You're Doing $10/Hour Work and Wondering Why Your Business Isn't Growing
You're Doing $10/Hour Work and Wondering Why Your Business Isn't Growing
There's this insurance inspection company. Father-son team. Best thing in their industry. Been around for 40+ years.
Couldn't break $1 million.
Rob Bedell—fractional sales VP and business strategist who specializes in liberating entrepreneurs from the daily management hellscape—sat down with them and asked one simple question:
"Why should people do business with you?"
Their answer: "Time, service, and quality."
Wrong.
Rob talked to their three best clients and found out the real answer: Customer service and communication. The ability to pick up the phone when there's a problem and actually get answers within 24-48 hours.
Once they started speaking to the market in the market's voice—once they focused on building those relationships instead of just listing features—they grew 26% the next year. Then 63% the year after that.
He took them from regional to national. 400% growth over eight years.
And it all started with realizing they had no idea why people actually bought from them.
Sound familiar?
The "I Don't Have Time" Death Spiral
Here's the indicator that you're screwed:
You keep saying "I don't have time" or "I'm too busy."
If you're at capacity, you're probably doing way more than you should be doing. You're doing work below your pay grade.
Rob's advice? Do a brain dump. For one full week, write down every single task you do, how long it takes, and what it is.
Then look at that list and ask: "Is this something I could pay someone $10/hour to do?"
People do this exercise and suddenly realize they're spending THREE HOURS A DAY on stuff they shouldn't be touching.
Data entry. Order input. Basic customer service that doesn't require decision-making. Administrative tasks that literally anyone could handle.
Meanwhile, they have ZERO time to build the relationships that actually grow their business.
The Thing Every Entrepreneur Gets Wrong (Including Big Companies)
You think you know why people buy from you.
You're probably wrong.
I was reading about this on LinkedIn this morning—startups and even bigger companies making this exact mistake. They ASSUME they know their clients' pain points. They THINK they understand product-market fit.
Instead of just... asking.
Rob's framework is brutally simple. Call your three best clients. Ask them three questions:
What value did we bring that you expected?
What value did we bring that you didn't expect?
What's the best thing about working with us?
The first two questions? Loss leaders. They're just warming up.
That third question? That's the hook. That's where you find out what actually matters.
That insurance inspection company thought it was all about time, service, and quality. Technical stuff. Operational excellence.
Their clients? They cared about knowing they could call when shaet hit the fan and actually get answers. They cared about communication and reliability when problems inevitably happened.
Completely different value proposition. Same company.
Sales is a Five-Letter Word (Not a Four-Letter Word)
Rob nailed this: "Sales has an S on it. That's plural. It's not a four letter word."
SALE—doing anything to get that one transaction at any cost? Yeah, that's a four-letter word.
But we're well past those days. Those days ended in the 90s, early 2000s at the latest.
Now it's all about building relationships. Plural. Long-term. Actual human connections.
And here's how you know if you're doing it right:
Have you ever been on a call where an hour and a half went by and you're like "how the hell did that happen?"
That's building a relationship. Natural flow. Conversation. Back and forth. You lose track of time because you're actually connecting with another human.
Versus those 15-minute calls that feel like the longest 15 minutes of your life? Where you're just checking boxes and going through motions?
That's NOT building a relationship. That's transactional bullshaet, and everyone involved can feel it.
The Best Business Advice Rob Ever Got (And Why You're Ignoring It)
"It's not about you. It's about them."
Have you ever been on a date with someone who just talks about themselves the entire time?
That's what most entrepreneurs do in sales conversations. Hell, that's what most companies do in their marketing.
Me, me, me. Our features. Our quality. Our time. Our service.
Nobody cares.
They care about THEIR problems. THEIR challenges. THEIR goals.
If you're constantly talking about yourself, you're not building relationships. You're just being a bad date who wonders why nobody wants a second round.
The Connection vs. Relationship Problem
Rob brought up something that hit me: With all the social media use of the term "connection," the word is almost worthless now.
It's easy to connect. You click a button. You add someone on LinkedIn. Boom, you're "connected."
But there's not a whole lot of deep relationships being built, especially in the business world.
Connection is a click. Relationship is a conversation.
Connection is surface-level. Relationship is when you're talking about personal lives, activities, normal human-to-human stuff that has nothing to do with business.
That's where the common bond forms. That's where you learn about the person as a PERSON, not just as a business transaction or a "connection" in air quotes.
And those relationships? That's what grows businesses. Not the 500 LinkedIn connections you've collected like Pokemon cards.
The Delegation Framework That Frees You Up
Okay, so you've done the brain dump. You've identified three hours a day of work you shouldn't be doing.
Now what?
Start small. Baby steps.
Don't try to delegate everything at once. That's overwhelming and you'll just freeze up and do nothing.
Instead: Every two weeks, identify ONE THING that takes 30 minutes to an hour that you can hand off to someone else.
Could be a virtual assistant. Could be an entry-level hire. Could be outsourcing to a specialist.
By the end of the quarter? You've freed up significant time. Time you can now spend building relationships with people who will actually grow your business.
And here's the weird part Rob mentioned: It freaks people out to suddenly have free time.
They've been so used to operating at 110% capacity, always under pressure, constantly stressed, that when they suddenly get three hours back in their day?
They don't know what to do with themselves.
But that discomfort is temporary. Because once you adjust, you realize you now have time to:
Build relationships with potential clients
Actually understand your existing clients better
Focus on strategy instead of just tactics
Have a life outside of work (wild concept, I know)
The Mental Health Angle Nobody Talks About
Staying in that "always on" solopreneur mode isn't just bad for business.
It's not healthy. It's not sustainable.
You will burn out. It's not an if, it's a when.
And once you burn out? That thing you were so passionate about—the business you built from scratch—becomes a slog. A grind. Something you resent instead of enjoy.
Delegation isn't just about making your business more successful. It's about making sure you don't destroy yourself in the process.
It's about work-life balance. Mental health. Actually being able to sustain the work you're doing long enough to see it succeed.
Because what's the point of building a successful business if you hate your life and destroy your health doing it?
Watch the Full Episode
This conversation with Rob went deep into fractional sales leadership, why entrepreneurs self-sabotage by refusing to delegate, and the exact frameworks for building relationships that actually grow businesses.
He's worked with everyone from manufacturing companies to insurance firms, and he's seen every flavor of "I'm too busy to delegate" that ends in burnout or stagnation.
Your business won't grow until you stop doing $10/hour work.
Your relationships won't deepen until you stop making it all about you.
Your mental health won't survive if you don't learn to delegate.
Pick one.
Actually, scratch that. You need all three.
P.S. If you're reading this and thinking "but I CAN'T delegate, nobody can do it as well as I can, I HAVE to be involved in everything"—congratulations, you've identified exactly why your business is stuck and you're miserable. Rob's seen this a thousand times. The entrepreneurs who refuse to delegate are the ones who stay stuck at the same revenue level for years, working 80-hour weeks, wondering why they're exhausted and their business isn't growing. Meanwhile, the ones who do the brain dump exercise, hand off the $10/hour tasks, and focus on relationship-building? They're the ones growing 26%, then 63%, then taking companies national. Also, if you just said "I don't have time to do a brain dump exercise," you DEFINITELY need to do a brain dump exercise. That's literally the problem. Start this weekend. You'll thank me later.
Karl Pontau hosts The Human Connection Podcast, where we talk about the stuff that actually matters in business: the humans running it. Because whether you're B2B or B2C, it's really H2H—human to human. Subscribe so you don't miss the next episode where we probably say something that'll make your HR department uncomfortable.
