Delegation from Afar part 1

When I was building my sports nutrition brands remotely, I quickly realised that success creates its own problems.

The experience forced me to draw on the management lessons I’d learned years earlier while building a food production company, and those lessons proved invaluable.

One challenge caught us completely by surprise. 

Social media influencers were just beginning to emerge, Twitter was our main marketing channel, and through an influencer partnership we suddenly had access to an audience of around one million followers. We launched the website and, within hours, our marketing packs—complete with next-day delivery and downloadable meal plans—were selling faster than we had ever imagined.

The offers represented excellent value, demand exploded, and we simply weren’t prepared. Operating from a modest warehouse with a small packing room, orders poured in faster than we could process them. Suppliers struggled to keep pace, stock control became increasingly difficult, and we found ourselves in the middle of the perfect storm. We were in one of the fastest-growing fitness markets, but our infrastructure wasn’t ready for the speed of growth.

Normally, I would have been on the warehouse floor organising production, solving problems and supporting the team. Instead, I was thousands of miles away. That changed everything. Remote leadership exposes every weakness in a business. Gaps in communication, poor systems and bad hiring decisions become impossible to ignore.

Finding reliable people at short notice was one of our biggest challenges. Staff came and went. Some lacked urgency, others lacked responsibility, and a few simply weren’t suited to working in a fast-paced environment. As entrepreneurs, we’re often hands-on by nature, so letting go can be frustrating. But if you want a business that grows beyond you, delegation becomes essential.

Delegation isn’t simply giving someone a task. It’s the strategic transfer of responsibility, authority and trust within a framework of clear systems and accountability. The best people don’t just complete jobs—they solve problems before you even know they exist.

After interviewing and trialling many candidates, we eventually found someone exceptional. She didn’t have the most impressive CV, but she was dependable, organised, communicated well, thought ahead and genuinely cared about doing the job properly. That experience reinforced one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in business: sometimes you’re not hiring experience, you’re hiring character.

As the company expanded, stock control, customer service and order fulfilment became critical. Good judgement in selecting people became just as important as the systems themselves. When you find exceptional people, invest in them. Listen to them, coach them, promote them from within and give them greater responsibility as they earn your trust. Loyal, capable people become one of the greatest assets any growing business can have.