You hired somebody, and six weeks later you are working more hours than before.
That is the normal outcome, it is not a sign you hired badly, and it happens for a specific reason worth understanding.
You were the system
For however long you ran this alone, nothing needed writing down. How you price a job, which supplier you call first, what you say when somebody asks for a discount, how you leave a site, when you follow up on a quote. All of it lived in your head, where it worked perfectly.
The moment somebody else is doing the work, every one of those undocumented decisions becomes a question. And the questions arrive while you are on a job, which is why the first months of having help frequently feel worse than doing it yourself.
That is a handoff problem, not a hiring problem, and the two get confused constantly.
The trap that keeps you stuck
"I'll just do it, it's faster."
Today that is true. It is nearly always true, which is what makes it dangerous. Explaining a task takes twenty minutes and doing it takes eight, so the rational choice in any given moment is to do it yourself.
Repeat that logic for six weeks and you have hired somebody without transferring anything, which costs you a wage and saves you nothing.
The only way through is accepting a deliberate short-term loss. The first three times will be slower. The fourth will break even. After that it compounds.
Hand off the wrong things first
The instinct is to delegate the skilled work, because that is where the hours are. That is backwards.
Start with tasks that are repeatable, frequent, and have a clear right answer. Loading the van. Materials pickup. Site cleanup. Photographing finished work. Sending the review request. Calling ahead to confirm tomorrow's appointments.
None of those require your judgement. All of them consume your hours. And handing them over gives both of you an easy early win, which matters more than efficiency at the start.
Then take the things you actively dislike, because you have almost certainly been doing those badly and late anyway. The follow-up on quotes that went quiet is the classic example.
Skilled work comes last, and it comes gradually.
Documentation people will actually use
Nobody in a two-person operation is writing a procedures manual, and if you start one you will not finish it.
The version that works is a phone video. Film yourself doing the thing once, narrating what you are doing and why. Two minutes, unedited, saved somewhere shared. It takes almost no longer than doing the task normally, and it answers the same question forever.
Alongside that, a short checklist for anything with steps that can be forgotten. Not how to do the work. What must not be missed.
Build the library one task at a time as you hand each one over. In three months you have something genuinely useful without ever having sat down to write it.
The eighty percent rule
If somebody does a task 80% as well as you and it returns your hours, that is a win.
Waiting for 100% means waiting forever, because they will not match you on things you have done ten thousand times. And the 20% gap is frequently invisible to the customer.
The exceptions are real and worth naming: anything affecting safety, anything affecting code compliance, and anything the customer sees as the core of the work. Those need to be at your standard or they need to stay with you.
Everything else, 80% and moving is better than 100% and stalled.
Delegating without authority is just adding a step
This is the failure that looks like success from the outside.
If somebody has to check with you before every decision, you have not handed the task over. You have inserted yourself into it, and you now get interrupted at a worse moment than if you had done it yourself.
The fix is boundaries rather than permission. "Order what we need under two hundred dollars without asking. Above that, call me." "If the customer wants something added that takes under half an hour, do it and tell me after."
That is a genuine transfer. It will occasionally cost you a hundred dollars in a decision you would have made differently, and it will buy back hours worth considerably more.
The customer-facing moment
Decide deliberately when this person meets a customer without you.
What arrives in the driveway is a large part of what people are actually judging, and a new person represents you before they have absorbed how you do things.
The workable sequence is ride along, then watch them lead while you are present, then let them go alone on the jobs with the least at stake. Not a fixed number of weeks. Until you have watched them handle something going slightly wrong and been satisfied with how they did it.
What does not get handed off
Some things stay with you longer than you expect, and it is worth being clear about which.
Pricing decisions on anything non-standard. The conversation when a job goes wrong. Relationships with the suppliers and the trades who send you work. And the choice about which jobs to accept, because that is where the margin actually gets decided.
Those transfer eventually, to somebody who has been there long enough. Not in month one.
The reframe
The hardest part is not finding the right person or writing the right checklist. It is accepting that you are now running a business that does the work rather than doing the work yourself.
That is a different job, and most owners are ambivalent about it, because the work is the part they liked.
But the thing that was capping the business was never leads. It was hours, and hours are the only constraint that hiring actually solves. Handing off badly wastes the wage. Handing off deliberately is the whole point of having hired at all.