T. Harv Eker argues that delegating has real downsides — hired staff often perform worse and care less, and delegation can require more staff and higher salaries. Using a fitness-store anecdote, he shows that stores run by others produced about 70% of his personal sales, but scaling multiple delegated units can still produce greater total profit through duplication. His central prescription: build a systemized business that works without the owner; otherwise you simply have a job, not a scalable business.
Chapters
Strong reasons against delegating. No one else is as good as me and nobody cares about it as much as me. It requires more staff, higher salaries, hard to afford a good chance when you leverage to somebody else. When you delegate to someone else, there's a really good chance they can't do it as well as you. No, I'm not kidding around. I'm being serious. And there's a 99.9999% chance they don't care about it as much as you. Real. Yeah, true, true. And it does require, if you're not in the whole technology leverage area, which you should be, by the way, leveraging yourself through technology instead of just people. It might require hiring, employing more staff and higher salary costs, and that will be harder to afford unless you're making more money because of it. Isn't that true? Yeah. So all accurate, but so accurate. It's as valuable as having that backup plan on your focus that takes away your focus. And now you fail in your major in what your focus was to focus on. It's the same thing. It makes sense. It just doesn't work. You see, there's a lot of things that are true in academics and they just don't work. If someone's going to run a marathon, there could be some painful spots to it. You could have blistered and bloody feet, you could have cramps, you could be throwing up. But that's what you signed up for. Sorry. It's a marathon. It's the game. That's what you signed up for. That's how you play the game. Part of the process of rich in business is leverage. And might it cost a little more at the beginning? Yeah, might. It might. Okay, and. And is it possible people can't do it as well as you? Yeah, probably. That's the way it goes. That is the process. So when I started my fitness business, fitness stores, I had one store and literally it was me and my partner in the store all the time. There was nobody else. Then we hired a salesperson and then we hired a manager. Then I hired an assistant manager, and now I had a few people in the store and I was still in the store literally 16 hours a day. I never left the store except for delivery to deliver equipment to people and show them how to use it and blah, blah, blah, yada yada. So I was working 20 hours a day, basically. And because nobody can do it as well as I can, nobody could show them as well. Nobody could handle the business as well. Nobody could handle the off the sale as well. Nobody was as nice to them. Nobody cared as much as I did. They didn't. That was accurate. But I had one store. And so six months to the day after I opened the first store, I'm not going to. In one of my programs, the marketing program, actually, we talk about how I did this, but six months to the day, I opened a second store again. I remember I started the first store with no money. I started the second store with really none of my own money, but a full on store which cost $50,000. Okay. And I had the manager of my first store go and manage that second store. Great, great. Within the first week, we realized that sales were down like 70%. Is it the store? Is it the location? What's happening? So I went into that store and switched stores and sales went back up to 100%. Came out of the store. Put him in. And an assistant and our top salesperson in sales down. And they're only 70% of the norm. Of what? Of the standard. The hell's going on? I go back in the store, back to 100. Boom. You know what I realized? I learned one of the biggest business lessons of my life. Harv, you better make this freaking business work at 70% of the sales that you can do, 70% of everything you can do. Because if it don't work, then it ain't gonna work long term. It ain't gonna be able to duplicate. I'm sorry, the only way to duplicate is to have, in this case, this business was to have other people in the stores. I attend stores. So I literally had delegated the sales and the whole, the whole movement and the whole business in each of those stores to, you know, four or five people per store. Ten stores, that's 50 people. 50 people. Knowing now, knowing that the business needed to work at this new level, this new standard, and at 70% of sales, I still had to be able to make a lot of money. Maybe not quite as much money, but a lot of money. How do you do that? Simple. Go with what we've been teaching you over and over and over again. So let's say the sales. I'm just giving you a number here. The sales, if I was doing it, is $1,000 in a day. Let's say the sales, if someone else is doing it, is $700 a day. All right? Now you now are only instead of making, let's say, $500, let's say your, your net profit was. I don't want to get into too many numbers here, but you made you made. When you were selling, you made $500. When they're selling them, you only make $200. So what do you do? 200 bucks is not enough. What do you do? Well, if you only have one, one entity, one unit doing $200, that's $200. But if you have two of them, that's $400. If you have three of them, that's $600. If you have four of them, that's $800. If you have five of them, that's a thousand dollars. If you have 10 of them, that's $2,000. You see what I'm getting at? It's called duplication. So you cannot duplicate the standard debt when you're there because that's not duplicatable. Because you cannot cut yourself in corners. And 15th and 16th and three hundreds, that's not duplicatable. You can only duplicate the delegated. The systemized entity that works without you. That's the only thing you can duplicate. Right? You can't duplicate when you're there, with you there. This is making any sense here. So whenever you've got to be able to create a business that works without you, period. Over and out. Yes, I might make a little less money, but I've got a systemized. I've got to set the system up so that it works and profits, profits without me. If I cannot create the business that's profitable without me, I do not have a business. I have a job. Stuck in that freaking job for the rest of your freaking days. That's how rich people think. Understand? It has to delegate. You have to leverage. You have to be able to grow without you if you're there, broke, still, compared to what you could be.
