I am a bad delegator and very much a do it yourselfer (DIY). It’s one of the many reasons I am certain I’d make a terrible CEO.
CEOs must delegate. At scale, they should only do three things; set the vision and strategy and continuously communicate it, recruit and retain the very best people, and keep the company funded. Everything else has to be delegated at scale.
But when you start a company, you (and your cofounders) have to do everything yourself. There is nobody to delegate things to. And hiring a bunch of people to do things like schedule your meetings, answer the phones, keep the books, review contracts, interview candidates, etc is a bad idea because it uses up money which is always in short supply at the early stage of a startup. You can, and should, see if there are service providers who are inexpensive who can help. Bookkeeping is one area where that is certainly true. Reviewing contracts and recruiting is harder to hand off to an inexpensive third party. I wish it were not.
I like it when I see a founder team that is resourceful, has range, and can do a lot of this stuff themselves. I like to see them running lean and mean and spending money on the things that really matter (product!!!!!).
But at some point they need to start delegating this stuff. And first time founders often make the mistake of waiting too long to take things off their plates. For one, they like the control and insights they get from doing things themselves. For another, they are often lean to a fault (penny wise and pound foolish).
Knowing when it is the right time to start handing things off and hiring is an art not a science. It has something to do with the availability of resources. And it has something to do with the scale of the organization. When the CEO is still scheduling her own meetings when there are over fifty employees, something is wrong. Investors can help a lot. We have pattern recognition. We can see two very similar companies (size, stage, etc) and compare how much delegation is happening in one vs the other. We can make suggestions.
One suggestion I frequently make is to find a “utility infielder” for your first business hire. This is someone who can do a lot of things well but nothing spectacularly well. This is often someone who has done this role before in a startup and likes working in companies that are between five and fifty employees. There are people who make a career out of this job. It is lucrative if you value equity over cash compensation. You can build a nice portfolio of early stage equity grants doing the “first business hire” gig for two or three years at a time and then doing it again and again.
Doing a startup is an evolution from DIY to Delegate. And timing the evolution is important. If you haven’t done it before, ask people who have for advice on this. Allocating your time (your most precious resource) is critical to the success of your business.
