143 | This 1 Hack Will Save You $10k Per Month By Showing You Which Tasks Are Eating Up Your Time & Who To Delegate Them To | Leadership, Delegation & Systems with AI Frameworks

Still saying, “It’s faster if I just do it myself”?

That phrase is costing you $10K–$15K a month—and keeping you stuck as your team’s overpaid Google.

Every time you redo your team's work, you're not just wasting time—you’re training them to be helpless and burning cash like confetti. In this Gallantine’s Day velvet boot rant, Dawn Andrews breaks down the real cost of micromanaging and the shift that sets you free: stop delegating tasks and start transferring your thinking.

You’ll learn how to make your Founder-Only List, use AI as your strategic mirror, and transform your team from passive executors into powerful decision-makers.

One mindset tweak + one simple prompt = thousands saved, and your CEO energy reclaimed.

Join the Free AI for Founders Community on LinkedIn
Stop redoing everyone’s work. Start leading like the CEO your business actually needs. Inside the community, you’ll meet other women using AI to build businesses that don’t require them to be in every decision. Click here to join.

What You’ll Take Away

• The $10K/month trap you're probably stuck in (hint: it starts with “let me just fix this real quick”)
• The Founder-Only List: 3 filters to ruthlessly protect your energy
• How to stop being your team’s bottleneck by upgrading from task delegation to decision delegation
• Who gets what: A simple delegation matrix for junior, mid, and senior team members
• 2 AI prompts to pinpoint your biggest time-wasters and document your thinking in minutes

Resources & Links

• Free AI for Founders Community 
• Get the “10 Ways AI Will Make You a Better Leader” guide 

Related Episodes

• 122 | The 10‑Minute AI Hiring Workflow Female Founders Use to Stop Hiring Dud Employees (Saves 6 Months + $30K) — AI + systems to hire right and get your time back.
• 112 | The 4‑Stage AI Process Female Founders Use to Stop Losing 10 Hours Each Week — Stop being the bottleneck by transferring ownership with AI.
• 110 | 3 Custom GPTs That Save Female Founders 16 Hours a Week — Tactical AI workflows that amplify delegation and time liberation.

Want to increase revenue and impact? Listen to “She's That Founder” for insights on business strategy and female leadership to scale your business. Each episode offers advice on effective communication, team building, and management. Learn to master routines and systems to boost productivity and prevent burnout. Our delegation tips and business consulting will advance your executive leadership skills and presence.

Transcript

She’s That Founder
143 | This 1 Hack Will Save You $10k Per Month By Showing You Which Tasks Are Eating Up Your Time & Who To Delegate Them To

Every time you say yes to doing something yourself in your business, you're saying no to the version of you your business actually needs.

 Hey, hey, hey. Welcome to She's That Founder Thursday edition. These are the quick rants kick in the pants, velvet boot in your booty moments that represent me standing in the future, pulling you toward the even stronger, better, more powerful version of yourself with AI as your copilot.

It's February. It is almost gallant times's day. And I have to say, it wasn't one of those things that I used to celebrate, but the more I have committed myself to elevating women in business, the more excited and joyful I feel every time February 13th rolls around. So I hope that you have grabbed your girls and you're going out to do something fun.

And if not, just text everybody. Tell 'em how much they mean to you and tell 'em how kickass they are.

Listen, I need to talk to you about something you said this morning. It's faster if I just do it myself. Yes. That thing you kept saying, it's a bunch of crap. And I say that with love because here's what actually happens when you say that you hand something to your team, maybe it's a client proposal.

Maybe it's a project brief, maybe it's an email to a partner or a client that you're trying to land. They do the thing, you look at it and immediately your brain goes, oh no, this isn't quite right. Not catastrophically wrong, just not your way, not the tone you would've used. Not quite detailed enough, not quite whatever.

So what do you do? You take it back. You know what, just let me handle this one real quick. So can I get an amen? Do you recognize that? And then you spend 45 minutes rewriting something that should have taken them 20 minutes, maybe an hour if you really get in there. And meanwhile, your team is watching and they're learning the real lesson here, which is don't bother trying, she's gonna redo it anyway.

So next time they don't even pretend, they just bring it straight to you. Hey, can you just take a quick look before I send this? And the translation is, can you do my job for me? And you do because it's faster. Except that here's the Gallant Times's truth bomb. It's not faster every single time you say it's faster if I just do it myself. Here's what you're actually choosing. you're training your team that their job is to bring you problems, not solve them.

That makes me a little nauseous. Just saying it. They become professional question askers instead of decision makers. you're keeping all the knowledge locked in your head, which means your business literally cannot function without you. Not for a day, not for an hour. Not ever. you're building yourself a very expensive, very exhausting prison, because faster right now means you'll be doing this exact same task next Tuesday and next month and next year.

Okay. Real talk. Let me show you exactly what this is costing you. Let's say you're running a service business doing somewhere between 500 K and 5 million in revenue. Your time conservatively, minimally is worth $250 an hour. That's what you should be billing yourself at for strategic work at minimum.

