The "Who, Not How" Shift

You've got a problem to solve. A new marketing campaign to launch. A sales process to document. A customer onboarding flow to build.

Your first instinct: "How do I do this?"

You open Google. You watch YouTube tutorials. You read blog posts. You spend three hours learning something you'll use once, execute it mediocrely because you're not an expert, and move on to the next problem.

Meanwhile, there's someone out there who does this for a living. Someone who could knock it out in 30 minutes and do it better than you ever will.

But you don't hire them. Because you're in "how" mode, not "who" mode.

And that mindset is costing you more than you realize.

Let me tell you about Jason, founder of a 5-person software consultancy.

Jason prided himself on being resourceful. Scrappy. A do-it-yourself kind of guy.

Need a landing page? He'd learn Webflow and build it himself.
Need email sequences? He'd figure out Mailchimp and write them himself.
Need a sales deck? He'd spend a weekend in Canva designing slides.

Each time, he told himself: "Why pay someone when I can learn it myself?"

So he did. Over the course of a year, Jason "saved money" by DIYing:

Total time: 153 hours.

At Jason's hourly rate ($250/hour for client work), that's $38,250 in opportunity cost.

Even if he valued his non-billable time at half that rate, it's still $19,125 spent doing work he could've delegated for a fraction of the cost.

"I thought I was saving money. I was actually lighting it on fire."

Then Jason hired a VA for $25/hour to handle design and admin work. A freelance copywriter for $100/project to write emails. A bookkeeper for $200/month.

Total cost: ~$500/month = $6,000/year.

He got back 10+ hours per week. Used that time to close two new clients worth $60K combined.

The math was obvious in retrospect: spending $6K to make $60K beats spending $0 to make $0 because you're buried in tasks you shouldn't be doing.

Here's the problem with "How do I do this?": it assumes you're the one who should be doing it.

And for most tasks, you're not.

Think of your time like a factory's most expensive machine.

You wouldn't use a $500K CNC machine to sweep the floor. You'd use a broom—because the machine's time is worth way more than the task requires.

Your brain is the CNC machine. Sweeping the floor is everything that someone else can do better, faster, or cheaper than you.

When you ask "How do I do this?", you're trying to become an amateur at something someone else has already mastered.

When you ask "Who can do this?", you're leveraging expertise you don't need to build yourself.

"How" scales linearly. "Who" scales exponentially.

Big companies have layers of people. CEOs don't design their own slides. They have teams for that.

You? You're doing CEO work, manager work, and junior associate work—all in the same day.

Here's why the "Who, Not How" shift is especially critical for microteams:

The best microteam founders aren't the most talented. They're the best at finding and deploying talented people.

Here's how to shift from DIY mode to delegation mode—and start building leverage instead of burning time.