for instructions and start bringing you ideas.

And when you’re ready to build this with support around you, that’s exactly what we do inside Life First Lab, my community for building a business that feeds your life. Set your GPS, share the map, and let your team drive with you.