How to Delegate Tasks in Your Small Business with Brittany Bettini

Tired of saying it’s faster if I do it myself? We dive into a practical, human way to break the bottleneck and build a business that runs with you, not because of you. Our guest, Brittany Bettini of I Need a VA, lays out a straightforward blueprint: start with a life audit, delegate low-joy work, and capture your “pie recipe” in clear SOPs so results stay consistent even when hands change.

We get honest about control, especially the hyper-independence many women entrepreneurs carry into their businesses. Brittany shares how she moved from doing everything to doing only what lights her up—coaching, teaching, creating—while VAs handle operations, inboxes, research, scheduling, design assets, and home tasks like groceries and laundry. The key isn’t just offloading tasks; it’s choosing what to keep based on joy, genius, and revenue impact, then backing the rest with documentation that a new hire can follow on day one.

You’ll hear how to use Loom and AI to turn screen recordings into step-by-step SOPs, why in-house virtual assistants (especially experienced Filipino VAs) protect your IP and culture, and how to structure training so your team writes and updates the manuals as they work. We cover mistakes to avoid—like over-relying on agencies for core functions—and the management rhythms that keep quality high without micromanaging: clear outcomes, visible dashboards, and monthly SOP reviews. Think of delegation like a pendulum: initial training takes time and money, then the swing returns with compounding freedom, focus, and revenue.

If you’re ready to stop being the bottleneck and start being the leader, this conversation gives you the tools and the nudge to move. 

Read more HERE

Chapters

• 0:35 Why Letting Go Feels Hard
• 1:49 Meet Brittany And Her VA Approach
• 2:50 Control, Identity, And Bottlenecks
• 4:16 The Life Audit Method
• 5:19 Start At Home To Reclaim Time
• 6:43 Choose Joy And Delegate The Rest
• 9:04 Balance, Pendulums, And ROI
• 10:01 Hiring Right Beats Delegating Wrong
• 11:04 Build In‑House Knowledge And SOPs
• 12:08 SOPs Without Micromanaging
• 13:03 Using AI And Loom For Training
• 15:16 Training VAs To Create SOPs
• 16:51 The DIY Hiring Guide And Support
• 18:32 Managing, Monitoring, And Ongoing Training
• 19:23 Resources, Referrals, And Closing

Transcript

Jenny: 0:35

If you've ever catched yourself saying, I always do it better, it's just faster if I do it. This video is for you. Today, in this conversation, we're breaking down exactly what tasks to delegate and how to create systems to make it so much simpler. Hi, Brittany. Welcome to the podcast. How are you?

Brittany: 0:54

I'm doing good. Thank you, Jenny, for having me.

Jenny: 0:58

Of course. I am so excited to have this conversation about how to delegate tasks in your business. Before we jump into that, will you actually introduce yourself and your business to my audience?

Brittany: 1:09

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Brittany Bettini, and I'm the founder of a company called I Need a VA. I have a lot of experience in a lot of different industries, but everything has kind of led me to down this path of helping entrepreneurs figure out how to do less while still making a great income. And I've been able to do that across a lot of industries by delegating tasks to Filipino virtual assistants.

Jenny: 1:35

Okay. Excellent. Very good. It's funny because our most recent podcast episode, someone was actually talking about Filipino as well for VAs and how well it works and all of that. So I'm excited to really jump jump into this. So here's my first question for you. Many small actual business owners struggle to let go of control. Why do you think delegation feels so hard at first?

Brittany: 2:00

Especially for women, I found this. And in fact, I wrote a book about it. It's called She Delegates. Um, and I think that a lot of it comes from this hyper-independence that we have as women that we have to take care of everybody and take care of everything. And when we become entrepreneurs, that spills over. Um, and so it's hard for us to number one, admit that we need help. Um, and number two, a lot of us think that no one can do it as good as us because we've built this and we become emotionally attached to our businesses. And we're like, this is my baby, and no one is gonna love it and care for it the way that I do. Um, so learning how to um kind of let someone be the babysitter um of the business so that you can focus on the things that you're really good at or that you're working in your genius. Um, but I think that the the biggest reason why people struggle to let go of tasks inside of their business is because they're control freaks. And it really spills over into being an entrepreneur because we're the ones with the ideas. So we're like, we have to do every little step of the idea when that's not actually true.

