stop DIY-ing your business growth

Summary

when your car needs an oil change, do you change it yourself or take it in? I changed my own oil for years to save money. one day, home from college, I jacked up my Nissan on a slight hill with the wrong jack, went inside for a glass of water, and came back to find the car had fallen off the jack to about three inches off the ground. right where my chest had been a minute earlier.

1. that DIY habit made sense at 16 with a part-time job and every dollar counting. it made zero sense in college when I had more money and oil changes were cheap. I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, and it almost cost me.

2. same trap shows up in business. the seven-figure earner who still climbs the ladder to hang his own Christmas lights and ends up in a coma. what are you doing in your company right now that’s no longer worth your time?

3. run a full-time audit. go through your week, list every task, ask what can be delegated and handed off. you do not need to be changing the oil in your business after a certain point. it’s costing you more than you realize.

4. but handing off is not permission to go golfing or sit on your ass. it’s permission to go find something more important that actually grows the business. nobody cares about it more than you do, so you have to be the person who cares.

5. example: I publish in four formats, podcast, YouTube, newsletter, essays, and I wanted everything to land on jerred.com automatically. I almost did the publishing by hand. instead I spent two hours in Claude code automating the whole thing. now it runs in the cloud and publishes for me in perpetuity.

6. the work you should keep is the work without a checklist. checklists go to AI or an employee. you go create the new relationship, the new program, the new idea that takes all your experience to invent. don’t keep changing the oil. hand it off and go do the meaningful work.

Transcript

the oil change that almost killed me

When your car, your vehicle needs an oil change, do you change the oil or are you taking it in somewhere to get the oil changed? I’ll never forget I was taught how to change my own oil growing up when I got a car at 16 and I changed my own oil for a very long time and it was just something I kind of got in the habit of doing.

I mean partly because when I was a teenager you know every dollar counted anything I could save or put back in my pocket was a big deal and so I kind of got in the habit of changing my own oil for years and only ever occasionally if something crazy happened would I ever take it in to get the oil changed but back in the day I drove this black Nissan Maxima and it actually was a huge pain to change the oil.

If you’re not familiar with changing the oil I’m not going to get into all of the technical aspects or how to on changing oil on this podcast but one of the things that you have to do when you change your own oil is you drain the old oil out and you have to change the oil filter and a lot of cars or trucks it’s not a very difficult process but with this Nissan where they had placed the oil filter was a huge pain to have to change the oil and what I’d have to do is that I’d have to jack the car up remove the front right wheel and remove the oil filter that was the only way to access it and this isn’t typical of all cars or trucks like I said it’s a lot easier most of the time these days but that’s

what I had to do and I’ll never forget I was visiting my parents I think I was coming home from college or something like that and I needed an oil change so I parked in their driveway and they were on a slight hill and so I was like all right I’m gonna go ahead and change my oil so I went out there and I didn’t have my typical jack I used this other my little tiny jack to jack my car up to be able to take the wheel off and as I was doing it the last time I had put the oil filter on I tightened it way too tight I couldn’t get it off and so I had to jam a screwdriver through the oil filter to be able to take it off and I decided to take a break real quick before I

did the rest of the project because I was so frustrated with how tightly this oil filter was on and so I went inside to get a glass of water you know came out from underneath the car went inside and then when I came back out the car had fallen off the jack and the way that the wheel was positioned it had fallen down to about being three to four inches off the ground and something to know is that’s right where my chest was it’s right where my chest was before I decided I was going to take a break and that may have killed me or severely injured me fractured some ribs something depends on where it actually hit me and it’s not the full weight of the car but it would have been significant impact to my chest because that’s right where I was at

you’re not 16 anymore

and that’s I mean that’s safety 101 when you’re jacking up a car I was using a different jack I was in a hurry I was frustrated and ultimately I was doing something I shouldn’t have been doing and the reason I say I shouldn’t have been doing it is because when I was 16 years old and had a part-time job and I was an athlete and everything else and trying to save money that made sense but I was in college now and had a little bit more money things were a little bit more squared away oil changes weren’t that expensive I could totally be farming that out but I liked this DIY mentality but it almost cost me significantly to continue the DIY can to continue being the person who does the thing and I don’t know if you’ve heard stories like this but guys who

earn seven figures a get a year decide you know what I’m I’m still going to put Christmas lights on my house and they slip and fall and end up in a coma or worse these things happen and I’m not here to tell you whether or not you should DIY some things but just some food for thought about what are you doing in your business right now that’s no longer worth your time what’s something that you shouldn’t be doing now you’re not going to end up dead or injured in the process of doing tasks you shouldn’t be doing in your business but it’s something that I want you to think about and what I normally stress with entrepreneurs or have them do is a full-time audit so go through your week go through all of your tasks what are you doing each and every single day

list them all out what can be delegated and what can be handed off you do not need to be changing your oil in your business after a certain point it’s not worth it and it’s costing you more than you realize

