In this prictical episode, Sid Jashnani, Founder of Rekruuto, shares how to master delegation and scale using global talent to escape solo overload. If you struggle with doing everything yourself and fearing first hires, you won't want to miss it.

You will discover:

- How to use the Delta Delegation Ladder for structured task handoff

- Why starting with low-risk tasks builds trust in delegation

- What global VAs provide for cost-effective team growth

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 2 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Sid Jashnani is the Founder of Rekruuto, a Certified EOS Implementer®, and a holdco entrepreneur who builds and acquires IT infrastructure companies. He scaled his own business from $4M to $35M using EOS, transforming from a firefighting operator into a strategic leader. Today, he helps entrepreneurs and leadership teams gain clarity, discipline, and traction through EOS coaching, specializing in delegation systems such as the DELTA Delegation Ladder and pairing strong systems with offshore talent to scale efficiently and affordably. His mission is to help good companies become great while enabling leaders to reclaim their time, clarity, and freedom.

Want to learn more about Sid Jashnani's work at Rekruuto? Check out his website at https://www.rekruuto.net

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome. Welcome once again

to the start, scale and succeed podcast, the only podcast that

grows with you through all seven stages of your journey. As a

founder, I'm your host, Scott Ritzheimer, and today I want to

talk to that founder out there who's listening. Yep, just the

one. No kidding, those founders of you who are listening, who

are trapped, and you know who you are. You started your

business for freedom, the freedom to build something

meaningful, to have autonomy and control, to take control of your

time, to take control of your money, to take control and do

the work that matters to you. But instead, you've built

yourself another job, and it's probably even a little worse

than your last one, because now you're salesperson, fulfillment

person, customer service person and bookkeeper. And to make

things worse, if we haven't rubbed it in enough, I have to

share a little jab that my coach shared with me, and he told me

that if you don't have an assistant, you are one. Yes,

that's where we are. We're stuck in this mode of having to do it

all yourself and feeling like you can't find a way out. Maybe

you've tried delegation, maybe you've tried vas, maybe you've

even tried offshore vas, but for some reason, it's just isn't for

you. Well, I want to challenge that assumption a little bit

today, and I've got someone here with us who is an absolute

expert in it and proof in and of himself. Today we have with us

the one and only Sid Jashnani, who is the founder of recruito.

He's also a certified EOS implementer and a whole co

entrepreneur who builds and acquires IT infrastructure

companies. He scaled his own business from $4 million to $35

million transforming from a firefighting operator, you know

what that's like, don't you into a strategic leader today, he

helps entrepreneurs and leadership teams to gain

clarity, discipline and traction through coaching, specializing

in delegation systems such as the Delta delegation ladder and

pairing strong systems with offshore talent to scale

efficiency and affordability. His mission is to help good

companies become great while enabling leaders to reclaim

their time clarity and freedom, and he's here with us today.

Sid, this didn't come out of the blue. Every founder faces it,

but you did as well. Have you always been great at delegating

or tell us a story? When? When did you notice the delegation

was something you had to pay attention to?

Scott, first of all, thank you for having me and

your show, and been a very avid listener and really enjoy this

delegation never came naturally to me. It was one of those

hardest things that I had to deal with, and I've always found

it very difficult to delegate. And what I realized over the

period of years, it is both an art and a skill in science to

really delegate well. And for me, I think my tipping point was

when I was the chief bottle washer, the janitor as well as

the cook and the attendant and doing everything in my business,

and I was just micromanaging my team. Not like not letting them

take decisions, not making the best use of the staff that I

had, and essentially for everything in my company, I was

the bottleneck, doing all sorts of approvals, making sure

everything's ticking. And if I had to take a couple of hours

off to be with my kids, everything would be at a

standstill, and I would get these messages on Skype at that

time to Hey, Sid, what do we do now? What do we do now? And that

was a breaking point for me, and I knew I had to do something.

And that's when I kind of delved into, okay, what is the one

thing that I can delegate today that's going to make life easier

for me. So I just did one step at a time, taking out one

irritant, as I call it, at a time, gave it to someone else

who was good at that, taught them, trained them, shadowed

them, and made tons of mistakes. What in doing that? And over a

period of time, I feel that I'm 80% there, not perfect, but I'm

80% there, where I do a pretty good job of delegating stuff and

empowering others to do it better than me.

That's fantastic, and you're putting

that likely. I think I've seen you've called yourself a

delegation junkie. Now, if I remember correctly, what does it

look like today? Because a lot of folks will hear someone like

yourself on an episode like this, and well, they've always

been good at that. They've always done that really well.

And from your story, you haven't why is it that transformation

was so great for you?