Jenny: 3:10

And I think too, as entrepreneurs, we work through so many things, learned the business to get it off the ground that we're so used to having to be in the business, it can be difficult to let go and not be that cog that stops everything. Right.

Brittany: 3:23

And ultimately we become the um bottleneck, and it inhibits people from wanting to purchase our business when it doesn't survive without us. I've always kind of talked about the pie recipe. You have this bakery, you are the only one that knows how to make this special pie that everybody loves, and then you die, and then the pie dies along with you. And so my my whole goal in life now is to teach people that the recipe in the, you know, the pie can live on after you are gone, after you sell. Um, and and it's been a whirlwind for me because I I was the one that struggled with how to let go myself. Um, my VA the first three weeks, I don't think she did anything in my business.

Jenny: 4:08

I totally understand that. So when someone is first starting to delegate, where should they begin?

Brittany: 4:16

Um, the the life audit is what I call it. So um for me, writing down every single thing I do during an entire week or two-week period. And I don't just mean inside the business, I mean everything I do daily with my family, with my kids' school schedules, um, just every single thing I do from the moment I wake up until I lay down exhausted at night. Um, and then having that list up, you can do it in your phone, put it on a notes app if you're not big with writing things down, or just, you know, write it down as you're going throughout your day. Um at the end, you go through and highlight the things that you know you don't want to be doing on a day-to-day basis, um, or things that you know could be delegated if you had the right person and had the right training for them to do it. And that's how I kind of built my insanely delegated life. I mean, I don't even do grocery shopping anymore. I have a VA who does grocery shopping, I have a VA who helps me with kids' PTO stuff. And then every part of my business except for what I'm doing right now is delegated. My only job now is to kind of speak and teach and help other entrepreneurs find my company. Um and so everything can be delegated. We've just got to go down that list and figure out which things we want to start with and build from there.

Jenny: 5:40

Yes. And I think often it's easy as a woman to start with the home, right? Like delegate there first. Because let's be honest, I don't really enjoy cleaning my kitchen. It'd be great to be able to hand that off. So thinking it that way.

Brittany: 5:57

Absolutely. And I I come from a background of janitorial. Like I lit my job was to clean toilets. I don't want to clean anymore. That's like the thing that was the number one thing on my list. Doing laundry, having a laundry service come and pick up. How many hours a day do you get back by delegating those little things that no one's gonna notice if it's you, no one's gonna celebrate you. They don't, they don't even say thank you when you fold their clothes and lay them on their bed or put them away for them. So if somebody else is doing that, that frees up your time to be either more present in their lives, the people that you love, or to reinvest that time into a business gonna generate you more income. Yes, so good.

Jenny: 6:39

So you said something interesting before when you were talking about what to delegate. You said it needs to just be you when it's things like this, a podcast interview where you're educating. So, how can a business owner identify which tasks are worth delegating versus the ones that they should keep on their plate?

Brittany: 6:56

So for me, it was what brings me joy. Um, I used to think that the more burnt out I was, the more exhausted, the more um, you know, that I I was winning if I was exhausted. And I I felt guilty if I took a moment for myself. And so I had like an epiphany uh a year or so ago when I closed down one of my businesses that was draining me. And for me now, I delegate everything that doesn't bring me joy, everything that doesn't make my life feel romantic. I try to romanticize my entire life now. Um, and for me, inside of my business, I want to be the genius who comes up with the cool ideas and someone else executes them. And I want to be the person that does what I love every single day. And I love talking to entrepreneurs. I love coaching people through their hangups of how to delegate. I don't love sending invoices. Or you don't want me bookkeeping. I'm going to prison if I'm the person in charge of that, I'm dyslexic. So for me, I started with the things that I knew would help drive more income. Um, but then ultimately my end goal was to just do what I love to do every day, which is spend time with my kids and talk to entrepreneurs. And everything else, I've got to figure out who else is better at that than me and give them that job.

Jenny: 8:26

I love that. So smart. And it really is to be able to live because that's what many of us started our businesses, right? Is to get back that joy. We didn't want to be stuck in a nine to five being miserable. So being able to then get into your business and feel that isn't any good. So we want to get the joy that it brings us. Yes.

