Stanko spent about 12 years working for an aggregator, running group operations and project management in finance. By the time he joined Jack Paxton on Blitz Growth, he'd spent the previous two years building his own agency. He'd also made a decision that plenty of founders put off: he delegated work from day one.
Web development, some SEO, client marketing, and design work went to people who could handle those tasks while he focused on how the operation should work. That decision sits behind much of his advice in this conversation.
His description of the job is refreshingly blunt:
“I help people get shit done.”
Then there's the messier version of the same job, the one you might recognize. You're answering a customer while checking a project, remembering an invoice, and wondering whether anyone followed up with that lead. Everything depends on you remembering what happens next.
Stanko's conversation with Jack gets into that problem without pretending every founder can immediately hire a team. They discuss protecting your time while you're still doing everything yourself, deciding what to hand off, and choosing software without expecting it to fix unclear responsibilities.
For creators selling services or building an agency around their expertise, there's plenty to put into practice.
Your business already has an operation
Stanko starts with a useful observation: every business has an operation, including a business that runs badly. Work already happens in some sequence. Customers arrive, somebody responds, and eventually somebody has to deliver what was promised.
The question is how much of that sequence lives in someone's head.
Jack describes the difference between a system people can follow and a business run through endless messages. Stanko takes it further. A good operation has stages, with the right person involved at the right point. Finishing one stage triggers the next.
That sounds straightforward until you try to write down your own process. Imagine a coaching client has paid. Who sends the welcome information? What tells that person payment is complete? If you have to search your messages before answering, you've found a place to start.
Stanko describes founders trying to hold a million things at once. That's his image for the overload, not a literal task count, and it captures why an apparently busy business can struggle to grow. The founder keeps carrying the reminders that should belong to the process.
A practical exercise is to choose one recurring piece of work and write down its actual route through the business. Include the awkward parts. If someone has to chase an approval twice, write that down too; a clean diagram that skips the chasing won't explain the delay.
You don't need to redesign everything this afternoon. Stanko's starting point is awareness: recognize the separate parts of the operation so you can start giving each one a clearer place.
Give each role its own time
Hiring isn't the first answer Stanko gives when Jack asks about delegation. He starts with how a solo founder spends the day.
Early on, you're probably going to wear several hats. Stanko's objection is to trying to wear them all at once. He argues that switching between five tasks prevents you from giving any one of them proper attention.
His recommendation is time blocking by role. In his example, 9-10 is operations and 10-11 is accounting, with sales taking another block. During each window, work as the person responsible for that function rather than dipping into every part of the business.
Jack already uses a version of this. He describes recurring calendar appointments, such as sales on Monday from 11-12 or HR on Thursday from 2-3. But the useful detail is what he puts inside the appointment.
He adds notes about the work he intends to do.
Without those notes, Jack says, he can reach the scheduled hour and have to figure out what it's for. Stanko points out that spending 10 or 20 minutes deciding what to do eats into the time you've set aside.
If you've ever opened a calendar event called “marketing” and immediately started checking email, you'll understand the problem. The calendar protected an hour; it didn't give you an assignment.
For your next block, name the role and write the next action before the appointment arrives. “Sales” might become “follow up with prospects waiting for a proposal.” That's an illustrative task, but the principle comes directly from their discussion: make the work clear enough that you can start.
Keep unrelated requests somewhere you can return to later. Otherwise, your operations hour becomes the same mixed bag of responsibilities with a more respectable calendar label.
Delegate around your strengths, then test the handoff
Eventually, better scheduling runs into a limit. Jack presses Stanko on that point: what happens when the responsibilities inside each block become too large for the available hours?
Stanko recommends looking at your strengths and the time you're spending away from them. His example is a practitioner doing injectable treatments who also runs the clinic's social account. Between clients, that person writes copy and publishes posts.
They can learn social media. But their main skill, and the work customers are paying them for, is elsewhere.
That distinction gives you a better delegation question than “Could I do this myself?” Ask how much time the task takes and what work you delay to fit it in.
Jack shares his own first-hire experience here. He couldn't get everything done in a day, so he hired someone to help with lower-level tasks. His account is about running out of capacity, rather than waiting for a perfectly designed organization chart.
Stanko suggests testing a handoff. He mentions finding help through Upwork and running a trial to take something off your plate. He doesn't offer a universal hiring budget or promise that the first person will be the right fit.
