Your first helper
Lesson 27 of 31 in the course “Million Dollar Sales Course”. Free, with animations and a quiz.
When you alone aren’t enough
Over five levels you learned to build an offer, find people, write emails, launch and work with creators. But for now, one person does all of it: you. Hormozi went through this. When gym owners started recommending his gym-filling service to each other, he says that without help he’d have been booked solid for over two years. He describes four scenarios. Just you: lots of work, few leads. One helper: less work, same number of leads. Many helpers: lots of work again, but far more leads. And a helper who hires other helpers: little work, ever more leads. In this level we move from the first scenario to the second: handing off work, training people, reading the numbers and using agencies.
40 hours doing or 4 managing
Hormozi is honest: employees take work too, just less than doing everything yourself. In his experience, if you trade 40 hours of doing for 4 hours of managing, you free up 36 hours a week. And you can repeat that trade. 200 hours of work a week turn into 20 hours of managing. Then you hire a manager who manages for you, and you spend about 4 hours on them. The result: 4 hours of your time for 200 hours of work. Why it matters for Misha: he alone edits the lessons, makes subtitles and replies to comments. Every hour on subtitles is an hour he didn’t spend on a new lesson or a talk with a creator. A first helper isn’t there so you can rest. It’s there to free up time for what only you can do.
“Nobody can do it like me”
The main obstacle is often in your head. Hormozi admits that for years he kept saying: “if you want it done right, do it yourself”, “nobody can do it like me”, “nobody can replace me”. He compared himself to everyone he hired, bragging that he was better one moment and complaining they were worse the next. Until he realized something simple: he was the one who hired and trained them. So their weakness was his fault. He changed his beliefs. If you want it done right, get someone to spend all their time doing it. If I can do it, someone else can do it better. Everyone is replaceable, especially me. Why this works: you can do any single task better than any beginner, but you can’t do every task at once. And according to Hormozi, for basic jobs, how you train someone matters more than who you pick. That’s the next lesson.
Break the work into pieces
What should go first? Alex Berman, co-author of Cold Email Manifesto, notes that in most sales teams everyone does everything, and it’s chaos. He splits the work into parts and gives each person one: one finds contacts, another writes the first lines of emails, a third books meetings, a fourth closes deals. When a person does the same thing over and over, they quickly become the best at it. Do the same with your week: list every task and how many hours each takes. Hand off first a task that repeats, eats a lot of hours and that you can do well yourself, because you’ll need to explain it step by step. For Misha, that’s subtitles and cutting Shorts. His face and voice in videos, the offer and relationships with key partners he keeps: people buy from him, as we found out in lesson 24.
Where to find a helper
Good news: you already know how to find a helper. Hormozi shows that the four ways from lesson 9 work for hiring too. Warm contacts: ask friends and your own students. Cold: message people whose work you like. Content: post “looking for a helper”. Ads: promote that post. And who to pick? Berman has a simple test: look at what the person has already made on their own, with no boss. If a candidate wants to make YouTube videos but has no channel of their own, it’s worth asking why. His formula: “Don’t hire consumers. Hire creators.” Misha is lucky: some of his students already edit their own videos. Someone who took his course knows his style better than any stranger.
Case: 40 interviews for one hire
Hiring is a funnel too, and you look for the bottleneck in it the same way. Hormozi describes a 2021 meeting: the cold outreach sales goal had been missed two quarters in a row. It turned out one sales rep left every four weeks, and only one in four candidates got hired. At screening, there was about one qualified candidate per ten interviews. That added up to roughly 40 interviews per frontline hire. The fix: interview in groups and take everyone with a good work ethic and basic social skills, then teach them the rest. According to Hormozi, within six weeks hiring outpaced people leaving, and by the end of the quarter cold outreach sales had doubled. The takeaway: the problem wasn’t the sales method, there just weren’t enough salespeople. If you can’t seem to hire, look for where candidates get stuck.
A business without you is worth more
Helpers aren’t only about free time. Hormozi gives an example. Two businesses each make $2M in profit a year. The first runs on its owner: they work around the clock, and a vacation means a fire. It’s basically a high-paying job, and no one will want to buy it, because without the owner it’s worth nothing. The second makes the same money without its owner. It can be sold, and according to Hormozi it could easily be worth $10M or more. His conclusion: you get rich from what you make, but wealthy from what you own. Misha’s scale is different, but the logic is the same. If the course only sells while he edits through the night, he has a job. If subtitles, cutting and replies run on checklists without him, he has a system. Do a simple check: if a helper costs $100 a month and the hours you free up bring in at least three sales at $49, they’ve already paid for themselves.
Do it yourself: your first-hire plan
List every task in a normal week and how many hours each takes. Mark the ones that repeat, take more than three hours and that you do well yourself. Pick one of those tasks. Separately, mark what you’re keeping: your voice, the offer, key partners. Find three candidates in different ways: friends, students, a post. Choose the one who already does something similar on their own. Offer a paid test on one small task and work out whether the helper will pay off. If you’re under 18, set up any work with other people together with a parent. Next lesson, we’ll learn to hand off a task so it gets done as well as you’d do it.
Check yourself
- How many hours a week will he free up?
Correct answer: 9 hours. It was 10 hours of work, now it’s 1 hour of checking: 10 − 1 = 9. That’s the “doing for managing” trade from Hormozi’s book. - What would Hormozi say?
Correct answer: If I can do it, someone can do it better. My job is to teach. Hormozi thought the same for years, and his business only suffered. You’re better at any one task, but not at all of them at once, and a beginner’s weakness usually comes from how they were trained. - What should he hand off first?
Correct answer: Subtitles: 6 hours a week, done step by step. The task repeats, eats hours, and Misha does it well, so he can explain it step by step. That’s the ideal first thing to hand off. - Who should he take?
Correct answer: B: already has 30 edited videos on their own channel. Berman advises looking at work a person did on their own, with no boss. 30 videos is proof, not just words.
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