The Importance of Delegation in Scaling Businesses - with Atiba de Souza

0:00On Builders, I interview entrepreneurs, CEOs, and leaders about their businesses and careers. My guest today is Atiba D'Souza. He is an entrepreneur, marketing expert, and author of The Delegation Trap, which is about scaling your business by turning doers into thinkers. And before touching on the book, we talk about what's important in marketing in 2026 and Atiba's own journey building his business and career.

0:31Hey, Atiba, how are you? Great to see you. It's a pleasure, John. Looking forward to this, my friend. Same here. We're going to talk a lot about marketing today. So before getting into your book and your company, I want to ask a marketing question. And we're all constantly shopping for a service. We want a new car. It's the new year. We want a new face cream. And we might know that we want a service, but we're offered a variety of choices. And you've looked at this a lot. What are the moments of truth in your mind that are important for someone to convince someone to go from shopping a service to buying your brand or product?

1:11Yeah, it's a great question. And it's changed over the last 10, 15 years. And one, I love that term, moment of truth. In marketing, we've been using it for a long time. Google brought it back to everyone's memory back in 2011 when they started talking about moments of truth and in search. Right. And in 2026, especially when shopping for services, and this is what's so interesting now about B2B, especially. okay when shopping for services people want to connect with people with other humans in the company and know that this company has humans that align with me because so many people have been jaded over the last five years and heck in the u.s we know what we went through in the last five years and that's not a political statement or anything it's just a matter of no matter who you are, you've been unhappy with something in the last five years where you don't trust big brother, big business in some way, shape or form because they've let us down in some way, shape or form.

2:26And so people are really, really looking for who is the person on the inside that represents this company that says their values are like my values. I'm willing to give them money because there's so many people who can do the exact same thing. It's so interesting that you say that. You brought up Google in the past. It kind of reminded me, I don't remember whether this was 10 years ago or 15 years ago, but you couldn't used to be able to call Google. And then they're like, oh, yeah, we should give a phone number because sometimes you need to talk to us. I'm talking more about from a small business standpoint.

3:02So true. And then also, I remember early in e-commerce flows, something that improved conversion rate was adding a phone number. It's not necessarily did people call you, but they knew they could. And yeah, so important. It's so important that automation helps some things, many things, but not as a replacement of someone on the back end. I think that's such a great point. You know, it goes even further than that too. And it's a great point that you made. I believe in 2026 through 2030, the new paradigm of business, and everybody thinks right now that the new paradigm of business is AI. And yes, AI adds a ton.

3:43And heck, we talk about it, we teach it, we use it a ton. However, as things get more high tech, us as humans are going to want more high touch. And so, you know, again, moments of truth, the connection, the human connection, but the next moment of truth that's going to affect retention is community. Right? How long is this customer actually going to stay with you? It's going to be about the community that you build, not about you and them, but about them and them of your customers. Community. Did you know that Builders is sponsored by Business.com? I'd love to tell you about a new free membership from Business.com for small business decision makers.

4:32It's called business.com plus, and it's designed to address the pain in selecting new products and services. What is the pain you might ask? It's things like knowing which vendor is best for your specific business, negotiating pricing, having access to someone who can answer questions for you. The new membership business.com plus handles all of that with a dedicated advisor, pre-negotiated pricing and solutions tested and reviewed by experts. Check it out at business.com slash plus. That's business.com slash P-L-U-S. I'm thinking more right now in the B2C context, but you're, you know, you've got these new Trader Joe bags, Trader Joe's bags that come out that, you know, you see someone else who has one, you're sort of part of the community.

5:21It could be shoes, clothes, cars, whatever. You know, I'm curious from B2B, where I know you spend a lot of your time, what would you recommend to a B2B company on the community part of things? Yeah, that's a great question. And it's hysterical that you bring up Trader Joe's. So for everyone listening, I live in the Philippines. But I used to live in the U.S. And I know that Trader Joe's bag. And it's hysterical because I keep running into people here with the Trader Joe's bag. And you see me like, hey, what Trader Joe's did you use to shop at? And it's that instant connection of something that you know that this other person has in common with you.

