Who Can You Actually Hand It To?

The problem in one breath

Every bit of advice about delegating assumes you already have someone ready to take the handoff. You look around your own company and you are not sure you do. So you keep holding everything — because handing it to the wrong person means a callback, a lost homeowner, or a torn-up roof you have to answer for.

Why it happens

You have never spelled out what "ready" even looks like. "Good worker" is not the same as "ready to decide." Your best nailer can still call you six times a day. Readiness is not about how clean he runs a valley — it is about his judgment when you are nowhere near the job. That is a different thing, and you cannot hand off blind hoping it is there.

The play

1. Pick one person. The one you would hand off to first — usually your lead foreman or your office manager. Not the whole crew. One name.
2. Score them honestly against the checklist. The tool gives you twelve things you can actually watch — not "is he smart" but "does he price a surprise deck repair without calling me," "do his homeowner talks come back to me as complaints." Score each one never, sometimes, or always. Scoring high to feel better just hands the wrong guy the keys.
3. Read the band. The sheet lands them in one of three: delegate now, grow first, or wrong seat. Believe the number even when you were hoping for a different one.
4. If "grow first," build them on purpose — three rungs, in order.
   • Shadow: they ride along on estimates and job starts and watch you decide out loud. They hear the why, not just the what.
   • Silent seat: they make the call while you sit in the truck and say nothing. Then you debrief — what they saw, what they would change. Biting your tongue is the whole drill.
   • Solo job: one whole roof, start to finish, theirs. You debrief at the end, not during.
5. If "wrong seat," stop trying to delegate to them. Either they are great at the job they already do — leave them there and stop forcing it — or you have a hire to make before you can get out of the truck. Handing real calls to someone who cannot hold them is worse than keeping the calls yourself.

Do this this week

Pick one person and score them on the checklist. Fifteen minutes. Do not tell them yet — this first pass is for you, to see clearly where they actually stand before you build a plan around them.

The tool

is-this-person-ready-to-decide.xlsx — the readiness checklist. Twelve observable behaviors, each scored never / sometimes / always from the dropdown. The sheet adds up a readiness score and drops the person into a band: delegate now, grow first, or wrong seat. One sample foreman is filled in so you can see how it reads. See the sheet notes below for the score bands and how to tune them.

If your crew is 1099

This play is about growing a W2 employee into a decision-maker — shadowing, silent seats, debriefs. You cannot do that with a subcontractor, and you should not try. You develop an employee; you select a sub. If the person you would hand off to is really a 1099 crew lead, the question is not "how do I grow him" — it is "is this the sub I keep rehiring, and does our contract spell out what he is allowed to decide?" Coaching, shadowing, and running a development plan for a 1099 the way you would for an employee is also a fast track to wrecking his 1099 standing and landing you a misclassification bill. Grow employees. Choose subs.