Now, let's be honest about how much time you're spending in the redo loop every week client proposals, you might be rewriting probably two hours a week, maybe more project briefs that you just tweak another three hours emails to partners or vendors follow ups that you end up handling yourself, potentially two more hours.

Team questions you answer because they don't have your documented thinking. Easily five hours a week of slack or email interruptions and quick calls, social media posts, marketing copy, presentation decks that you touch up at another three hours. That's 15 hours a week minimum. And honestly, if you tracked it, you'd probably find it's closer to 20.

So let's do the math. 15 hours at $250 an hour is 37 50 a week times four weeks. That's $15,000 a month you're spending doing work that someone making between 25 and $35 an hour could handle if you just document your thinking. But wait, it gets worse because every time you jump in to redo something.

You're not just costing yourself those hours, you're also training your team to be helpless, which means they're operating at maybe 60% of their actual capacity and pay scale because they're constantly waiting for you to tell them what to do. If you've got a team of even five to seven people and they're all operating at 60% effectiveness because they don't have frameworks to make decisions, that's like paying for seven people but only getting the output of four.

The actual cost north of 10 KA month easily, and I did this for years. I told myself I was protecting quality, that I was maintaining the client experience, that I was being a good leader. And you wanna know what I was really doing? I was protecting my identity as the person who's the best at everything, because deep down I was terrified.

 If my team could do it without me, what did that make me? What was I even for? And here's the thing. I had worked with Oscar winners, fashion brand presidents, TV producers, talent managers, people operating at the highest levels. I knew what strategic leadership looked like, but I couldn't give it to myself.

So here's what I need you to hear. You're not redoing their work because they're incompetent. You're redoing it. Because letting go of being the person who does everything right feels like becoming unnecessary. But here's the thing, nobody tells you.

Being irreplaceable is just another word for bottleneck and bottlenecks don't scale. They break. So here is the shift, and this is where everybody gets delegation wrong. Everyone's telling you to delegate more, but that's not your problem. Specifically. The problem is you're delegating tasks instead of decisions.

You're outsourcing the doing without transferring the thinking. That's not delegation. That's just creating a bunch of very expensive assistants who can't function without your brain. Can you see the difference When you delegate a task? You get, Hey, I finished a thing.

Can you review it? When you delegate a decision, you get, I made this call based on the framework you gave me. Here's my thinking. I'm moving forward. Unless you see something I missed. One keeps you in the loop, which is great, but the other multiplies you. here's the hack that changed so much for me and for my clients.

So create what I call your founder. Only list five things. That's it. Just five. These are the only tasks that genuinely require your specific brain, your strategic judgment, and your unique expertise. And here's the criteria that most of us miss.

Your founder only list should include tasks that meet at least two of these three filters. Filter one, only you have the relationship capital. So think closing high value clients. Navigating sensitive partnership negotiations, handling escalated client situations where your reputation is on the line.filter one, you have the relationship capital.

Filter two, only you have the strategic context. So think setting company direction, making build versus buy decisions, deciding which market to enter or which product to create. Saying no to revenue that doesn't fit your vision.

And then the final filter, only you have the unique expertise that is the business. So think if you're a brand strategist, maybe it's the final brand positioning. If you're a PR maven, maybe it's the media pitch angle, the thing clients are actually paying for your brain to do everything else, and I mean everything else.

You teach it once, you document it once, and you never do it again. here's how you actually figure out who gets what. The next time you catch yourself starting to say it's faster if I just, just stop. Ask yourself what's the actual decision that needs to be made here?

And then ask, and this is like, I'm modeling this for you right now. This is how my brain works as a business strategist. So I'm giving you what I'm telling you to do, right? What I'm telling you to think through and do for your team. So stop. Ask yourself, what's the actual decision that needs to be made here?

Then ask, what would someone need to know to make this decision the way I would? Because here's what most of us do wrong. We hand off the task, but not the thinking. We talked about that. what we tend to give our team members is can you draft the client proposal for the Davidson Project? What they should get is, can you draft the client proposal for the Davidson project? Here's my thinking. They're price sensitive, but value driven, so lead with outcomes, not deliverables. They've been burned by agencies before. So emphasize our process transparency and their risk averse.

So include three client examples that are in their industry. Use the proposal template in the shared drive and follow the tone guide. If you're unsure about pricing strategy, ask me before you start, not after you've already drafted it. Can you see the difference? Yes. I know that was a lot of words there, but it took me two minutes to share all of that context and all of my thinking to empower my team member to go make an incredible proposal.

You're not delegating the task, you're transferring your decision making framework. And so now that you've got that part handled, let's figure out who on your team should own what. So your junior team members give them process driven tasks with clear output things, where you can document.

When X happens, you do Y. If Z happens, loop me in. So examples might be scheduling data entry, client communication from templates, social media posting from approved content, your mid-level team members, people who've been with you three to five years. You can give them judgment calls with documented principles.

