ISSUE #47

Welcome to the Forward Obsessed Founder, my newsletter with insights, awesome tools, and real-world advice to grow your business and career.

GO FORWARD THOUGHT OF THE WEEK ➡️

Stop Letting $10 Tasks Cost You $1,000,000

This Go Forward Thought is about what I consider the most critical asset for any leader who wants to make the most out of their creative capital and has 7- or 8-figure (+) goals.

If you guessed “time,” you are correct. But how do you create and preserve that asset?

The answer is systems. Whether you're a company of 1 person or 100,000 people, you need systems designed for you that will scale for you.

But most systems suck. I say this as an ADHD founder who hired smart Ops people who forced systems on me that worked the way they did.

We need to design systems that enable people to get more space in their workdays with less time and effort.

In other words, we need systems designed to remove work, not create more.

For founders, the top two systems I think about are:

System #1: Delegation and task management
System #2: Revenue

Stick with me, and I’ll show you why and how.

Beat The System

The first system you need is a way to track and hold yourself accountable. Whether you keep a physical to-do list on a piece of paper or use a fancy, elaborate system makes zero difference to me.

The best systems are the ones you actually use.

But seriously, the first hire you should make as a founder is an EA or someone that you can delegate administrative work to.

Then, you need a revenue system that lets you create a repeatable sales funnel. If you’re a startup, then you’re probably doing founder-led sales. And if you’re working in your business and not on your business, this system will not scale (see System #1).

As a serial entrepreneur, I’ve been in this situation more than once.

As I mentioned, when I've hired operations people, they’ve brought their own playbook and set of tools.

Before I knew it, I was using dashboards to keep track of my dashboards. And nothing reflected my preferred work style.

So, despite spending a small fortune on collaboration tool subscriptions and EAs, I've often found myself wasting 20-30 hours a week on low-value tasks in my zone of competence when, really, all I want is to be working in my green zone: that sweet spot where I'm in flow and focusing on those $1M ideas that bring me joy and success.

Without a full delegation loop that included accountability in the mix, I realized I didn’t have a system.

The delegation system isn’t just crucial for you, the founder. It’s also how you create a happy, healthy, empowering work environment.

When your EA says, “Give me more work; I have the bandwidth,” and you’re not even sure what to give them or what they’re doing, that’s a sure sign you need a repeatable system that allows you to go faster — not slower — and capture everything that comes through your brain.

Then, that flow can be automatically captured and organized by someone else to build a bridge between your imagination and reality.

After all, as I always say:

And execution doesn’t happen without accountability.

Let’s be honest — is this you?

🛑 I spend most of my time on $10/hour tasks.
🛑 I catch my team sitting around, complaining that they don’t "have enough work" or "have clarity on their priorities."
🛑 My growth KPIs are grim, and I know it’s because I’m stuck in the weeds of daily operations.
🛑 I’m buried scheduling meetings about meetings and in a landslide of emails, but I still notice my competition is doing just fine, snagging market share like crazy.
🛑 I’m burning out. The 80-hour workweek sucks for me and my family, and my health, relationships, and decision-making skills are going up in flames.
🛑 Speaking of flames, it feels like all I do is put out fires. I have no time to be proactive.

That’s not just you — that was me, too.

So, I built a delegation system called EAOS that works intuitively and smoothly. It’s designed for busy founders and ADHD, Type A people like me, but it’ll honestly work for anyone.

The TLDR;

You can speak (or text or upload an image even) what you need, and an AI-powered delegation agent swings into gear to turn that thought into an actionable task with a deadline, priority level, and indication of whether it repeats regularly or is just a one-time thing.

You get all of this:

✅ Free up 20+ hours per week for strategic thinking
✅ Empower your team to take ownership and drive results
✅ Scale your operations without scaling your stress
✅ Make data-driven decisions with AI-powered insights
✅ Stay focused on growing your business and changing the world

I'm currently piloting this new tool, EAOS, with my favorite founders and doing an early adopter launch for $999 (includes lifetime updates). As a newsletter subscriber, you'll get it for the lowest price I'll ever offer: $800 (one-time fee).

If you want beta access to EAOS, just hit reply.

Keep in mind the price you’re paying for ineffective delegation isn’t just measured in dollars… it’s the cost of your mental and physical well-being, too. It’s the health of your organization, as crappy delegation leads to unhappy teams. And it’s all that opportunity cost as your competition that does a better job delegating is also winning the innovation game and beating you to market.

Here’s what one of our early customers said:

“Dude, this tool is amazing! It’s exactly what I needed to really leverage my EA and team without adding more sh*t for me to have to manage (tools, etc.).”

Seriously, don’t hesitate to delegate.Those $10-an-hour tasks are zapping your productivity and growth. Trust me, I was that idiot for years.

Not anymore. I’ve got a system, and I encourage you to join me.

Always here to help 🙌

Pete Sena

Creative Caffeine ☕️🍵

Introducing the Green Zone Framework to Optimize Your Work & Life

I linked to it above, but I'm just calling out one of my favorite frameworks—the Green Zone. Given that we spend about 90,000 hours, or about a third of our lives, working, what we do for a living is critical to how well we live. Take a minute to review how to ensure you're spending most of those hours doing what you love and making good money doing it.

Sam Corcos, Co-Founder of Levels — The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Assistants, 10x Delegation, and Winning Freedom by Letting Go (Plus: Creating Leverage with Tools, Systems, and Processes)

Just a classic discussion between two of the GOATs of time management, Sam Corcos and Tim Ferriss. A must listen. Plus, check out the show notes — Tim shares a ton of Sam’s publicly shared company-building and strategy docs from his company, Levels Health. Invaluable startup founder fuel.

My Obsession of the Week 🖤:

Standup Comedians & Startup Founders

Recently, I’ve caught a couple of comedy shows — Andrew Schultz and Theo Von — and it got me thinking about how founders need to learn how to think more like comedians, as the most successful comics get the greatest insights by studying people.

Both founders and comedians must be amateur psychologists, as this Psychology Today article attests:

“An experimental psychologist’s job is to test hypotheses about the way people see the world—whether it’s the perspective of a single person, or the psychological tendencies of a population. And in order to do that, generally, they run experiments. These experiments will, in theory, help to confirm or deny the psychology’s preexisting theories.

Comedians actually go through a similar process. When comedians develop a new joke, they're uncertain about how well it's going to go over. But they start with a hypothesis that it will do well. And to test their hypotheses, they run their own kind of experiment. If they tell the joke and people laugh, then they know they’ve hit on something. But if they tell the joke and it falls flat, then they know they’re off-base. And once they developed a repertoire of this tested material—say, enough for an hour-long special—they know they are onto something significant.”

Want help finding unique insights like comedians do?

I made you this free tool:

Give it a whirl!

And don’t forget to have a sense of humor about what you do:

“As a startup CEO, I slept like a baby. I woke up every 2 hours and cried.” – Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder, Opsware and Andreessen Horowitz

Bottom line: Being curious about human behavior, experimenting, and iterating are the keys to creating a winning product that your customers love. Funny how that works.

Ways I can help you & your teams grow faster:

Help you design, build, and scale your startup.
One-on-one private growth and BD consulting.
Growth workshops to inspire and upskill your teams with AI-enabled creative toolkits.

Let's Talk

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