6:03The community. The community. Right. Around a silly bag, a tote bag. On the business side now, on the B2B side. So like I can tell you, with our clients, one of the things that we do, at our agency, we serve primarily the medical industry. Okay. Here's something really simple. Now, we're helping them all with marketing. We bring them all together on a monthly call and foster conversations with them. Here's something really simple. for our non-customers and customers, we host a WhatsApp chat that's completely free that anyone can subscribe to and come in and have conversations about marketing, have conversations about AI.

6:49So that anybody who comes in knows that they're not only leveraging you, they're leveraging other people that are clients of yours. The WhatsApp channel is a great idea. I'm on a couple of private Slack channels for marketers and it's great. You don't want to leave that because you're saying it helps with networking, it helps with career development, it helps with business development, all those things. You mentioned your clients, your company's called, I think, Client Attraction Pros. And I know that you started, or I believe you started in video marketing, but why is it important for businesses to get video, right?

7:29I know you said earlier, like, that there's a person behind it, but what else is important about video and what other services do you offer? Yeah, so that's where life gets really interesting because video is king, queen, and the whole court these days. And we've been on this trend for a while, right? The trend of video being really important in your marketing has been coming for a while. Most of us didn't think it would actually pick up until about now, 2025, 2026, right? So we're talking 2017, 2016, 2018. That was kind of the trajectory we thought we were going to be on. Then this thing happened called COVID.

8:10And when COVID happened in 2020, and we're all home around the entire globe, humanity had a choice as a whole. We were going to consume content because we were bored. We were stuck in the house. And we had a choice. We were either going to watch or we were going to read. and John guess what humanity chose by and large well I I chose I chose watching oh lately I feel like I'm reading as much as much as I ever did my kids did I mean I know TikTok was around longer than than that but that's when they really became you know they became consumers of it it's it's interesting how much more I'm I'm I'm tilting towards video when I'm doing my own research on anything, whether it's B2B or B2C.

9:01I totally agree with that. And the year of video or whatever, you're right. It does feel like it took five, 10 years. I remember earlier in my career, the year of mobile was every year until the iPhone came out and then it really was. It really was, yes. Yeah, so your business, you started, I think you started 20 years ago. Am I right about that? Actually, 30. 30, oh wow. 1996. Well, good for you. Take us back to when you started the business. Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? And are you surprised looking back that you've been part of this business as long as long as you have?

9:40Could you ever have expected that back in the mid-90s? Yes, I was going to be an entrepreneur. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. I grew up in a reality that it was weird to have a job. And so it was almost never expected for you to have a job. Interesting. Right. And so, yes, I started businesses when I was young and I've been running businesses forever. I've owned a ton of different types of businesses over the years. This one has stayed. It's morphed over time. We started off as a computer consulting firm in 1996, because that's what everything was back then, if you were doing anything computers.

10:22And we were doing everything from running cables in asbestos-filled ceilings. Wow. In 1996, we actually launched and put our first search engine on the internet. Yes. I had a search engine on the internet before Google. That's my claim to fame. They won because I ended up selling it for$2 ,500. I missed the mark by several zeros. Maybe more than several. Yeah. We didn't know what we had, unfortunately, when we sold it. We did not know. But over the years, my agency has morphed from, you know, we built that search engine. We were in search. We were in written search for a lot of years before we made the transition into video.

11:10And when making the transition into video, it wasn't about video production for us. It was about video for search. Interesting. What made you decide to pivot? Because in the mid-90s, like you're saying, computer consulting was growing faster than other industries. It was super important. Everybody needed it. It hadn't been big business yet, et cetera. And at some point you say to yourself, there's more opportunity in video. Maybe take us through that decision, if you don't mind. Yeah. So that transition, it took years. And so we've been purebred video marketing agency 2019, 2020. We were in written search for a long, long time before that.

11:57Really, you're talking 2001 to 2019, we were in written search. It was about 2005 when we really made our mark in written search because at that point, well, before that point, we were working within the government. And we were building systems and building search and helping search within the government. And it was 20. Yes, U.S. government. Okay, okay. And built lots of stuff for lots of agencies in the government. Right. It was 2005 when we came back into the private sector. and john i don't know if you remember 2005 but that was a point in time where you could put white text at the bottom of a page to rank in google right um and so google was having a major problem with marketers who were gaming and spamming the system yeah yeah and because we had been in search for so long from the inside out of building search engines we understood the challenges that Google was facing.

