Jun 2, 2026 · 31 min · 10 segments
James Russell has spent close to a decade helping builders and trades stop drowning in busywork. As the owner of Builder VA and someone coached directly by Dan Martell, he has helped around 350…
James RussellGuestSethHostNickHostBecause most builders are perfectionists.
Most builders want to do everything themselves.
They don't want to hand the tasks off, and they would rather just go and do it themselves rather than giving it to somebody else.
But the reality is most builders are doing – $15 an hour tasks themselves.
They're the ones going and writing the blogs and putting it on.
And they're the ones also telling themselves, you know, I may as well do it myself.
They're creating these stories, right? And it's half the time, it's not because the person's bad that they're delegating to.
to
Yeah.
But they
even know it.
Nick, talk a little bit about some of the top builders that we work with and how are they buying back their time?
Well, yeah, the top builders that we work with, they buy back their time in literally every single way.
I mean, they look at the company and they're not afraid to replace themselves with everything they do.
And so that's what it takes to scale.
It's literally like becoming great at something and then building a team to do it greater than you can.
And yeah, From my perspective, it's the only way to scale because obviously we're in the marketing business, but I see this time and time and time and time and time again.
We could generate 500 leads for a company and now all of a sudden they don't have the person to phone the leads because the business owner is too busy.
The business owner is too busy building the actual estimate, which somebody else could do.
So there's all these things that are actually a bottleneck in the business are all things that should be done by somebody else.
Because most builders are perfectionists.
Most builders want to do everything themselves.
They don't want to hand the tasks off, and they would rather just go and do it themselves rather than giving it to somebody else.
But the reality is most builders are doing – $15 an hour tasks themselves.
They're the ones going and writing the blogs and putting it on.
And they're the ones also telling themselves, you know, I may as well do it myself.
They're creating these stories, right? And it's half the time, it's not because the person's bad that they're delegating to.
to
Yeah.
But they
even know it.
Nick, talk a little bit about some of the top builders that we work with and how are they buying back their time?
Well, yeah, the top builders that we work with, they buy back their time in literally every single way.
I mean, they look at the company and they're not afraid to replace themselves with everything they do.
And so that's what it takes to scale.
It's literally like becoming great at something and then building a team to do it greater than you can.
And yeah, From my perspective, it's the only way to scale because obviously we're in the marketing business, but I see this time and time and time and time and time again.
We could generate 500 leads for a company and now all of a sudden they don't have the person to phone the leads because the business owner is too busy.
The business owner is too busy building the actual estimate, which somebody else could do.
So there's all these things that are actually a bottleneck in the business are all things that should be done by somebody else.
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