You can apply that advice with a contained assignment. Say you're a creator who sells consulting and spends time preparing routine client materials. A trial could cover one repeatable preparation task, with a clear example of the finished work and a point for review.
The details matter because “help me with admin” leaves too much open. A bounded task lets you see whether the person understands the work without transferring an entire function at once.
Stanko's own agency followed that approach to specialization from the beginning. Outsourcing selected work let him keep his attention on the broader operation. Your first handoff can be much smaller; it still deserves a clear purpose.
Our take: choose a delegation trial that gives you room to do work customers already pay you for. Agree on what a finished task looks like, then judge the handoff by the work delivered and the attention it gives back.
Growth exposes unclear roles
One of Stanko's strongest warnings concerns employees who grow with a small business. Someone joins early, proves helpful, and gradually takes on responsibilities they haven't trained for.
Over time, that person can end up running a function without the skills it now requires. Stanko sees this as a common reason an operation stops progressing as well as it could.
He also describes small teams spreading too many responsibilities across too few people. In his example, three or four staff members receive five or six different tasks or responsibilities each. People become flustered, and the work suffers.
Founders can recognize this without treating the employee as the problem. If a role changed while the business grew, look at whether the person received the training or support to match it.
The business may still be winning customers during this period. Stanko specifically points out that marketing can work and bring in leads while operations and retention fall apart internally.
That's a difficult combination to manage because acquisition creates more work for the team that's already struggling to deliver.
Try reviewing one recurring responsibility with the person who owns it. Ask what they believe they're responsible for and where they wait on someone else. Compare that answer with your own expectations. Any disagreement is useful information, especially if you've been judging performance against instructions nobody clearly discussed.
A growing task list won't tell you whether a role makes sense. You have to look at the work inside it.
Choose software for a process you understand
Jack asks which tools make the biggest difference to operations. Stanko's answer stays broad, covering how software can connect work throughout a customer relationship.
He describes a sequence involving lead generation and sales, followed by production and dispatch in a manufacturing example, with retention work after the sale. The useful idea is that each stage connects to another; software helps carry that sequence.
For a smaller business, Stanko mentions Trello as a place to organize customers or accounts on a board. For a larger operation, he gives Salesforce as an example. He ties the choice to the size of the business and what it needs to do.
He doesn't compare their features or say every company needs either product. Keep that distinction intact when deciding what to buy.
Before adding software, write down the point where work currently stalls. Perhaps a paid customer waits because nobody knows who's supposed to contact them. In that hypothetical case, define the owner and the trigger before deciding which tool should send the notification.
The conversation also includes predictions about AI for 2024, following what Stanko describes as a big year for AI in 2023. Those comments belong to that moment; they're predictions made during the interview, rather than evidence of what happened afterward.
Stanko expected more testing and a clearer sense of where AI wasn't as useful as people had portrayed it. He also expected some jobs to become redundant while new roles appeared, including opportunities for more salespeople or account managers.
His practical advice is to stay open and sift through the options. For your business, that means trying a tool against a defined task and keeping it only if it helps. Enthusiasm alone won't tell you whether the task now takes less work.
Match your offer to the help the client needs
The conversation shifts into a question that creators with useful expertise often face: should you sell coaching, build a course, or start an agency?
Jack explicitly lays out those three models. He thinks each can be successful, while acknowledging that doing all three is difficult. Stanko explains how he distinguishes coaching from hands-on agency work.
Project size and the size of the problem guide his decision. Some clients want someone working inside the business with their team, understanding the current operation and helping rebuild it. Others feel stuck at a particular point and want guidance from someone with relevant experience.
The comparison below follows those distinctions. The course model comes from Jack's framing; the conversation doesn't establish that Stanko sells a course.
Model | How the conversation describes it | Question to ask before offering it | Delivery commitment |
|---|---|---|---|
One-to-one coaching | Help for someone stuck at a particular point who wants experienced guidance. | Can the client carry out the work with advice? | Direct involvement with the individual. |
Course | Jack describes one-to-many teaching with lower direct involvement. | Can you teach the subject without personally working inside each business? | Teaching through material rather than individual delivery. |
Agency | Hands-on work to understand the business and help build its operation. | Does the client need someone to do the work alongside the team? | Capacity to carry out the agreed project. |
For your own offer, the distinction helps you set expectations. A buyer who needs implementation may struggle with advice alone. A buyer with a capable team may need help making a decision rather than another delivery team.
