The Number That Tells You What You're Allowed to Put Down

I sat with a founder this week who tracks deliveries by hand.

She runs an eight-figure business.

The easy read is "she's disorganized." She isn't. She's one of the sharpest operators I've worked with this year. Knows the business cold. Outworks everyone in the building.

That's exactly why it's a problem.

The task felt like work. It gave her a clean, finishable hit of done. You can see it. You can cross it off. The real growth of the company is bigger, slower, and it doesn't reward you today. So the tiny urgent thing wins. Every day. Right up until the company can't grow past the size of one founder's to-do list.

I didn't tell her to "delegate more." Every founder has heard that a thousand times and it changes nothing, because "more" isn't a number. You can't act on "more."

So I gave her a number instead. Your buyback rate.

Here's how you find yours. Grab the calculator on your phone.

Step one. Take the income you want to pay yourself this year. Not last year's number. The one you're building toward. Say it's $200,000.

Step two. Divide it by 2,000. That's roughly the working hours in a year. $200,000 divided by 2,000 is $100. That's what an hour of your time is worth at the salary you're aiming for.

Step three. Multiply that by 0.25. A hundred dollars times a quarter is $25.

That $25 is your buyback rate.

The rule is simple. Any task you could hand to someone for $25 an hour or less, you should not be the one doing it. Full stop. Not "when things calm down." Now.

Here's where the quarter comes from, because it's not arbitrary. Multiplying by 0.25 assumes a 4x return on replacing yourself. You pay someone $25 to take the task, which frees your $100 hour to go do the work only you can do. If that freed hour is worth anything close to your real rate, you just turned $25 of cost into $100 of value. Four to one. That's the whole trade.

So the buyback rate isn't "the most I'll pay to get rid of a chore." It's the price at which handing something off pays for itself four times over. Keep doing that $25 task yourself and you're not saving the $25. You're passing up the $100. That's the 75% you leave on the table, every hour, on purpose.

Find your row.

Run it for the number you actually want, not the one you're settling for. The rate climbs fast, and so does the list of things you have no business still touching.

Now here's the part that catches everyone.

When most founders run this, the number comes back lower than they expected. And their honest reaction is, "wait, I could pay someone just $25 an hour to take that off me? I've been guarding it like it was sacred."

Yes. That's the point. Your instinct about what only you can do is almost always too generous to yourself. The buyback rate is cold about it. It doesn't care that you're good at the task. It cares what the task is worth.

So run your own day against it. Not in theory. Actually.

What did you personally do yesterday that someone at or below your buyback rate could have done just as well?

If you vanished for thirty days, what breaks first? That thing is your real job. Nearly everything else is a hobby your company is quietly paying for.

And be honest: is the reason you keep doing the cheap work that it's cheaper, or that it's comfortable? For me it was always comfortable dressed up as responsible. Midnight in a spreadsheet felt like discipline. It was hiding.

The founder tracking deliveries didn't have a growth problem.

She had a $10 task and a $100 hour, and no number telling her that was a trade she couldn't afford.

Now you have the number.

Cruz