Brittany: 8:46

We went from working like 40 to 60 hours a week for corporation and feeling like we hated it to starting a business for freedom and now we're working a hundred hours a week and we're more exhausted and more broke because we're not getting paid. Right. So ultimately, um finding finding, I hate the word balance, but finding that balance in the beginning when you're delegating of um, you know, what what things can I delegate that are income driven? So that way I'm I'm making more money and getting my time back so that that way I can actually have the peace of mind to sit and think, what else can I delegate?

Jenny: 9:24

Yes. So I love the fact that you brought up balance because you hesitated to say it. And that's something with my audience we do talk about, like it's more like a pendulum, right? It swings from side to side based on what you can pay attention to. And I think that's the same thing when you're talking about delegating within your business. There's gonna be times when you're able to delegate and it's gonna be a little bit more expensive than you want it to be, but it's gonna swing back where it's going to be less expensive. You're gonna be making all this money, and that's the purpose behind doing it so that you can get to that point of having the more of the time and less money spent as compared to maybe in the beginning where you're spending more and not quite having all the time you want because you've got to train the person, right? Yeah. So are there any common mistakes you see entrepreneurs make when choosing what to delegate?

Brittany: 10:09

Um yes and no. So my biggest thing isn't what to delegate all the time, um, it's who to delegate it to. Uh is where I see the biggest mistakes. A lot of people will hire companies um to take over certain portions of their business, um, which can be good or bad. I like to have everyone who works for me on an in-house team. Um, and you know, in the beginning, that could it started for me with one virtual assistant who kind of did a lot of different things. She was wearing a lot of hats like I was. And then we developed a two and then three, and then now we have departments and we have, you know, 15 people on our internal team, and we have this nice little chart that tells everybody what their job is and it's very organized. Um, but when you hire like a graphic design company, you're giving them your branding. And if they close down, if they go away, or if you know you ultimately decide to fire them, you're starting back at square one. Whereas when you hire someone in-house, not only are you training them and they're becoming part of the family, but also their job is to build their own SOPs as they're doing it for you. So that way, if they get promoted and move up in your company or have to leave the company for whatever reason, the next person that comes in isn't starting from ground zero. They have all the assets, they have all the folders, they have the training. And, you know, you own everything inside of your business. Ultimately, that's gonna allow you to get a higher evaluation if you decide to sell or if you decide to, you know, um, or if you, you know, need to pass it down to someone. They have all the manual of how to run your company just like you would, because that's the biggest thing people are scared of. It's not gonna be done like I would do it. It will if they have an SOP that tells them exactly how you would do it.

Jenny: 12:05

So you said the magic word, SOP. And I think a lot of people hear that word and they freak out. And I'm the opposite. I get so excited because I know that's where the organization comes from. So, and I think it kind of like leads itself nicely into my next question, which is how do you ensure that tasks are completed the way you want without micromanaging?

Brittany: 12:26

Yeah. Um, luckily for my team, I'm not a micromanager. I'm more of like when I get it back, if it's not right, I'm just like, oh gosh, either I need to do this to myself or we need to start over. Um, and that's where I learned how to really create SOPs that work because I was the one that would be like, you know what, I'm just gonna do it myself. It's faster if I just do it myself. Um, so I had to figure out how to train somebody to be me. Um, and so having an SOP that isn't just something that's written, having something that has videos, you can use Loom. Um, you can actually have um AI, and I'm not a huge fan of AI, but you can have AI watch your screen as you do a task. Um, they have that new feature where you just press a button and it's like, hi, what can I help you with? And you're like, can you see my screen? And then walk it through. This is how we make a post on our social media. We start here, we go here, we click here, blah, blah, blah. And then Chat GBT will actually create a very lengthy, easy-to-read, easy to follow um SOP for the person who's going to be doing that task moving forward. I always tell when I'm having an AI help me develop it out because I'm not great at really small details, is explain this to someone as if they're a third grader. I want my 10-year-old kid to be able to run my company. Explain it so that they could actually do it. So, you know, a lot of times we just over uh we don't over-explain enough of how we want something done. We tell them a little bit of what we want and then we hand it to them, and then we're frustrated when it comes back and it's not correct. Um, so that, and then having your team update the SOPs every time a process changes, every time something in your business is different than it was the last time you did it, that SOP needs to be updated and it needs to be ever evolving. That manual needs to be digital and just ever changing.