Yeah, I think if I continue to all the stuff that I

was doing in my business at that time, I would have never been

able to, you know, I would could, I could not scale my

business. And I realized that. So I made a list of things that

I was doing on a daily basis, and I started tagging that list

and saying that, okay, how much, how much of my money? Is this

worth is it like a $10 an hour sort of work I'm doing, or is it

$100 an hour, or is it $1,000 and where does my natural

abilities lie? So for me, it was being out with customers,

thinking about strategy, going out and meeting suppliers, and,

you know, building strategic relationships. So that's where I

should have been spending my time, but then here I was, you

know, building my website, setting up the accounts,

following up on payments and rescheduling interviews. So I

was doing a lot of admin, and a lot of the critical stuff just

got, you know, did not get the priority needed. And suddenly

realized, or at least I realized back then, that my pipeline is

quite weak. And I was like, Oh, I was just busy building

websites. I was just busy building assets and marketing

assets for my business. And I was not out there speaking with

customers. And I said, I need to be out there speaking with my

customers helping them do well, that's how I make my money, and

that's when I realized that I had to start delegating some of

the things that are just taking up my time. So every business

owner out there is probably doing something which they can

delegate today. So I call it the low hanging fruit. Just make a

list of the stuff that you doing over the past week, or just

track it for the next two weeks. I promise you there'll be about

two to five things that you can easily delegate to someone out

there. And that's, that's low hanging fruit. That's the

easiest win you can get.

Yeah, so Sid, that brings me to kind of a sub

question that I had as you were sharing your own experience

early on, and particularly for that person who has folks around

them but doesn't trust them. What I see founders do a lot at

this stage is they kind of externalize that lack of trust

as if it is their people's problem. And really, you touched

on something, and that is that it might very well be an us

problem. So for folks who are new to this process of

delegation, or who have failed in this process of delegation,

or who don't think that their people can handle delegation,

what would you say to them?

Yeah, that's a tough question, and the answer

is probably not very pretty, but this is what I did. And yeah, I

think to delegate. I also had trust issues with some of the

people that were working with me, because I just didn't trust

that they're going to do the kind of quality job that I

expect. But I think what worked for me was just setting up

expectations clearly and just giving them the time and being

patient with them to explain to them what the outcome I'm

looking at. So I showed them what great looks like. This is

what would, you know, float my boat, and this is what's just

going to make my day, if you do it this way. And then I would

just hand hold them, and I said, Hey, for you to do this, these

are the steps that I use, right? And we started recording those

using, you know, like a tool, like loom. So we do it on a

video call, we record those steps, and obviously, now they

have that video available to refer back to, to kind of follow

that system. A lot of people got it and understood it, and they

started doing it, and some of them improvised. Those processes

made it better than what I actually expected, right? And I

was blown away. And I was like, wow, this is brilliant, because

I've empowered them to do a job which is better than me, and I

love that. But in certain cases, I was asking people to do stuff

that they were not good at. So essentially, I had a VA who was

more of a bookkeeper and accountant, and I was asking

them to do graphic design work. And then obviously, no matter

what sort of video I show them, they just don't have the skill,

the aptitude to do that work. And you know, it's just setting

myself up for disappointment, and that's what happened. So if

I'm delegating something to someone, have to make sure that

they get it and they understand it and they have the skills to

deliver what's expected. The rest of it is the teaching and

the guide rails and the framework that we can teach

them. But if you have people who just don't know and just don't

get it, then yeah, you're not going to get the outcomes that

you want.

I want to jump to that framework here in a

second, but I want to go one more step on the founder's role

in this. Because when you when you said, you know, even if you

had to step away for a couple hours to be with the kids,

things would come to a halt, and they'd say, what do we want to

do? And one of the things that I don't think founders recognize

is how much they're actually robbing their people of the

ability to do those things. The very reason you can't trust them

is because you've taught them to not be trustworthy. You've

taught them to just come and ask you for questions. Do you see

the same thing?

Absolutely. It's like, you know, leaving their

monkeys on your back. You know, the great book a One Minute

Manager, right? So they just come. And leave their problems

with you. And then, you know, just because you're the

entrepreneur hero, it's your business. You want to put out

all fires. You take their monkeys, and you say, All right,

you know, let I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out. And

that just becomes a habit. And for them, that's the easy way

out. They're like, Oh yeah, Sid will do it. Let me just walk

into his office and just tell them, or tell him my problem,

man, he is going to deal with it, you know, and you're right.

So we don't give them the opportunity to step up and give

it a shot, because, you know, that's the mindset that we treat

them with, and that's what they live up to.

Yeah. Now this isn't just your story. This is

something you've helped a lot of folks with, especially more

recently, and you've developed something called the escape

formula. Tell us a little bit about what the escape formula is

and why it matters to someone who's struggling with some of

this today.

