25 tasks your assistant can do
I speak with a lot of female founders. Many of them listen in awe when I speak about my assistant. They dream of one day having someone they can offload tasks to as well.
And they should.
In business, the 80/20 rule states that you, the business leader, should focus on the 20% of tasks that will result in the biggest impact for your business. My translation? The other 80% should either be delegated or automated, or at least shared with someone else on your team.
In 509 Female Founders, we speak often about Dr. Gay Hendricks’ concept, working in your Zone of Genius. If you’re a business owner, you’ll agree that most of the tasks below are not where you’d like to be spending the majority of your time.
To build this list, I made a quick spreadsheet of all the overarching tasks that must take place for my businesses, Karma and 509 Female Founders to function. Out of the 62 total tasks, 25 are completed by my assistant. In other words, she runs over a third of my business.
“Out of the 62 total tasks, 25 are completed by my assistant. In other words, she runs over a third of my business. ”
In her book, We Should All Be Millionaires, attorney, business coach and entrepreneur Rachel Rodgers goes deep into this topic. She explains that hiring an assistant (or hiring out tasks like housecleaning) is one of those things women business owners resist (for gosh knows what reason) while it’s actually one of the things that could turn your business around the fastest, when done wisely.
By the way: quick plug—my assistant, Marissa, came to me from a premier executive assistant agency called She’s A Given. If you’re ready to hand over the tasks you know you shouldn’t be doing so that you can focus on the projects you love, let us help you get some solid standard operating procedures (SOPs) in place first, then consider booking a call with them.
Or, if you know it’s time for you to take the leap, and begin entrusting parts of your business to an assistant, even on a part-time basis, but you don’t know which tasks to offload, pick up a copy of our workbook and flip to Page 27.
“Hiring an assistant... [is] actually one of the things that could turn your business around the fastest, when done wisely. ”
To give female founders an idea of what they can say goodbye to with an assistant, here’s my list:
Archiving AI chat histories – This came in especially useful when we rode the waves of “What AI should we use??” Claude → ChatGPT → back to Claude → “Ooo, but what about You.com?” → “Wait no, Notion AI can do everything.” We didn’t want to lose the important chat histories, including ones where we built out $100K scopes of work. But we didn’t need all the ones where I asked AI what soil I should feed my monstera either. So I had Marissa download the important ones and can the rest.
Calculate and prepare estimated taxes
Certifications – Over the past year or so, we obtained WBE and DBE certifications through the Office of Minority and Women Business Enterprise. This involved finding, creating and providing approximately nine million business documents (give or take), filling out endless forms, communicating with their office, etc. It would have been so much harder without the support of my assistant.
Checking emails – Marissa triages my inbox every day, flagging important emails, automatically drafting replies based on her knowledge of my company and the way I like to run things, and sends spam right to hell where it belongs. She also watches for scams.
Client billing
Contractor onboarding + offboarding – This involves carefully following SOPs (which she wrote) to complete tasks such as adding/removing subscriptions, collecting W-9s, setting up their custom email addresses and email signatures, etc.
CRM management
Expense categorization – I literally mailed her an entire proverbial “shoebox” of receipts once all the way to her home on the East Coast, and she scanned every single one and entered them into QuickBooks. God bless her.
Filing contracts
Handling password resets and technical access issues
Handling S-Corp reporting and payroll tax
Hours on the phone with tech support – Like, so many hours. And hours of chats with chatbots.
Instagram engagement – Marissa follows businesses, replies to their comments, adds new follows to our CRM…
Invite clients to events
Lead generation
Managing + shopping around for auxiliary support like bookkeeping, business insurance, etc.
Research and evaluate new software tools
Scheduling meetings – I barely touch my calendar, and she knows that my time and energy are sacred. She will not book meetings for me outside my working hours.
Send gifts to clients & colleagues
Subscription management
Track and pay all outstanding invoices (contractors and vendors)
Update business licenses and file annual report
Updating credit card info – Like, when your credit card number is used fraudulently and you have to update it everywhere. Yeah, she fixed that.
Write and maintain SOPs
Payroll
Finally, the extra task I left off the list was more of a soft skill: “moral support.” While it’s never an assistant’s job to be your shoulder to cry on, the good ones know that when they earn their place as an executive’s right-hand, it comes with being there with them through the good, the bad and the ugly. And if having more support as you grow your business sounds nice, consider joining our 2026 cohort mastermind.
No, I did not have my assistant write this blog post. But someone else on my team posted it.
