notessamuele onelia

I, We, They: Delegating Decisions, Not Just Tasks

The Story

The framework, named explicitly: “I use this framework called I, We, They, and so when you first start your business it’s all you. You’re doing everything yourself, you’re talking to potential customers, you’re out there and you’re just grinding away. And then when you get to We stage, then you start bringing in people to help you, and then you create the systems that you need to run the business. And after that, you go to They, which is, you have your team essentially running most of the day-to-day operations within the business” (Source 1).

The distinction that matters: tasks vs. decisions. “I think the next more advanced step is delegating decision making. And that has really changed a lot for me because now I actually trust my team to make decisions on my behalf and for the greater good of the company. And that has really freed up a lot of my time” (Source 1). And in the Hiscox interview: “delegate not only tasks, because I think tasks is like a good first step. People who are solopreneurs, it’s totally fine. You should start off as a solopreneur. But once you start delegating tasks, that’s great, but that’s only the first step. The second step is delegating decisions, and that’s a much harder step, but essentially you need to be so in sync with your team that you trust the decisions that they’re going to be making” (Source 2).

The mechanism for keeping that trust in good repair: “there have been instances where there were decisions made that I know that there will be some issues with it, but I almost let those things surface because it’s a learning lesson for the team. It’s like the old saying where you teach a man to fish, that kind of thing. And so, you don’t want to keep making the decisions for them because then you are the bottleneck. Literally, like the team won’t be able to do anything without your approval” (Source 2).

The non-negotiable: keeping a pulse without re-becoming the operator. “But the important thing is never fully lose track of your business. It’s like you want to keep a pulse on it, but I think over time you gain that trust with your team and you can slowly, slowly take a step back” (Source 1).

He runs Urban EDC, the largest revenue driver, at about an hour a day in this configuration. “Urban EDC right now, I would say that’s our biggest revenue driver. And I only work on Urban EDC for about an hour a day. And so, I meet with my, the GM for Urban EDC a hour a day, and all the decisions that he needs to check with him, we just discuss it and that’s it. And there was a point when I felt like my day was almost like it was empty. It was a really weird feeling” (Source 2).

The Bootstrapped Founder interview adds a deliberate framing principle for working with operators: “you never want to be a dictator type leader, where you always want their buy in. So, you know, I’m never gonna say, hey, this is the way it should be done. What I will say, however, is I will say, hey, so these are the scenarios. This is what’s happening. What do you think we should do? And then we’ll talk about it and ultimately, like, we’ll come up to a decision and then now they’re bought in” (Source 3).

The general manager for Urban EDC was promoted from inside: “for example, you know or Urban EDC, one of the operators that we had. He was a customer support agent, joined us like five years ago. And he continued to work himself up, proved himself to the point where now he knew everything about the business. And now he was running the show. So that’s an internal promotion” (Source 3). The logistics operator was external. Yong-Soo notes the tradeoff plainly: “the external thing is very threatening to someone who’s been at a company, they’ve worked really hard, they’re hoping to level up. But then this external person comes in and they’re threatening” (Source 3).

Lesson for Creators

The bottleneck most operators hit isn’t time — it’s that every decision still routes through them. “Hiring help” and “delegating tasks” gets you a team that can execute what you decide. That’s still a single-person bottleneck. The harder move is letting someone else make calls you would’ve made differently, and letting some of those calls go wrong on purpose so the operator builds judgment. The Socratic posture — “here’s the scenario, what would you do?” — is the cheap version of that handoff: it preserves your input without making the decision yourself. The framework also names the failure mode: solopreneurs who delegate only tasks plateau, because the founder remains the slowest part of the system even after the team scales. If the goal is to add a third or fourth business, the first business has to be operable without you, not just staffed below you.

Backlinks

External sources