Things where you can say, here's how I think about this type of decision. Here are the factors I weigh. Now you make the call. So it could be client onboarding, customization, project scoping team workflow adjustments, choosing vendors under $5,000 of investment, and then here's what you can give to your senior team members or department leads.

If they've been with you for five years or more, they've picked up a lot of your thinking without you even intentionally giving it to them. So you can give them strategic ownership within their domain. Things where you can say, here's the outcome I need and the boundaries I care about. You own the how.

So this could be hiring decisions for their team. It could be budgets, it could be client relationship management. It could be redesigning an ops process. all of that gives you some framework, some process for sharing things and giving things away to your team and. This part is the part that nobody's talking about, which I'm excited about.

AI can show you exactly where you're the bottleneck. And I don't mean AI as a task tool. I mean AI as strategic intelligence. Okay, so you're ready for your prompt. here's what we do. Open your LLM. Copy, paste your calendar from the last two weeks, and then use this prompt.

I'm a founder running a. Whatever your revenue is, service business with a team of whatever the number is, analyze my calendar and identify which recurring tasks I'm doing that could be handed to someone else if they had a framework for my thinking, what patterns do you see and how I'm spending my time versus where A CEO at my revenue level should be focused and what's the highest cost bottleneck you see?

Then hit send. AI will pattern match in 30 seconds. What would take you a week to figure out yourself, even though I bet you have a pretty good idea in your gut and taking all that time to do that. That's not efficiency. That's strategic intelligence and this is where it really gets good. You can use AI to turn your brain dump into an actual framework.

Next time you do something you know you shouldn't still be doing, record yourself doing it. Just talk out loud like you're teaching someone next to you, like I'm doing right here with you on this podcast. Okay, I'm reviewing this client proposal. First thing I look for is whether they led with the client's problem or our solution.

Always start with their pain. Then I check if the outcomes are specific and measurable because vague promises kill trust. Then I look at the pricing structure. That's just an example and you can take that recording the transcript or your notes, give it to ai, and here's another prompt to polish that up so that you can get your thinking out where your team can see it.

I just describe exactly what you did and why turn this into a step-by-step decision framework someone on my team could follow, including the judgment calls I made and when to loop me in versus decide independently. AI will give you back a documented process in about 90 seconds that would've taken you an hour to write yourself.

And now that thing you were doing, you have the option, the possibility to never do it again. you might be thinking, girl, what if they still don't do it as well as I would? Okay, fair. But first of all, that isn't actually the question to ask. The question is, what becomes possible in my business when I stop doing work that actually doesn't require me?

Because here's the truth, your business has been trying to tell you it doesn't need you to be the best at everything. It needs. You focused on the five things only you can do. So the translation, when you stop redoing everyone's work, you're not losing control, you're multiplying yourself. And here's the ripple effect.

Your team stops treating you like Google. They start actually solving problems. They start bringing you solutions instead of questions. You work less, not more, and your business becomes more valuable, not because you're in it all the time, but because it works without you having to be in every single decision.

That is so much more than delegation. That is freedom and that 10 to 15 KA month you're saving. That's not even the best part. The best part is you finally have strategic capacity to do the thing you started this business for in the first place. The life changing work, the big partnerships, the thought leadership that positions you as the expert, this version of you is what your business has been waiting for.

Okay, let me recap real quick. One, it's faster if I just do it myself, is costing you between 10 and $15,000 a month? Minimum. Stop saying it. Two, you're not delegating tasks. You're delegating decisions and strategy. Transfer your thinking, not just the doing. And three, your move this week create your founder only list using the three filters, five things maximum.

Everything else gets the who decision matrix. Junior team gets process, mid-level, gets judgment calls senior team gets strategic ownership. And finally. Four. Use AI as strategic intelligence to show you where you're the bottleneck, and then use it to document your frameworks so you don't have to touch lower value work.

Again, the bottom line, every time you say It's faster if I just do it myself, you're choosing to stay the bottleneck, so I'm inviting you to choose differently if this resonated, and I'm guessing it did, because you're still listening, come join other female founders who are breaking this exact pattern inside the free AI for founders community.

On LinkedIn, we share wins. We share tools. We have real conversations about building businesses that don't require us to be superhuman. And honestly, the women in there are documenting their frameworks, building their founder only lists, and using AI to multiply themselves instead of just working harder.

The links in the show notes. I will see you in there. Alright, that is your Gallant Times's truth for the day. Happy Gallant Times's Day. Go make your founder only list. Use your filters. Be ruthless about actually what requires your brain versus what requires your documented thinking. And here's to think about before the next episode.

What version of you is your business actually waiting for? It's not the version who's the answer key to every question. It's the version who teaches once and moves on to what actually matters. So I'll see you next time for a deep dive into a new framework, a new AI tool, something that lets your team replicate your thinking without you having to be in the room.

And until then, stop being the person who does everything. Start being the person who builds the business that does everything. Talk soon, Lovie.