Jenny: 14:27

Yes, we're big on as much video and audio as possible because that's how I actually communicate better rather than it being written for them, although we always have a transcript. Uh, I love that you brought up AI. We are actually huge proponents of AI within my business and also within my audience. We love it. We have learned that it's not replacing us, it's meant to minimize our time and make it so that we can maximize everything that we are doing. We actually have prompts specifically for our people that work on our team to be able to use that prompt to help create the content that we're using. So it becomes part of the SOP. Absolutely. So I love that. So, do you have, would you say you have a specific process for training someone on how to create the SOP? Are there steps that they have to take in order to like create it for themselves?

Brittany: 15:16

Yeah. So the way that my company works is we do a lot of the recruitment for everyone from um solo entrepreneurs and real estate agents all the way to we work with uh C-suite executives at Fortune 500 companies. So as you can tell, we're in 20 different industries. The SOPs are all over the place. We don't have like a set SOP to go with your VA. So we have to have a way for the VA to really create their own SOPs once they get into the job. A lot of it is the prompts that you talked about. We've developed some really great prompts that will help them. And then our training process, everybody that um hires a virtual assistant from my company, their VA comes with pre-training. So they go through a week-long kind of boot camp to number one, weed out people who aren't gonna make it. And number two, to give them the tools that they need to be able to really perform well at their job. Um, and in that process of learning a bunch of different tools and how we do things, um, they they become a SOP machine for their clients. Um, and so that's how we do it internally for our clients and internally for our own business as things continue to evolve. Um, the SOPs get better and better. And as we learn more about AI, it becomes easier and easier to transform really amazing thoughts and processes into manuals for their company.

Jenny: 16:44

Absolutely. I love it. So now tell me about your hiring guide. What can we expect to find in this? We're gonna link to it in the actual blog post so people be able to get to it, but tell me what they can expect to learn from it.

Brittany: 16:57

Yeah, absolutely. So um I I wanted to build my business around no gatekeeping, there's no secret sauce to where I find VAs or or how I recruit them. I wanted to give that away. People pay me for uh convenience because it's a process hiring folks. I'm sure you know. Um, there's a lot that goes into that. But I wanted them to have all those tools. So we put everything in the hiring guide, um, everything from where you can go to find a Filipino virtual assistant to hire, um, job listing um of what you should put in the job description so that you'll get the right people to apply, uh, what questions to ask during interviewing, how to vet them, what to what kind of questions to ask to make sure that you're getting someone who can actually do what it is you're hiring them to do, um, so that they can do it themselves. So it's a DIY guide on finding your own virtual assistant and hiring them and getting them onboarded. Um, and then if you need us, we're there. Um, and and that's how I've I've built my business. We're 100% referral-based. Uh, we don't run ads. Everyone we we get either comes from a speaking opportunity or from a very happy client who sent their friends over. And the hiring guide allows people to see that, oh, they'll just give us the entire blueprint. If we need them to do it for us, they're there to do it for us.

Jenny: 18:23

Right. And if someone's looking for to hire, they're looking to not have spend the time probably doing the hiring as well. So that's perfect. That you can't do that. And the man of that process.

Brittany: 18:32

One, it doesn't stop once you hire someone. Once you hire a virtual assistant, the hardest part is the management because they're on, you know, a different, they're in a different country, monitoring them to make sure that they're working on um what they're supposed to be working on, that they're not double dipping and working for 15 other clients, making sure that um that they have ongoing training. Um, the reason my team is so successful is because we invest in them and we don't just invest in our internal team, we bring in outside experts to teach the VAs that are working for our clients on an ongoing basis. So that's one of the things that people really love about working with us is not only do we do the recruitment, we're monitoring and training them as long as you're a client of ours.

Jenny: 19:16

Excellent. So we're gonna link to that. We're also obviously we can go to your website because people are going to be wanting this, I can tell already. Brittany, it was fabulous to speak with you. I really appreciate you taking the time to speak with me and my audience.

Brittany: 19:28

Absolutely. It's a pleasure, and um I'm I'm thankful to be here with you today.