handing it off is not permission to coast

because as you level up as an entrepreneur you better yourself you better your skill set you become smarter you become more resilient the next step is for you to hand something off and once you hand something off to somebody you’ve delegated it’s time for you to start working on bigger things I’ve been talking to a lot of entrepreneurs about this recently is when you hand things off it is not time for you to go golfing it is not time for you to go sit on your ass it is time for you to find something more important to do that’s going to actually grow the business that’s your job and so by continuing to diy stuff and to waste your time with things that shouldn’t be taking up your time it’s going to eat away at what the future company could be you might not see

a cost right now but the 30 minutes to two hours you spend per week on something you shouldn’t be doing is costing the company real growth because no one’s coming in your business with hey I’m going to grow this as big as possible nobody’s going to care more than you do so you have to be the person who cares so your job as you progress through leadership and entrepreneurship is to get as much off your plate as humanly possible but when you do fill the gaps fill the time that you free up with how on earth am I going to grow the business bigger what gigantic opportunities could I be working on

what I just handed to AI

now a few examples of this one thing that I just handed to AI now this is a pretty cool process I publish a lot of content multiple various formats right I have this podcast sometimes my youtube videos are the podcast sometimes my youtube videos are different tutorials I have a weekly newsletter that was recently named renamed boring brutal better newsletter you want to sign up for that you can go to jerred.com and sign up for that a lot of you already are but I have all these different forms so we got youtube we got podcast I got a newsletter and then occasionally I just want to write something so I write and one of my goals recently was to have all of this filter into one place and that is jerred.com so j-e-r-r-e-d.com you go to the blog section and see it because I just

wanted a place where everything was going to get captured anytime I published it that was kind of the vision that’s the big reason I wanted to redo that website and get it up and running but what I didn’t want to have to do was to publish all those things manually like I don’t mind creating the content like recording this audio podcast right now I don’t after I’m done recording I don’t really want to do much I don’t I don’t want to do anything else so team members edit the audio publish it to the podcast feed so on and so forth but then there’s the further extra step of like okay well now I gotta put this on the blog and I have four different sources where it’s coming in the only reason I’m telling you this is because I wasn’t going to take up a

team member’s time to publish all these things like when I have a random blog post or new youtube video because they’re already publishing it to the public platforms and so I was like you know what I think I can get AI to do this because I was starting to do it I was like you know what I’m just going to do it won’t take me up that much time and then I started thinking about I was like even if it only takes you 30 minutes to an hour per week you only have so much time bro so like what are you going to do so I decided I would go to Claude and see if I could automate the whole thing and this is actually way more complicated than I thought it was going to be I had to go into Claude code we had

to work with all these different APIs and like things I didn’t even know but Claude walked me through the whole process and now what’s cool is whenever I publish something whether I write an article I write it in a local note-taking app called obsidian so if I write an article in obsidian a new video publishes to youtube this podcast publishes on its rss feed or I write a news a new newsletter Claude is checking every day for any new content that gets publicly published on any of those things or if I write a draft and then what it does it finds it and then it puts it on my website automatically it finds it creates a transcript it writes a summary and takes my content or if I wrote it just straight up publishes it in like the newsletter and my essays that I write

those it’s it’s not really doing anything it just takes them from wherever I put them and puts them on the blog automatically and it took what two hours to set that up with Claude just going back and forth being able I had to learn a lot of things whatever my whole point in telling you that whole process is I almost took back let’s call it an hour plus per week of you know what I’m just gonna do this because I really want everything to like publish in a centralized location and I was like you don’t have to you don’t have to do that let’s let’s get AI to that so I got AI to do it the whole thing works seamlessly now and it operates in the cloud I don’t have to do a single thing it just automatically publishes and all of those will

be updated in perpetuity and I think it’s awesome now you don’t have to do something like that with AI but do know that those options are out there it’s really cool

go do the work that has no checklist

but what are you doing that you shouldn’t be doing and what’s next so now that I have that freed up right it was something I started to do for like a week or two I was like no I spent the two hours with Claude to get this fully automated now it’s automated now I’m like okay this is fully freed up you got you got your time back what are you doing that time and that’s always what I’m asking because it’s very easy especially even like in advanced stages of entrepreneurship it’s easy to go back to the things that we’re good at that we kind of enjoy doing that doesn’t take as much brainpower it’s kind of like a checklist item typically you know you’re you’re going the right direction entrepreneurship if you’re doing something and you don’t have a defined outcome or you don’t have

a defined checklist for doing it and I love checklists I love like being able to have a repeatable process but that’s typically what you hand to AI or you hand to an employee once you have those things in my view as an entrepreneur you should be trying to accomplish tasks that don’t have a checklist because you have to go create the checklist the first time so if it’s creating new relationships that could further grow you know new customer acquisition or if it’s a new program that you need to create to better help your customers your clients whatever it is those are the things that you need to go do they’re brand new they take creativity they take you thinking outside the box they taking take you all of your experience and putting it together to create a new process a new idea and I do

think through the use of employees and AI that is where your time is going to be spent in the future is in this creative creation mode and don’t think of this as like an artistic creation like I love to write so I write you don’t have to write if you don’t want to write but I guarantee there’s something creative that you want to do on a daily basis the way you think about your business that other people don’t the way you market your business the way you develop relationships those are the things that you should be working on as you grow and scale your company so that’s it don’t keep changing the oil in your business hand it off to an employee hand it off to AI and then go find the meaningful work try harder you