12:59And in 2005, I said, well, they're going to need content and they're going to need to base it on relevance. And what made relevant content? Well, it meant that you were going to answer the question that the person actually was asking, because that's what Google wanted. And so that's when we started creating a ton of content for the private sector that was ranking really well on Google. 2017, by that point, SEO had become a commodity. Yeah. Right? We were a boutique agency. It was$4 ,500 for us to write a blog for you, but we guaranteed that that blog would rank in the top three within a certain time period.

13:46Otherwise, you got your money back because we were that good. But SEO becoming a commodity and people saying, hey, I can do SEO for you for$650 a month, really created issues. And I really didn't like where the industry was going. That's what made me start looking around and realizing in 2017 that video was going to be the future. Now, we made that leap, like I said, 2019, 2020. But Google did something massive, which most people don't know, in 2021. In the middle of COVID, Google quietly put out and said, we're going to restructure our entire database and we're going to start to lean towards video search.

14:32And we're going to start to lean towards showing video at the top of search. Massive change. It's true. And, you know, if you do almost any how-to search, any review search, and I'm sure I'm missing tons of types of searches, you're going to see video. And maybe the AI overview is at the top now, but video is right under that. But even in the AI overviews, they're video now. That's right. That's right. Oh, that's right. They're embedded. And sometimes they're on the right-hand side. You're exactly right. And if you're really paying attention, which I know a lot of people aren't, and that's okay, but what Google's even now doing is it's not only using video in the AI overview, but it's grabbing pieces of the transcript from the video as part of the answer in the AI overview.

15:25Yeah, so it's taking the transcripts and it's effectively turning that into the written search part of it. When you're talking to clients about video marketing, I'm curious, because you might have a video in YouTube. How important is it in your mind that that video is seen in order for it to show up in the AI overview? So Google's saying there's this content that answers the question. But just like in the kind of the web world, I guess, the non-video world, there are backlinks. There's authority. There's other ways to think about whether or not it's a good piece of content. How does somebody think about that in the video world?

16:07Yeah, that's a great question. And unfortunately, there is no straight answer for it because we don't have an algorithm yet. We're all still kind of throwing darts and hoping we hit with that. Logic. Logic kind of tells us that, hey, if your video is ranking well in YouTube search and you've got really great. uh retention on your video in youtube search you should have a better op opportunity to show up in the ai overviews that's what logic says and then you find something that breaks that completely and you're just like well damn yeah yeah yeah well and it does it does feel feel like a sort of like a late a lay person here that the that the um the the algorithm they They haven't worked out all the kinks, you know, like they sort of had in the SEO world where things are are are commoditized, if you will.

17:08I want to shift topics a little bit because I I'm I'm interested. I'm interested in the in the pivot question and also in terms of in terms of of scale. And you've written a book about something that I'm I'm really interested in. You call it the delegation trap. And I think the the the gist of the book is. or I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that as a leader, as a CEO, as a founder, you need to scale. And how do you do that? Am I right? Like what inspired you to write the book and why'd you write it? Yeah, great question. And, you know, I never wanted to write a book. Let me just start there.

17:55People have been telling me to write a book for years and I never wanted to do it and i've said no i said no i said no i never wanted to do it then i was in a mastermind and if you're not if you don't belong to a mastermind you should um but i'm in a mastermind of people that stretch me okay um where i feel like the little guy in the room compared to everyone else and you need to be in those types of environments because it opens your mind to so much more, right? And so much more opportunity and possibility. And so I'm in this mastermind. And one of the things that we do when we meet every four months is we kind of go around and talk about, hey, what's one thing that you've done in the last four months that's been super impactful that other people can learn from, right?

18:49So it's my turn. I've just had one of the worst four months in the last decade. I don't know what I'm going to share. Like things are rough right now. We're doing a lot of stuff. You know, we're having a bad time in business, which happens. The ebbs and the flows, right? It's rough. What am I going to share? And so I get up and I say, I don't, which is, this is true. I don't answer questions my staff asks. And everyone in the room turned around and looked and like, what the hell do you mean? Right. Even the speaker, can you explain that further? And like, well, the reality is in order for me to do my job, I've got to make sure that they do their job.

