You started out as the founder. The big picture person. The “I’ve got a vision and a Notion board” type.
Now you’re closing deals, figuring out your tone of voice, settling team drama, and learning the difference between revenue and deferred revenue.
You didn’t mean to collect job titles like Pokémon, but here we are. Time to fire yourself from a few?
Thought so. 🙃
Here’s what you’ve probably picked up along the way:
You probably thought this would involve shaping values, setting the tone and maybe saying something inspirational at the company off-site. It does, but… in reality, most of your time is spent defusing team tension, deciphering someone’s tone in a Slack channel and debating whether ordering pizza counts as adequate team-bonding. But it’s so much more than that. Culture deserves someone who can balance the fine line between people and processes.
In the early days, the culture was largely influenced by you. It doesn’t mean it 100% should stay with you. Fire yourself and hire a People expert to take you from wholesome vibes to organisational structure.
Let’s be clear. You should be on key sales calls. People love buying from the founder.
But if your days are full of cold emailing, updating the CRM and chasing every lukewarm lead, you’re not selling, you’re drowning.
Hire an Account Executive. Let them fill the funnel and close the everyday deals. You stay on the juicy calls. Great founders stay in sales, but they don’t stay stuck in the funnel. Know the difference.
You should set the vision for your brand and product. That is founder work.
But scaling marketing is a different game. Testing channels, pitching ideas, managing ads and influencers, building a content machine… if that’s not happening, neither is growth.
Hire a marketing expert who can turn strategy into results. Your biggest headache here should be saying yes to the podcast interview they want to drag you into. 😄
If you are a technical founder, then this one is really hard to let go of. Building things is fun. It feels like progress, and it’s tempting to stay hands-on with every new feature and every line of code.
But at some point, being the lead engineer or product owner will hold you back. You can’t scale your product if every decision runs through you. You also can’t fundraise or hire if you’re busy fixing bugs at midnight.
Hire great engineers. Bring in product leadership. You can still be involved in the day-to-day running of things, but stop being the bottleneck to your own growth.
Hiring feels deceptively simple. Write a job post, talk to a few people, make an offer. Easy, right?
Wrong!
Great hiring takes time and skill. Sourcing top candidates, keeping them engaged, running a smooth process and dealing with all the admin in between. Hiring is a full-time job, and most founders simply lack the bandwidth and knowledge to do it properly. This is where an embedded Talent Partner comes in. They will steer the ship, build out the Talent function and grant you the space to focus on who to hire, not how to hire.
Happy firing/hiring!