Henry Shi recently shared something that caught my attention: "A billion-dollar founder just handed me something he's never shared publicly: the actual SOPs his team uses to run his life." He added that the founder spent "years and millions" building it, and that the same playbook can start with a "$10/hr VA".

That combination (elite-level operations, then practical starting steps) is what makes Henry's post worth unpacking. Because the real story is not celebrity delegation. It is the idea that personal operations can be engineered like company operations, and that the compounding effect comes from documented processes, not from hiring one magical assistant.

In Henry's telling, the founder is Trevor Koverko: a repeat builder who co-founded Polymath (raised $59M, reached a $1B token market cap), took two companies public, and now runs Sapien. Trevor's support system costs roughly $300K/year and, as Henry put it, "lets him operate like 20 people". The details are fascinating, but the underlying framework is what most founders can copy.

The hidden tax: context switching and micro-logistics

Henry described Trevor's early founder years in a way that will sound familiar: grinding, moving countries, wearing "operational intensity" as a badge of honor, even doing his own groceries to save money. That mindset feels responsible. It also quietly converts your best thinking hours into errands, inbox triage, and coordination.

The failure mode is not that you work too little. It is that your day becomes a chain of small switches:

Logistics to strategy to scheduling to follow-ups
Vendor negotiation to finance approvals to meeting prep
Personal admin mixed into product decisions

Each switch costs more than time. It costs depth. Henry's post captured the turning point: "context switching destroyed his ability to think strategically".

If your calendar is a patchwork of tiny decisions, your company strategy becomes a patchwork too.

The delegation stack Henry outlined (and why it works)

What stood out in Henry's breakdown is that Trevor's system is layered. It is not "hire an assistant". It is: design an operating model, then staff it.

Layer 1: A Chief of Staff who turns chaos into a queue

Henry wrote that Trevor's Chief of Staff, Lauren, earns $120K/year, has full banking access, and handles the "brain dump" by parsing chaos and routing tasks to specialists.

This role is less about doing everything and more about being the control tower:

Capture incoming requests and decisions
Clarify requirements (what done looks like)
Route work to the correct owner
Maintain standards (SOPs, naming conventions, recurring cadences)

A key takeaway: if you want to scale delegation, you need a person or function that protects the system from entropy.

Layer 2: Offshore VAs for repeatable, rules-based work

Henry mentioned multiple offshore VAs at $3-4K/month each covering bookkeeping, vendor negotiations, and 24/7 coverage.

This is where most founders get immediate ROI, because the tasks are high-volume and processable:

Inbox filtering and follow-up drafting
Data entry and reconciliation
Quote collection and vendor comparisons
Travel booking and rebooking

The point is not "offshore" specifically. The point is: assign tasks that can be standardized and audited.

Layer 3: In-person support for physical-world constraints

Henry also noted two in-person PAs in Toronto at about $5K/month each to handle food, errands, and anything requiring physical presence.

This layer matters because digital delegation hits a wall in the real world. If your health, meals, home, and appointments are a mess, you will pay for it with energy and attention.

The real asset: SOPs that compound

Henry listed what Trevor's system includes, and it reads like a founder OS:

Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual assistant SOPs
Calendar architecture and color-coding system
Meeting briefing templates for first-time meetings
Hiring, onboarding, and offboarding procedures (with interview questionnaire)
Chef and meal prep coordination system
Health and nutrition routines
Property management operations
Asana best practices and task naming conventions
Service provider booking and payment workflows

A lot of people see that list and think, "I don't need all that." But Henry's key line reframes it: Trevor has one non-negotiable rule that "everything done more than once gets a documented procedure".

That rule is the compounding engine. Not because documentation is fun, but because it turns:

Memory into infrastructure
One-time decisions into reusable defaults
Delegation into a repeatable pipeline

Delegation scales when quality is encoded, not when a founder repeats instructions faster.

SOPs prevent knowledge from walking out the door

Henry shared Lauren's documentation principle: "You have to act as if somebody has no idea what you are talking about." The point is extreme clarity, so knowledge stays even when people leave.

That is a founder-grade insight. Most teams document for the current person. Elite teams document for the next person.

Calendar and communication: protect deep work by default

Another detail Henry highlighted: Trevor does not manage his own calendar or email. His EAs know when to book calls, when to protect deep work, and what meetings belong where, without asking.

If you want to copy the spirit of this, define booking rules that remove constant micro-approvals:

What days are meeting-heavy vs deep work
Minimum notice for non-urgent calls
Default meeting lengths (15, 25, 50 minutes)
Categories and color codes (sales, hiring, investors, product, personal)
A short list of "auto-yes" and "auto-no" meeting types

This is not about being inaccessible. It is about preventing your most valuable hours from being auctioned off one invite at a time.

Automation is the glue, not the goal

Henry described a workflow where voice memos go into Zapier, auto-populate Asana, get transcribed, and are prioritized. Trevor "just speaks while the system handles the rest".

The temptation is to start with tools. The better approach is:

Define the capture habit (voice memo, quick form, email forward)
Define the triage step (who reviews, how often, what priority rules)
Define the execution path (task owner, due date standards, definition of done)
Then automate the handoffs

Automation without SOPs creates faster chaos. SOPs with light automation create calm.

A practical way to start with a $10/hr VA

Henry's post implies a spectrum: Trevor's $300K/year system at one end, and a single affordable VA at the other. You can start small if you start correctly.

Step 1: Build a "Delegation Inbox"

For one week, do what Henry called a "brain dump". Send everything to one place: a doc, a form, or voice notes. The goal is to surface repeatables.

Step 2: Pick 10 tasks that happen more than once

Good first tasks:

Scheduling and rescheduling
Travel planning templates
Expense categorization
Recurring vendor payments and renewals
CRM updates, reminders, follow-ups

Step 3: Write one SOP at a time (and keep it painfully clear)

Use Lauren's rule from Henry's post: write as if the reader has no context.

A simple SOP format:

Purpose (what outcome this produces)
Inputs (what information is needed)
Tools and access (accounts, permissions, where files live)
Steps (numbered, with screenshots if possible)
Quality checks (how to verify it is correct)
Escalation rules (when to ask you vs decide)

Step 4: Introduce the rule: "done twice, documented"

Make it cultural, even if your "culture" is just you and one assistant.

What Henry's post gets right about founder leverage

The headline is SOPs, VAs, and a high-functioning support team. The deeper lesson is that founders should treat personal logistics as an operational system with:

Standards (SOPs)
Cadence (daily, weekly, monthly reviews)
Ownership (who does what)
Observability (task naming, checklists, audits)
Continuous improvement (an SOP for creating SOPs)

When Henry says Trevor built something that runs his life, I hear: he removed friction from the parts of life that steal attention from leadership. That is not indulgence. It is strategy.

If you are stuck in relentless execution, consider the uncomfortable decision Trevor made early on: hire support before you feel ready, then systematize so the support actually scales.

This blog post expands on a viral LinkedIn post by Henry Shi, Co-Founder of Super.com ($200M+ revenue/year) | AI@Anthropic | LeanAILeaderboard.com | Angel Investor | Forbes U30. View the original LinkedIn post →