The Best Advice I Got Was to Become a Great Delegator

There’s a version of every moving company owner’s origin story that looks the same: one person, every hat, every problem, every solution. You start by doing everything because you have to. Payroll, accounting, scheduling, customer service, sales, tire changes, financial advising, and emotional support. The hustle is necessary early on, but it becomes a ceiling when you realize you can’t be everywhere at once. Mark Hirschi, President of Salmon Moving & Storage and Ellis Moving & Storage, spent years in this role before receiving advice that fundamentally shifted how he scales his business. The turning point wasn’t working harder or learning more. It was learning to delegate better than anyone else around him.

The Owner as Jack-of-All-Trades

“You are a man or a woman of many hats,” Hirschi reflected on the early years of business ownership. “Sometimes someone’s financial advisor, you’re their best friend, someone to lean on. You’re learning how to do payrolls. Learning numbers, accounting, how to schedule effectively, customer service skills, sales skills. It goes on and on. How to change a tire.”

This isn’t exaggeration. In a small to mid-size moving company, the owner often becomes the fallback for anything that doesn’t have a clear owner. A crew member has a personal crisis? You listen. A customer is upset about their estimate? You intervene. The accounting software breaks? You troubleshoot. The truck needs a tire? You grab the jack. Each of these tasks feels urgent. Each one pulls your attention away from strategic work. Over time, the role becomes defined by reaction rather than vision.

The problem is that many of these hats don’t fit well. You might be an excellent move coordinator but a mediocre accountant. Talented at sales but impatient with scheduling logistics. Good at customer relationships but terrible at technology. Yet because you’re the owner, you feel the responsibility to maintain minimum competency in all areas. That’s not just exhausting. It’s a strategic mistake that limits your ability to scale.

The Best Business Advice: Become the Best Delegator

The turning point came from an unexpected source. Hirschi recalled a conversation with TM from Let’s Get Moving: “One of the best advices that TM from Let’s Get Moving gave me, I said, man, how? How are you doing this? He goes, I just learned to be the best delegator. I found people that were really good at the things I needed to get done and turned around and hired them and said, you go do it. I’m gonna go do something else, because that’s not my forte.”

This is simple advice with profound implications. Instead of trying to excel at ten things you’re only average at, you hire people who are excellent at those things. You free yourself to focus on what you actually do well. You also give other people work that matches their strengths, which tends to make them better employees. It’s not just better for business. It’s better for everyone involved.

The mental shift required is real, though. You have to accept that someone else might do a task slightly differently than you would. They might organize the file cabinet differently, take a different approach to customer communication, or use a different software tool. The default instinct is to insist on your way. But if their way works, and it frees you from a task that drains your energy, then their way might actually be better for the business.

Finding Your Actual Strengths

The flip side of delegation is clarity about your own strengths. “A lot of guys I talked to were lawyers, accountants, tech, and they go into the moving business,” Hirschi noted. “Find out what you’re good at and then hire, delegate. Delegate, delegate.”

This observation points to a common pattern in moving companies. Successful owners often come from different backgrounds. Maybe you were a lawyer before starting a moving company; your strength is contract negotiation and legal risk management, not QuickBooks. Maybe you have a tech background; hire someone excellent at operations and finance. The best growth happens when owners lean into their actual strengths while building a team that covers everything else.

This requires honest self-assessment. It’s easy to convince yourself that you’re decent at everything because you’ve been doing everything. But there’s a difference between being capable and being excellent. When you delegate to someone whose primary skill is the task at hand, the quality almost always improves. The business outcomes almost always improve.

The Documentation Problem: Systems Before You Hire

Delegation only works if people know what they’re supposed to do. This is where many owners stumble. They hire someone, show them the ropes, and hope they remember. The result is inconsistent execution, repeated questions, and work that requires constant oversight rather than actual delegation.

Hirschi acknowledged this challenge directly: “Stop thinking that you know everything and make sure that you are documenting and writing everything down. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I still sometimes have a hard time to create SOPs.”

This is important because it’s honest. Creating standard operating procedures is work. It requires you to actually write down the things you’ve been doing intuitively for years. It feels like busywork when you’re juggling a hundred urgent tasks. But without documented processes, delegation becomes a guessing game. New employees waste time asking questions instead of working independently. You end up supervising closely instead of delegating effectively.

The solution isn’t perfect documentation. It’s good enough documentation that someone new can understand the process and execute it. Start with your most critical tasks: the customer estimation process, the crew assignment process, the invoice and payment process. Document what happens in each step, who needs to do what, and where decisions need to be made. This doesn’t need to be a 50-page manual. A few pages per process is often enough to make delegation work.

Building a Business That Doesn’t Depend on You

The ultimate goal of delegation is freedom. Not laziness, but freedom to focus on activities that actually move your business forward. Strategy. Relationships with key clients. Business development. Leadership and culture. These are the things that scale a business, and they’re the only things that require your specific skills and attention.

When you’re still handling payroll, customer service, and tire changes, you’re not doing these strategic things. You’re busy. But you’re not making progress. Growth stalls not because the market isn’t there, but because you’re trapped in execution when you should be thinking about expansion.

The transition from doing everything yourself to building a team is uncomfortable. It requires letting go of control, trusting people, and accepting that some things will be done differently. But it’s the only way to move from an operator who works in the business to an owner who works on the business. Learn more about building sustainable moving companies and scaling beyond the owner in the full conversation with Hirschi.