Sponsored by: Plus Forty helps CPG and e-com brands scale with vetted offshore talent – without the admin or the overhead. From executive assistants to media buyers and sales support, they handle sourcing, pre-vetting, contracts, payroll, insurance, and more, so you can confidently grow your business.

In the early days of building a CPG brand, doing everything yourself was part of the job. You take customer service tickets, manage freight issues, answer retailer emails, update spreadsheets, coordinate samples, and jump into whatever needs doing. It is scrappy, necessary, and often the reason the business gets off the ground.

But at some point, that same behavior becomes a growth constraint.

One of the biggest shifts founders make as they scale is realizing that not all tasks are equal. Some activities drive the business forward. Others simply keep it moving. And if too much founder time is spent on repetitive execution, there is less room for the work that actually changes the trajectory of the company.

The “$12 task” Problem

A $12 task is any repeatable, low-leverage task that does not require the founder’s unique judgment. It does not mean the task is unimportant. It means it should not live on the founder’s plate indefinitely.

For a CPG founder, that can look like:

• Entering data into your Inventory System
• Scheduling meetings
• Following up on invoices
• Updating retailer orders
• Placing purchase orders
• Submitting forms
• Managing shipment updates
• Handling basic customer support
• Copying data between systems
• Formatting decks and reports

These tasks are operationally necessary. But they are not where a founder creates the most value.

Where founders actually create leverage

The highest-value work in a CPG business is strategic.

That includes things like refining positioning, building buyer relationships, improving gross margin, identifying growth channels, fundraising, hiring key talent, making product bets, and spotting problems before they become expensive.

Those are the moves that compound.

When founders spend their best hours on admin and coordination, the cost is not just time. It is slower decision-making, missed opportunities, and less energy for the work only they can do.

Why founders stay stuck in low-value work

A lot of low-value work feels productive because it is visible. You can clear it, finish it, and check it off. Strategic work is different. It is often slower, less tidy, and harder to measure day to day.

That is why many founders stay trapped in execution longer than they should. Not because they do not know delegation matters, but because the immediate work keeps showing up faster than the important work gets scheduled.

In CPG, that problem compounds quickly. Retail expansion, supply chain coordination, broker communication, retailer forms, promotions, and inventory issues create a constant stream of tasks. Without support, founders end up operating as the company’s backup system for everything.

How to start buying back your time

The first step is simple: audit your week.

Look at every recurring task on your calendar and to-do list, then sort it into three groups:

• only I can do this
• someone else can do this with a process
• this should be automated or accelerated with tools

That exercise usually reveals how much time is being spent on work that does not need to be founder-owned.

From there, start with the easiest handoffs. The best early delegation tasks are repetitive, clear, and process-driven. In CPG, that often includes admin support, customer support triage, sales follow-up coordination, invoice chasing, retailer paperwork, reporting prep, and operational tracking.

Delegation works better when the handoff is simple

Founders often think delegation requires a perfect SOP library. It does not.

Usually, a short walkthrough video, a checklist, and a clear expected outcome are enough to get started. The goal is not to create a giant system before handing anything off. The goal is to stop being the bottleneck.

A lot of delegation fails because founders hand off work too late only once they are already overwhelmed. The better move is to delegate before the task pile becomes unmanageable.

Who Should You Delegate To?

You have a few options for delegating executional tasks. Some can be done through automation, others through AI Agents, and many through a virtual assistant.

Many tasks require human thought behind it and in that case it’s affordable to hire a virtual assistant or specialized offshore talent to handle these tasks.

For CPG founders who need more operational support without adding full-time overhead, Plus Forty can be a smart extension of the team. They help you find virtual assistants and specialized offshore talent to add to your team. They will focus on recurring execution so you can get back to high-leverage work.