Grow vs. Buy Back Your Time: A Founder's Framework for Every Marketing Hire (and the 10/80/10 Rule)

A few years back I watched a founder I respect quietly burn himself out, and the cause was the most boring thing imaginable. He was pulling numbers into a spreadsheet every morning before his team logged on.

Not strategy. Not creative. Data entry. He was a smart operator doing a task he could have handed to someone on A$25 an hour, and he was doing it at 7am because it was the only quiet hour he had.

Here's the thing. That's not a time-management problem. It's a hiring problem wearing a time-management costume. And almost every 7-figure founder I talk to has a version of it.

So this is the framework I'd use to decide your next marketing hire. It's not glamorous, but it's saved me from a lot of expensive mistakes.

There are only two reasons to hire

Strip everything back and a marketing hire only ever does one of two things. It either grows the business, or it buys back your time. That's it.

Growing the business is a strategic bet. You're saying "we want to double this channel" or "we want to be properly good at retention", and you don't have anyone whose whole job is that outcome. You're hiring toward a number you can't hit today.

Buying back your time is different. You're the bottleneck. You're doing things that could be delegated, and every hour you spend on them is an hour you're not spending on the work only you can do.

Most founders muddle the two, and that's where the money leaks. You think you're making a growth hire, but really you just want the admin off your plate. Or you keep grinding through tasks yourself because you can't yet justify a A$180k director, when what you actually needed was a A$50k doer and a written process.

I believe naming which of the two you're solving for is the most important five minutes of the whole decision. Get that wrong and you hire the right person for the wrong job.

The test before you spend a dollar

Before the org chart, before the job ad, there's one number test. I first heard a version of this from Taylor Holiday and it's stuck with me.

You hire when the value the person can produce, ideally something you can put a dollar figure on, is greater than what you'll pay them.

If you bring on a creative strategist at A$130k, the honest question is: can that person produce at least A$130k of value, and hopefully a good multiple of it? For a strategist who frees up your media budget to actually spend into better creative, that's usually an easy yes. For a fourth person to "help with content", it often isn't.

To put this into perspective, a single strong creative hire who lifts your account from a ~2.4 ROAS to a ~2.9 ROAS on A$60k/month of spend is generating roughly A$30k of extra revenue a month. Against a A$130k salary, the maths isn't close. But that only works if you can actually draw the line from their work to a number. If you can't, be honest that you're making a comfort hire, not a value one.

Start with the lowest-value task, not the most senior role

Here's the instinct I'd push back on. When founders finally admit they're overloaded, they reach for the big hire. A director. A head of something. The shiny org-chart box.

But if you're buying back your time, the cheapest, fastest win is almost always at the bottom, not the top.

Look at what's actually eating your week. The reporting. The inbox triage. The manual ad-naming. The weekly performance pull. Most of it isn't strategic at all. It's repeatable. And repeatable means it can become a written process and go to someone junior for a fraction of a senior salary.

My rule of thumb:

• If a task is repeatable and rules-based, write the process and delegate it down. Cheap, fast, low risk.
• If a task needs judgement and ownership, that's when you hire up, and you hire someone whose whole job is that outcome.
• Don't hire a A$180k strategist to do A$25k of admin. And don't ask a A$25/hour assistant to own your channel strategy.

Do the low-level delegation first and you often buy back ten hours a week before you've spent serious money. That bought-back time is what lets you make the bigger hire properly instead of in a panic.

The 10/80/10 rule for what you keep

Once you've got people, the next trap is staying too involved. You hired help, then you carried on doing the work anyway, just with more meetings.

The frame I use here is 10/80/10. A mentor put it to me and it's the cleanest constraint I've found for a founder's role on any given project.

You should be involved in the first 10% and the last 10%. The 80% in the middle belongs to your team.

Take a real example: rebuilding a post-purchase email flow. My first 10% is auditing what exists and briefing the team properly, getting all my thinking out on the table. The middle 80%, the actual drafting, the design, the back-and-forth, the build, that's the retention lead and the copywriter and the designer. Then my last 10% is reviewing the final version and giving sharp feedback before it goes live.

If you're sitting in the 80%, you're not leading, you're just an expensive pair of hands. And you're capping how good the work can get, because nobody owns it end to end. One person spending 100% of their time on something will almost always beat you spending 30% of yours on it, even if you're more experienced.

The honest test: look at any project you touched last week and ask which slice you were actually in. If the answer is the middle 80%, that's your next thing to delegate.

Which functions to hand a partner first

Now the bit founders ask me most. Some functions you build in-house. Some you're better off handing to a partner who does that one thing all day. So which goes where?

My take: keep the work that is core to your brand and benefits from being close to you. Outsource the work that needs deep, specialised reps you can't realistically build for one brand.

Paid media and creative testing sit right on that line, and it's where I'd point founders first. Here's why. Running paid social well needs a different muscle to almost everything else in your business. It's a different language, it moves fast, and the people who are genuinely good at it are looking at dozens of accounts a week, not one. Building that depth in-house for a single brand is slow and expensive, and you're often paying a senior salary for someone who only ever sees your data.

A partner who lives in Meta all day brings pattern recognition you can't grow internally at your size. They've watched the kill and scale calls play out across many brands, not just yours. That's the bit that's hard to replicate with one hire.

So the function I'd hand over first is the one where outside reps compound fastest and where being slightly removed actually helps: paid acquisition and the creative engine behind it. Keep brand, keep the customer relationship, keep the decisions only you can make. Let the specialised, reps-heavy work go to people who do nothing else.

That's not me being precious about what we do. It's the same logic as the rest of this piece. You delegate the thing where someone else's 100% beats your 30%.

Putting it together

So next time you feel the pull to hire, walk it down in order.

First, name it. Are you growing the business or buying back your time? Be honest.

Second, run the test. Can this person produce more value than they cost, and can you draw a line to a number?

Third, start low. Delegate the repeatable stuff down with a written process before you reach for the senior box.

Fourth, hold the line on 10/80/10. Stay in the first and last 10%, hand over the middle.

And fifth, send the specialised, reps-heavy functions to a partner first, paid and creative being the obvious one, and keep the work that has to stay close to you.

If you've read this and you're quietly aware that your account is one of those places where you're carrying the middle 80% yourself, it might be worth getting a clear, outside read on where your time and budget are actually going. A Signal/Noise Audit lays that out plainly, no obligation, just an honest picture of what to hand off and what to keep. Either way, the question I'd sit with is simple: of everything you did last week, how much of it could only have been done by you?