19:43And if I've done my job and given them the vision for what they need to do, they should have no questions for me. They should be able to go out and just execute. And so I don't answer their questions when they ask them. And that weekend, almost everyone in that room came up to me and wanted to have a conversation about this. Like, I spend half my day answering questions. Now, these are people who, again, I look up to. A lot of these are like industry legends, names that if I call them, you're like, oh, I know that. Oh, and they're coming up like, I'm struggling with this. I'm thinking, how in the world are you struggling with this?

20:30Why haven't you figured this out already? And that was the moment when I realized there was something that I had figured out in my, at that time, almost 30 years of business in leadership and delegation that a lot of other people hadn't, that was keeping them trapped in their business, that was allowing me to actually be able to have freedom to scale. knowing that I had a team behind that I could actually accomplish. You have an interesting, interesting phrase that you use. I think I might be paraphrasing. When you hire someone initially, you hire them to do. And then if they're going to scale, if they're going to make that, that, that thing better, they need to, they need to think.

21:14And so you have, you have a, a method that you've coined. I think it's called the case, the case method. Would you tell the audience what, what that is? And I, I know that they're going to have to read the book to get the whole shebang. But but but maybe maybe give them a teaser on on what it is, what it is. Yeah, absolutely. And John, you're right. And what you said there is, you know, we can't scale. We can't grow until we have people who are able to think that they're not able to think. They're always going to just sit there and wait and wait and just do. And you're just going to be in a bottleneck state.

21:55And so I was there. I've been there. Let me just tell you the story of how this really all came together. It was several years ago. And as we talked about, I've been an SEO for a long time. When you've been an SEO for that long from the inside and the outside of the industry, marketing and the technical side, I know a thing or two. I've been through a thing or two. And I realized that all SEO in the company was always still being touched by me because I was the smartest person in the room. You were that subject matter expert or whatever. Yeah. And so therefore, we couldn't grow further than how much I could touch.

22:40And that needed to change. Right? I was looking at where we were and I was like, that needs to change. And so I said, all right. well, it's time to bring in some other SEO experts here or people who know SEO and that we could train on SEO because the way we did it was very different. So I wasn't just going to go hire a random person on the street. I needed to hire someone who really understood where we were. And so the first young lady that we hired, she was young and we weren't planning on hiring someone this young, but she applied and she blew me away in her ability to think. And I realized, okay, hey, I can, she can get this.

23:20She was, when I say she was young, she was like 21, 22. She was young. This was her second job. And so I'm like, all right, well, you know, you're starting and I'm going to train you. I'm going to teach you. And at that time, I went through all of the stuff that I had learned in delegation from reading books over the years. And in her first couple of months of working with me, We used to meet weekly. Her name was Christine. She used to show up to our meetings and cry almost every single week. Oh, no. That's not a good thing. Okay. That's not a good thing at all. And she just felt like she was failing.

24:02And I kept trying different techniques of teaching and delegation and it just wasn't working. and i remember one one tuesday morning um we're going to have this meeting and i'm saying to myself at table we cannot make this young lady cry this is just bad dude like you don't make people cry at work that's bad right totally and and so the meeting hasn't started yet and i'm waiting for her to come and i'm frustrated and i'm just like what am i going to do different and i don't have an answer and so she comes to the meeting and i just pause and i don't know where this came from you know i thank god for divine intervention whatever you want to call this just came she's sitting there and my first question to her i said so christine tell me what challenges did you have this week with the project and so that's the c in the case method what challenges did you have this week and and she started talking and and she started telling me all these different challenges that she she had and i and in that moment i was smart enough and i'm share with you, the audience, and you, John, be smart enough when you ask that question to not say anything in return.

25:12Just listen. Take notes. Just listen. And so I just listened to her. I listened to her challenges, okay? When she was done, all of her challenges and all the things that didn't go well and issues that she had, I said, okay, let's go back to the start. Let's go back to the beginning. And can you articulate the steps that you went through? Just walk me through step by step, right? With the classic, and then what? So you did this, and then what? Right? And so that's the A, articulate. And so she went through and she said, these are all the steps that I took. Okay. Now something happened in that moment.

