Companion to "The first role."
Price every activity by what it would cost to buy it in the market, this year.
| Bucket | What lands here | Your hours/wk |
|---|---|---|
| $10 work | Confirmations, scheduling ping-pong, inbox triage, data entry, supply runs, basic prep and cleanup; the market clears this at entry wages | |
| $40 work | Skilled delivery under your standard: cleaning to a spec, editing to a style, installations, coaching sessions that follow your program, bookkeeping that reconciles | |
| $100 work | Sales, pricing, the quality bar, key relationships, strategy; the decisions that set the ceiling. You keep all of it, for now |
The first role is the biggest cluster of $10 and $40 hours that is checkable: work whose output you can verify quickly without doing it yourself. A job you cannot check is not delegated; it is donated.
| Sentence | What it answers | Yours |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Outcome | What is true when this person is doing the job well? ("Recurring clients' homes pass the walkthrough every visit and rebook.") | |
| 2. Measure | How you and they will both know: walkthrough pass rate, delivery time, rebook rate, response time. One number, visible to both of you | |
| 3. Boundaries | What they decide alone, what they escalate. ("You decide sequencing and supplies under fifty dollars. Quality complaints and anything over comes to me same day.") | |
| 4. Buy-back | What this frees you to do, specifically, by name. ("This frees eight hours a week that go to sales calls and the new commercial bid.") That sentence is the whole justification for the payroll |
| Delivery extender: customers want more of the work than you can produce; the hire multiplies delivery; fastest to justify because the refused revenue already exists | ☐ |
| Admin absorber: ten hours a week vanish into scheduling, quoting, invoicing, follow-up; cheaper to carry, pays only if freed hours are genuinely redeployed into selling | ☐ |
| Specialist you will never be: books kept current, video actually edited, listings photographed; usually a contractor lane | ☐ |
Do not hire your mirror. The fantasy first hire who sells like you, delivers like you, and cares like you does not exist at any wage. The real first hire does defined work at a defined standard and makes your good hours possible. If the role description only makes sense for a clone of you, the role is not defined.
| All hundred-dollar work kept this hire (sales, pricing, quality standard, top clients, judgment) | ☐ |
| You have personally owned every kind of work you will need to check | ☐ |
| Read-aloud test: the four sentences survive being said out loud to the person | ☐ |