Stanko also describes B2B as selling to an individual within a business. A person still makes the decision, even when the company pays.
At the time of the conversation, much of his client acquisition came through word of mouth and referrals. He had a small team and attributed that traction to the work and results. He doesn't provide a referral rate or acquisition cost, so there's no numerical formula to copy.
The practical lesson is to give delivery as much attention as the offer. In Stanko's account, doing the work well was central to how the next client found him.
Cash flow sets the pace of delegation
Jack raises the uncomfortable part of hiring: do you spend money on help before there's much room in the budget, or keep doing the work yourself until the business earns more?
Stanko doesn't give a revenue threshold. He says people are in different financial positions and may need to retain funds for later.
His recommendation is to identify the top five things that need doing and separate them from work that can wait. He also uses pros-and-cons lists to decide what makes sense.
Try making that decision about a specific task. “Should I build a team?” carries a lot of uncertainty. “Should I pay someone to handle this recurring assignment?” gives you a scope you can examine.
You can then consider the fee alongside the work you'll do with the available time. If you can't name that work yet, pause before assuming the expense will pay for itself.
Stanko encourages a longer-term view of marketing spending, including SEO. Jack adds a useful caution: sometimes spending money to make money works, and sometimes it doesn't.
That caveat belongs in the plan. Calling a cost an investment doesn't remove the need to decide how much you can afford or what would justify continuing. A limited trial gives you a decision to revisit before the commitment gets larger.
Do this, not that
The episode's advice gets more useful when you turn it into choices you can make during an ordinary working week.
Write the assignment into the calendar event. Avoid an empty block called “sales” if you'll spend its opening minutes deciding where to start.
Trial a defined task with someone whose skills fit. Don't hand over a vague collection of unfinished work and expect them to discover your priorities.
Check whether responsibilities still fit the person. An early employee's willingness to help doesn't establish that every new function belongs in their role.
Describe the handoff before choosing the software. Buying another tool won't settle who needs to act when a stage finishes.
Look at delivery while reviewing customer growth. More leads create more work; check whether the team can handle what you've sold before adding pressure.
None of those choices requires a complete business rebuild. Pick the one that addresses a frustration you dealt with recently, because you'll have a concrete example to work through rather than an abstract idea of “better operations.”
A seven-day operations reset
The following checklist turns the conversation into a suggested week of work. It's an editorial application of Stanko and Jack's advice, not a program Stanko claims to use or a promise of results in seven days. Keep the scope to one recurring process.
Day 1: record what you do. Write down the tasks you handle and note where you switch roles. Include the follow-ups and small interruptions you might otherwise forget. You're looking for an honest picture of the day, so resist tidying the record into what you intended to do.
Day 2: trace one customer process. Choose a repeated activity, such as bringing a new client into your service. Write each step in its actual order and name who handles it. Mark any point where progress depends on somebody remembering to send a message.
Day 3: schedule focused work. Create role-based blocks for the responsibilities you still own. Put the next action inside each calendar event. During a block, capture unrelated requests for later so you can return to the assignment instead of changing roles immediately.
Day 4: review ownership. If you have a team, discuss one responsibility that has expanded over time. Find out whether the current owner has what they need to handle it. If you're solo, choose a task that takes time away from your strongest paid work.
Day 5: define a possible trial. Write a short handoff for that task, including an example of acceptable work and when you'll review it. Consider whether you can afford outside help now. If you can't, keep the instructions; you've still made the task clearer.
Day 6: examine one software use. Select a step from the process you mapped and decide exactly what software should help you do. Keep the test narrow. Look for whether it reduces the work involved, including any checking or corrections you still need to perform.
Day 7: make the next decision. Review where you still had to chase work or explain the same thing again. Choose one change to continue and one unresolved issue to address next. Leave the rest alone for now; you need room to see whether the change holds.
Build around the work you want to keep doing
Stanko's account of delegating from day one is useful because it reveals a choice about his own job. He wanted to spend his attention understanding how a business should operate, with other people handling selected work around it.
Your choice may look different, especially if cash is tight or you're still figuring out what customers will pay for. You can still begin by protecting a block of time and making one recurring responsibility easier to follow.
Look at the task you keep carrying into tomorrow. Decide whether it needs your focused attention, a clearer process, or a trial handoff, then put that decision on the calendar.
Listen to the full Blitz Growth Podcast conversation with Jack Paxton and Stanko for their discussion of delegation, operations, and building a service business.