25:57Because again, I'm still just listening and taking notes. I've got the backdrop of her challenges and I'm listening to the steps that she's going through. Yeah, I can see where you went wrong. Right? I can see that you zigged when you should have zagged. I can see that you went up when you should have gone down. That was a left turn. It should have been a right. Right? And I'm seeing this. But here's the thing that it's illuminating for me even greater in that moment. it's illuminating this is how i would have thought about this this is how you're thinking about this and that's showing me the gap in between where i am and where you are and as a leader my job now is to help you bridge that gap yes okay that's my job help you bridge that gap in the way that you think so so she articulates all these steps and i'm looking at all the steps and and i'm looking no joke i'm looking at how much time we have left in the meeting right i'm like okay we don't have a long time left we can't go through all of this and so i picked three or four and in the book we talk about picking four steps pick two they did right two they did wrong so we're not just focusing on the negative we want to look at all the steps but we don't have enough time so we're going to choose four and I'm going to say, okay, Christine, what I want to do now is I want to study these four steps that you did and I want to go and dive deep in them.

27:32That's the S. S is the study. Okay. And so now I'm asking her, I'm saying, okay, so when you started step three, tell me what were some of the assumptions that you were making about how it was going to work and what did you expect and what actually happened? and now we're studying because in this study i get i already see that if this was one that she did wrong that her thinking was was left and she should have gone right but now i want to understand why you were thinking that what was going on inside now one of the things we do in the book is talk about the questions that you ask because right now in this study step the questions that you ask are critical.

28:14They're critical, John. But why'd you do that? Bad question. Okay. Well, so you said you did it this way because of that. Well, if that wasn't true, but this other thing was true, how would that have changed things for you? Good question. And we dedicate two chapters in the book to learning how to ask better questions, because that's the key right here. Right? In the S, the study stage. So for several weeks, Christina and I did this process iteratively, asking these three questions, asking these three questions, asking these three questions. Then a couple months later, we got to a place where 25, 30 minutes into the conversation, we're done.

29:06And I'm sitting there like, well, we still got another half an hour. What are we going to do? And then I asked her the next question, which is the E. Okay, so looking at the process now and looking at all the steps, which one or which ones were the easiest for you? And what that uncovered was hidden talents that she had that I didn't know she had. because in seeing what she found easiest and talking through why she found it easy, I got to see, again, how her brain works. And I'm like, man, some of the things that were easy for her were actually struggles for me. She saw that part of the process better than me.

29:47And she was able to innovate that part of the process faster than I could because she had a hidden talent there. And what that did was it allowed her over time to actually make the process better. I haven't touched SEO in my company for years because she took the process that I had. She made it better. And then she taught others. That's a really cool way to think about career growth, whether you're an entrepreneur, whether you're a manager, manager of a large team, because oftentimes I know I might I might ask somebody, let's say in an annual review, where do you see yourself in a number of years?

30:27or what do you see as your next step? And it strikes me the way that you're doing it. You're asking about it more of an atomic way where someone's saying like, what's easiest or where do I find joy? Or that kind of thing and steering them from data, maybe as opposed to opinion, that's really cool. Yeah, thank you. Again, it wasn't a deliberate thing of coming up with this. I didn't sit down one day and say, hmm, let's philosophize the better way. It was literally born out of pain. I want to ask a final question. And I wasn't expecting that to ask it because I didn't know until we were sort of doing the pre-brief that you lived and worked in the Philippines.

31:21Talk about what you love about the Philippines, both as a business owner and as a resident. Number one, if I could have done this sooner, I would have. If I knew it was going to be this great, I would have done it sooner. One of the things my wife and I had planned, we've talked about since 2001, was moving abroad and living abroad. It's always something that was in the plans and we didn't execute it until much, much, much later. You know, kids out of the house, that type of thing later, right? What do I love? One, I'm somebody who loves heat and it's always hot here. let's just start there i don't do cold well okay i don't have that issue here okay number two we looked at a lot of places around the globe to live and we came here and we we fell in love with a particular area in manila called bgc and like right now it is 2 39 a.m and quite honestly if i turn this mic off and turn another mic on, you can actually still hear the parties going on downstairs.