Projects stall waiting for your sign-off, your team can’t make moves without you, and strategic work keeps getting pushed to next week. Being able to delegate properly fixes that.
The hard part for leaders isn’t knowing that they’re stuck in the weeds. It’s knowing what to actually do about it, and why being able to delegate is vital for firms to scale.
In a recent episode of The Blueprint Collective, Josh Stone, former engineer and Founder of Ignite Coaching, reveals what it looks like when a principal or founder becomes a bottleneck in their firm, and shares practical advice on how firm owners can be more strategic.
These five practical steps will help you start delegating and stop being the bottleneck.
Step 1: Know Your Buyback Rate
Before you can start delegating, you need to know what your time is actually worth. Josh calls this your buyback rate, a concept he says comes from Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time.
The maths is straightforward: divide your annual salary by roughly 2,000 (the average amount of hours a person works in a year). Then, divide that rate by four. This gives you a buyback rate: the amount that you should be paying someone to do tasks which free up your time. Not only does this provide a 4x ROI, it also means that as a general rule, principals shouldn’t be spending their time on tasks that could be outsourced for their buyback rate.
“You should be really looking to get other people to help support you in the business. If your buyback rate’s $80 an hour, anything less than that and someone else should be helping do that for you, freeing you up as the founder or the owner to focus on higher value tasks in the business.” – Josh Stone
This single number reframes every task on your to-do list; making it more about whether you should do something, not about whether you can.
Step 2: Do a Week-in-Review
Once you know your buyback rate, the next step is understanding where your time is actually going. A week-in-review is a simple solution for any firm owner who suspects they’re spread too thin.
Josh encourages his boardroom clients to have an awareness of high value time vs low value time: the highest value activities founders bring to the business, compared to low value activities. High value time might include strategic direction, business development and client relationships, whereas low value time might mean admin work, calendar management and manually managing finances.
“Do a brain dump of all the stuff that you’ve done this week. Highlight green for stuff that is high value time for you, orange is the low value time and you just get a very clear, unemotional, snapshot of your week. Then what we encourage our clients to do is to make a plan to start delegating.” – Josh Stone
Once you’ve got that snapshot, the questions become: who on the team could take this on? If no one can yet, does this work form the basis of a new hire’s role description?
Step 3: Get It Out of Your Head
The biggest barrier to delegation in small A&E firms isn’t willingness. It’s that everything lives in one person’s head. Fee proposal logic, client communication norms, project setup preferences; all of it undocumented, and in the founder’s head.
To solve this, founders don’t need to write a manual. All Josh says they need to do is to do the task once, on a recording. Videos around fee proposals, project kick-off checklists and client briefing notes can then be used time and time again.
“We encourage all our clients to do screen recordings of them doing a fee proposal. A platform like Loom, you can screen record yourself doing something and then you hit the AI button and it spits out an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) in terms of what you’ve just done. It’s just looking for ways to get the stuff out of your head and into a system or process.” – Josh Stone
Step 4: Train Staff Continuously (And Patiently)
Delegation isn’t a handover. It’s a process, and expecting staff to get it right from day one is the fastest way founders convince themselves no one else can do what they do.
The practical approach looks like this: share any video recordings or SOPs, give your team a template, ask them to have a go, then sit down and give feedback. Josh shares that while the first attempt may not be perfect, founders need to be building capability, not outsourcing the task and walking away.
“Founders get frustrated with their team when they could just be ‘doing it themselves’. But you’ve got to look at the longer term play in the business. And even if they only get it 80% right, and you’re still required for that final review, 80% done by someone else is better than 100% done by you.” – Josh Stone
Step 5: Consider Whether it’s a Hire or An AI Workflow
Before worrying about when, and who, to hire, ask whether the task is process-driven enough to automate. Josh raises this with his clients regularly.
Admin tasks, document formatting, meeting summaries, first-draft templates; a growing number of these require a well-built workflow, not additional staff.
“In the world of AI, could you build an agent? Can you build a workflow for that to help support you? Maybe it’s not a hire. Maybe it’s using AI, particularly if it’s process driven or admin.” – Josh Stone
Where to Start
Josh’s benchmark for how founders should structure their time is simple: 80% of your week on high value work, 20% on low value work.
For leaders struggling with that split, the week-in-review is the place to start. Delegation rarely fails because the team isn’t capable. It fails because the process of handing tasks over was never properly built.
A documented process, a trained team member, and a closer look at where your efforts are going isn’t complicated. It just requires founders to accept that 80% done by someone else isn’t a failure. It’s how the business grows.
About The Blueprint Collective
Hosted by Scott Bampton, Product Marketing Manager at Total Synergy and former Operations Lead within national architecture firms, The Blueprint Collective is a curated podcast featuring candid Q&A-style conversations with architects, engineers, and creative leaders redefining how we design, deliver, and lead.
Filmed online, the series cuts through industry polish to focus on what matters: the ideas and people driving progress. Want to join us on the podcast? Register your interest here.
About Total Synergy (Australia)
Total Synergy is an Australian software company based in North Sydney, NSW, helping architecture and engineering practices across Australia improve project visibility, resourcing, and profitability with project management and practice management software.
About Josh Stone
Josh Stone is a business coach, engineer, and former consultancy owner who built his expertise from the ground up, not from a textbook.
He spent nearly a decade as a director and shareholder of a $3M engineering consultancy, growing it into a $30M firm spanning civil, structural, environmental, town planning, surveying, and architecture with multiple offices along Australia’s east coast.
That firsthand experience – the wins, the hard lessons, and everything in between – is the foundation of everything he now teaches through Ignite Coaching. Today, Josh helps engineering, town planning, surveying, and architecture consultancy owners across Australia and New Zealand, build profitable, sustainable businesses that give them back their time and freedom.
He is the author of The Profitable Engineering Consultant, a straight-talking 193-page playbook distilling his proven Boardroom Growth Model into an actionable framework for consultancy owners ready to scale without working themselves into the ground.
