Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin, Episode 19: “Delegating Responsibility”

Having Dave take the packages to the post office every day would help, but in reality, it only saved about an hour of my time. With the amount of work I had, and facing the reality that my order volume and client base would continue to expand, I would require a lot more help. In the past, when I had attended Phoenix House, an inpatient rehab, the residents were given certain responsibilities, or jobs, to ensure the seamless operation of the community. As residents proved responsible, they rose up the ranks, and were given more and more responsibility. As residents rose to a coordinator position, they managed more people, representing corporate structure to teach delegation of responsibilities. As I rose to “House Coordinator”, the top position in the house, I was forced to delegate all tasks as a lesson in management. It is not as easy as it sounds. If you want something done correctly, it is usually best done yourself. However, you can’t do everything. To teach management skills, you have to learn how to effectively delegate responsibilities. The irony is, this inpatient rehab, an institution created to teach me how to avast my criminal thinking and criminal behaviors, taught me how to create and manage, what would turn out to be, the largest black market anabolic steroid operation in U.S. history.

As much as I wanted to do everything in my business, I had to delegate responsibilities. If someone could package the orders and ship them out, that would ameliorate hours of workload. I heard Dave walk in the door and make his way back to my office, where I was working. As he grabbed the packages, I pulled a hundred dollars out of my money clip.

“I appreciate your help,” I said as I handed him the money. “I have some additional responsibilities of which I could use some reprieve, if you would like to generate more income. I was thinking I could pay twenty dollars per shipment to have you come package each order and take it to the post office.”

“I was thinking about that,” he responded. “I don’t know if I would have time to come over here for long periods every day. Furthermore, I have to keep this furtive, because my girlfriend is not aware of what we are doing, and I don’t know that she would approve. I was thinking Little Steve would be a good employee. He has an eBay business, so he already knows how to package and ship products. He would be perfect. Do you want me to ask him?”

“Yes, see if he’ll do it. Thanks.”

We called him Little Steve because several of our friends were named Steve, and he was the smaller in stature than the rest. I knew him as an acquaintance, and he seemed competent enough.

“Additionally,” Dave continued, “I will create another business email, prices@bdsupplements.im, for people who just need a product and price list, I will keep that updated and send people pricelists throughout the day. I will post this new email, and when it should be used, on the website. That should cut down on the traffic to your email. Just give me two hundred a week and I will take care of that for you.”

“Thank you,” I ingratiated. “That will be pragmatic.”

I thought of Gene, how he ran his business, and how I wanted to emulate his business model. To implement Gene’s business model, I would have to delegate compete control of certain aspects of the business to others, and manage their function from afar. As much as I did not want to give up control of any aspect of my business, this was a necessary step to scale. Moreover, it would free up some of my time to spend a portion of this money that was pouring in to my house. Additionally, there was a part of me that thought surrendering control of certain aspects of the business may shed liability for me, although I was aware that conspiracy laws would make that improbable.

I would ask Little Steve to take control of the shipping operation. I was reticent because this meant I would have to allow him to take all of the products, probably one hundred thousand dollars’ worth, to his house to package and ship from there. Thinking about how this would work, I could not pay him hourly, for there would be no way for me to keep track, and there would be no incentive to work quickly to get every package out in a timely manner. I would have to pay him by volume of work he completed, which would incentivize fast and efficient production. I would offer to pay him twenty dollars per package shipped. For an average of ten to twenty packages per day, he would make two hundred to four hundred dollars a day, which was well over one hundred thousand a year. There was no way he was going to make more than that on his own, and hence, there was no way he could say no.

By outsourcing the shipping, I was free to concentrate on aspects of the business that I enjoyed, such as customer service, collecting money, and expanding the business. When a customer sent me payment information, they included their shipping information. I would aggregate client data including the name, shipping address, and order into an email account created solely for this purpose. At the end of the day, I would then send this email, which included the entire days’ worth of orders and aggregated data, to Little Steve, the shipper. Little Steve had until the post office closed the next day to package all of the orders and get them out to be shipped.

NEXT >> Episode 20 (Money Collectors)

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Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin (Table of Contents)

Start reading from the beginning or browse the table of contents for summaries of each episode of “Memoirs of a Steroid Kingpin”.

Ryan’s Root’s real-life autobiographical story is a must-read account of his rise and fall as one of the largest anabolic steroid dealers on the Internet.

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