You work 50 hours a week and still feel behind.

You’re delivering client work, answering emails, fixing problems, putting out fires, managing your team, and somehow trying to grow the business at the same time.

And at the end of every week, you think: “What did I actually accomplish?”

Here’s why you can’t answer that question: you don’t know where your time is going.

Not because you’re disorganized. Because your business doesn’t have clear functional boundaries.

Everything blurs together. Client work bleeds into admin. Strategy gets interrupted by execution. You’re doing everything, all the time, with no sense of what should happen when.

The 4-Box Map fixes this in 20 minutes.

Why Most Founders Can’t See Their Business Clearly

Most founders operate from a task list.

Wake up. Check email. Handle whatever’s urgent. Respond to your team. Work on a client project. Squeeze in some marketing. Answer more questions. Go to bed.

Repeat.

You’re busy. You’re productive. But you’re not strategic.

Because you’re managing tasks, not functions.

And when you don’t understand the functions of your business, you can’t design systems. You can’t delegate ownership. You can’t extract yourself.

You just keep doing everything because you don’t know what “everything” actually is.

What the 4-Box Map Is

The 4-Box Map is a simple framework that breaks your business into four core functions.

Every business—doesn’t matter what you sell or who you serve—runs on these four boxes:

1. Deliver Fulfilling what you sold. Getting clients results. Doing the work.

2. Sell Bringing in new business. Closing deals. Converting leads to clients.

3. Build Improving the business. Marketing, product development, team growth, strategy.

4. Run Keeping operations moving. Finance, admin, legal, compliance, tools, systems.

That’s it. Four boxes.

Every single task you do falls into one of these categories.

And once you can see which box you’re living in, you can start making better decisions about where you should actually be spending your time.

How to Map Your Business

Grab a piece of paper. Draw four boxes. Label them: Deliver, Sell, Build, Run.

Now list everything you did last week.

Go through your calendar. Check your email. Look at your task list.

Write down every task and put it in the right box.

Here’s what most six-figure founders find:

Deliver: 60% of their time
Run: 25% of their time
Sell: 10% of their time
Build: 5% of their time

And that’s exactly why they’re stuck.

What the Map Reveals

You’re Doing Too Much Delivery

If you’re spending 60% of your time in the Deliver box, you’re not running a business. You’re doing a job.

Delivery work is important. But it shouldn’t be the founder’s primary function.

Your job is to build systems so other people can deliver.

If you’re still the one doing most of the client work, you haven’t extracted the system yet. It’s still living in your head, which means only you can execute it.

You’re Drowning in Run

The Run box is where founders go to die.

Email. Admin. Invoicing. Tool management. Calendar Tetris. Slack messages.

None of this is high-value work. But if you don’t have systems in place, it all falls on you.

Most founders spend 20-30% of their week in Run tasks that could be automated, delegated, or eliminated entirely.

You’re Not Selling Enough

Most founders avoid the Sell box.

They’re uncomfortable with sales. Or they’re too busy delivering. Or they tell themselves they’ll focus on it “once things calm down.”

But if you’re not actively selling, you’re not growing. And if you’re not growing, you’re stuck.

The Sell box should be 20-30% of your time as a founder. If it’s less than 10%, that’s your growth bottleneck.

You’re Not Building Anything

The Build box is where strategic work happens.

Marketing. Content. Systems. Team. Product improvements. Long-term planning.

This is the work that compounds. The work that creates leverage. The work that makes next year easier than this year.

But most founders spend less than 5% of their time here because they’re buried in Deliver and Run.

And that’s why the business never gets easier. You’re working in it, not on it.

What a Healthy Map Looks Like

Here’s where a six-figure founder should be spending their time:

Deliver: 10-20% (only high-value, founder-only work)
Sell: 30-40% (closing deals, strategic partnerships, high-touch sales)
Build: 30-40% (systems, marketing, team, strategy)
Run: 10-20% (oversight only, not execution)

That’s a business where the founder is working on growth, not just keeping up.

But you can’t get there overnight. You have to extract the systems first.

How to Use the Map to Extract Yourself

Once you’ve mapped where your time goes, here’s what to do:

Step 1: Identify What Shouldn’t Be on Your Plate

Look at your Deliver tasks. Which ones could someone else do at 70% of your quality?

Look at your Run tasks. Which ones could be automated, delegated, or deleted?

Circle everything that doesn’t need to be you.

Step 2: Extract the High-Frequency Tasks First

Start with the tasks you do every week.

If you’re doing client onboarding every single week, that’s your first extraction target.

Pull it out of your head. Document it. Hand it off.

Step 3: Reassign Your Time

As you extract tasks from Deliver and Run, reallocate that time to Sell and Build.

This doesn’t happen all at once. But every system you extract gives you back 2-5 hours a week.

Six weeks from now, you could have 15-20 hours back. That’s enough time to completely shift your functional focus.

What This Looks Like in Practice

When I first mapped my business, I was spending 70% of my time in Deliver and Run.

I was doing client work, managing projects, answering team questions, handling admin, and trying to squeeze in marketing on the weekends.

I had no time for Sell. No time for Build. I was running as fast as I could just to keep up.

So I started extracting. I pulled the client delivery process out of my head and handed it to my project manager. I automated invoicing. I created decision frameworks so my team stopped asking me questions.

Within two months, I’d shifted my time to:

Deliver: 15%
Run: 15%
Sell: 40%
Build: 30%

Same business. Same revenue. But I was working on growth instead of just keeping up.

That shift came from the 4-Box Map.

The Bigger Picture

The 4-Box Map is part of the Extract phase of the Operations Reset Framework.

Once you can see where your time goes, you can extract the systems that are keeping you stuck in Deliver and Run.

Then you assign ownership to your team (phase two) and scale the operating rhythm so the business runs predictably (phase three).

When all three phases work together, you get The Reset: a business where you’re working on strategy, not just execution.

But it starts with seeing the map clearly.

Quick Win: Map Your Last Week

This week, grab a piece of paper and draw the 4-Box Map:

Draw four boxes: Deliver, Sell, Build, Run
List everything you did last week
Put each task in the right box
Estimate the percentage of time in each box
Circle everything that shouldn’t be on your plate

That’s your extraction roadmap.

The 4-Box Map: Visualize Your Business Functions (Deliver, Sell, Build, Run)