Yeah, I think so. The Escape formula is just one

of those cool things that I created, which is more actually

moved into the Delta framework, but the escape formula is

essentially getting out of this firefighting mode. And how do

you escape this? You know, because it's, it's a cyclical

process. It's like running on a hamster wheel, like, how do you

exit that? How do you escape that? So you actually work on

the stuff that energizes you. Because for me, energy is

created by just speaking with customers and just, you know,

making more money and just helping other people do their

job better and but I'm, if I'm spending my time behind a desk

chained, I don't feel very free. So that's why I created this

framework, which is the escape formula. And one of the things

in the escape formula is this delta delegation ladder, which

is very simply for you to delegate. There are certain

stages, right? And you know, the D in Delta just stands for do as

I say, which is if, you know, if I hire someone, and I'm like an

assistant, and I'm telling them, Hey, these are the instructions.

Just follow instructions and get it done. Now today, we are

blessed with AI in the mix. And then, you know, the D part can

be done by AI. You know, you can fire up an AI agent to do that,

because it's like a repetitive workflow. And the E gets

interesting, where we say, hey, go explore, and go figure out

this problem that we're dealing with, right? And tell us, you

know, give us some recommendations. So yes, it

requires a bit of research, bit of IQ, and you're trying to

figure out what the problem statement is, what the possible

solutions are. And the L gets more interesting, because then

that's why we say that lead with a recommendation, right? The

else for leading with the recommendation? And typically

want to hire people who are at the L level, where you know,

they can do the research, they know what they're doing, and

then they can say, Hey, I found a few solutions. I think this is

the best solution based on what I know and what I've learned

from you, right? Because they're leading with the recommendation.

The T is more interesting. And these are managers for me, like,

these are the guys who take action, right? They lead with

the recommendation, they know what to do. And they go take

that action, and they keep you in the loop. They exactly know,

yes, I'm going to keep in the loop. This is what I'm doing,

and I'm going to take care of it. So these are the people you

start trusting, even if you're not an office, they'll take

they'll take care of the solution, yeah. Now the A, which

is the last part, which I say, which, which is, you know,

that's autonomous mode. That's like co founder mode. That's

when you know that you met your, you know, the ying and the yang.

And this is the person that will really, you know, be your CEO.

And you can elevate and start doing other stuff, you know,

like in Eos, we call visionary and integrator mode, you know.

And so, and I think you also call this in the four jigsaw

puzzles I saw, which is the visionary and, you know, this is

the Operator mode. And so this is the operator essentially. So

they're autonomous, because they know how you think, they know

what kind of actions you take, and they are just there to

execute that. And and we want people, we want them to graduate

through this ladder and get to this autonomous mode where they

understand everything. They understand the ethos, the

processes, the systems, and they're just executing. And

that's the ladder of progression. And we have to

start somewhere. And I tell people, Hey, if you're going and

hiring someone, start with an L. Help them move to a T, and

eventually, hope that someone gets to an A where they run a

department on a T or a team autonomously for you.

Yeah, that's I love that. I love it. I love it.

It's so good. I love the different steps of that. You

know, we think if we we should just be able to jump to a and

it'll, it'll all work out. And it doesn't work that way. So

super, super helpful, super practical. Recommend folks

listening go back and work through those one stage at a

time, because they do build on each other as well. Sid, got a

couple more questions for you here. The first one is one that

I like to ask all my guests, and that is this, what do you what

is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?

What's that one thing you wish everyone watching or listening

today knew?

Yeah, I think there are certain things that

you can't delegate. And what I've learned is you cannot

delegate, oh, well, you cannot delegate culture with your team.

What you have to do is show up every day and you have to lead

from the front. And I thought that I could delegate that as

well, right? I thought, Oh yes, I it's easy to build culture,

and I've kind of set the guide rules now you go deal with it.

No, I think as a leader, you know, I have to lead from the

front. I have to walk the talk, be consistent. And if I don't

show up in my own meetings and expect others to do it, then you

know that just kind of creates a discipline, or lack of

discipline in the company where we start tolerating, you know,

mediocre behavior, and then it just takes, you know, a little

chink in the armor for the whole armor to come down. And so one

thing that I've learned is you cannot delegate culture, and

everyone in the organization is responsible for culture, and you

have to show up every day as a leader, walk the talk, be

consistent and repeat yourselves often. So that's one learning

I've had over a period of years.

It's so good, so good. Sid, there's some folks

listening who'd love some help in several of these areas. Where

can they reach out to you? Where can they find more out about the

work that you all do there at Rekruuto?

Yeah, I think rekruuto.net is our website, and

sure, we'll leave it at the link part of your show notes. Search

for us online recruiter, and we can help you find great talent

who already at at least an L or a T level based on the kind of

work you need. And even if we can't help you find talent,

we'll refer you to some great freelancers, people who are out

there, who are great operators across the world, who have done

some of this, and they might just be able to help you, you

know, figure out the next puzzle piece as you move through your

ladder and as you you know, scale your business.

Excellent, excellent. Well said. Thanks so

much for being on the show. It was a privilege and honor having

you here. Thanks for sharing your story, and especially the

Delta delegation ladder, super practical, very helpful. I

really appreciate it. Thank you. And for those of you watching

and listening, you know that your your time and attention

mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this

conversation, as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see you

next time. Take care.