The Two Roles Every Founder Must Separate: Owner vs. Operator

If you’ve recently started your business, chances are you’re doing most of the work yourself.

You’re wearing all of the hats – product, marketing, sales, customer support, everything.

But deep down, you know it can’t continue like that forever. At some point, you’ll have to do the uncomfortable thing and find people to take over some tasks.

Yes, it’s not an easy thing. Mostly emotionally. That’s why I think that in building your business, you build a new version of yourself. One where you’ll have to take care of all of your weaknesses.

Selling exposes your self-worth.

Hiring exposes your control issues.

Leadership exposes your communication.

And scaling? That exposes everything.

So, if you want your business to have any scalability, you’ll have to separate your roles as owner and operator.

In this article, I’ll show you the importance of delegation and exactly when you should stop doing everything in your startup.

Get ready to give your business some scalability 😉

Why Founders Start By Doing Everything

If right now, you’re doing everything by yourself, I don’t blame you at all.

And I certainly don’t see you as “less of an entrepreneur”.

The only time that people can instantly delegate a lot of tasks is when they already have a lot of money. They can hire top talent and not lift a finger in their business.

They can truly work ON their business instead of IN their business.

But if you’re under 40 years old and you’re not a prodigy who made tons of money in their 20s (so pretty much everyone reading this)…

… You have to start as an employee in your business.

Still though, I encourage you to at least think about delegating from the very beginning. If you are not ready to delegate, you are likely to find yourself in self-employment rather than running a business.

Self-employment and business are two different things.

If you truly enjoy a particular activity and always want to continue doing it, that’s okay – but it cannot fully be called a business.

And if you are planning to start a business or a startup, you must be ready to delegate tasks to others and stop doing everything yourself.

A business implies growth and expansion, which means you won’t be able to handle all tasks on your own as you do now.

What If I’m The Core Of The Business?

If you’re at a point where you think: “I understand delegation is good, but… I’m a key part in the business, and I can’t delegate my tasks to anyone else”, I have some advice for you too.

I mean, I get it – it’s not always so black and white.

Sometimes, people want to work with you because you’re YOU. Sometimes, that’s your unique selling proposition.

Here, I recommend you ask yourself the following question:

“Where do I want to be in 3, 5, or even 10 years?” 

How much money do you want to make? How much do you want to work? What do you see yourself doing in the future?

Generally, the more money you want to make, the more you have to delegate.

Your day has 24 hours, and no matter how good you are in your field, you can’t do infinite things in a finite amount of time.

Let me give you an easy example.

Right now, you might be servicing clients by yourself, but do you see yourself doing that in 10 years?

Or do you have a vision of making a big exit in the next 5 years?

I have a free guide for you that can easily help you figure this out, as well as your idea, your launch, and… pretty much everything about your startup.

For $0, it’s definitely a once-in-a-lifetime steal. It’s called the “8D framework to launch your business”.

DOWNLOAD 8D FRAMEWORK

First Path: Build To Sell

In this path, you immediately understand: “I will now start a business. I am making some kind of product, some kind of business model, and it will grow with me. In three years, I want to make a big exit and sell it.”

Well, then in this case – it doesn’t make sense to get stuck in the role of an employee in your business forever, does it?

If you’re building a startup, you probably fall into this bucket.

Second Path: Family Business

Not every business needs to scale to infinity, you know?

“Well, how — yes, of course — it is necessary that the business earns a billion dollars a year.”, your money-obsessed mind blurts out.

But whoever said that you must necessarily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a month?

No one.

The beautiful thing as an entrepreneur is – you don’t owe anyone anything.

That is, you are not obliged to make a growing business.

You are not obliged to make a scalable business.

You only owe yourself and possibly your children, if you have any.

So, if you’re starting a small business, such as a local business or a shop, you can retain your key role.

This is especially true if you want to live a simple life and do the same job for many years to come.

I mean, delegation is quite chaotic. It definitely brings a degree of stress and uncertainty into your life. If you want that, great.

But don’t let social media tell you that you HAVE to want that.

Startups vs “Any Other Business”

The best definition would be: “A startup is a temporary organization created to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”.

The keyword that many underestimate or just overlook is ‘repeatable’.

You want to find repeatable processes you can run every day to grow your revenue. Let me repeat it one more time.

Find processes that do the SAME thing EVERY day while INCREASING revenue.

If you’re running a startup, find processes that make it develop this way:

• Make the startup scale very, very quickly. The quicker, the better.
• In fact, it should grow so quickly that it changes the generally accepted norms in the market.
• The processes make the startup innovative and disruptive.

The Truth About Scaling: Growth Requires Letting Go, But Maybe Not Immediately

In the previous section, I said that your growth stage should be as quick as possible.

However, not every stage needs to be a growth stage!

While you feel out your product-market fit, your startup may be in a dormant mode, maybe even for a couple of years.

And then… it abruptly enters a very active phase of growth. That is exactly when you want to delegate as MUCH as possible so you can actually focus on growth.

When you’re doing everything by yourself, you don’t have a lot of time to think. You can’t be innovative and grow.

In a dormant stage, that can be okay… but when you’re growing, absolutely not.

Also, your “role” should change in such a growth stage. If you were a great salesperson in your startup, you can still use your skills in a growth stage.

However, you should apply it to a larger goal – for example, fundraising, instead of individually selling your product.

That’s how you go from a small to a large company.

At Some Point, You Become the Bottleneck

If you keep getting involved in ‘details’ forever – trust me – you’ll become a nightmare to work with.

You’ll become a so-called ‘micromanager’. Ugh…

It’s needless to say that micromanaging kills growth and morale.

Ask yourself this question:

“What will I NOT do in my business, even though I could?”

Then, just hire an Indian VA delegate all those tasks.

On the other hand, your company must have a unified development plan, and you still have to be involved in its implementation.

See how I didn’t say that you must implement the implementation? You just have to oversee it.

 “The company will do nothing that I am not personally focused on,” is exactly what Steve Jobs did for Apple.

That doesn’t mean he screwed all the bolts and worked on every marketing piece ever, but he did oversee it all.

A Personal Delegation Example: The Path of a CEO

I think I talked about systems and the importance of delegation enough for one blog article. I’ll just give you a real-life example before I let you go.

Suppose you’re writing a blog:

• Role of Specialist: Writing excellent articles.
• Role of Expert: Writing articles and constantly improving.
• Role of Manager: Finding authors to write articles and training them to constantly improve.
• Role of Top Manager: Finding managers who will find authors and training the managers to constantly improve.
• Role of Owner: Finding top managers who will find managers, who will find authors, and training the top managers to constantly improve.

Can you see just how much more growth potential an “owner” has in comparison to the “specialist”?

The role of a CEO is NOT to perform every task. It’s merely to make sure that the business never runs out of cash.

What a useless person, right?

Takeaways

In this article, we talked about whether you should delegate and when to do so. We also saw that it’s not so black and white as everyone says it is.

“DELEGATE EVERYTHING!” is something I hear way too often, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the best option for everyone. Here’s a summary of who should think that way and how to do it well:

• Founders typically start doing everything by themselves because they don’t have the money to pay someone else yet. That’s very common and totally okay.
• Sometimes, they’re also genuinely passionate about their field, which is also normal.
• That’s why you have to think: “Where do I see myself in 3, 5, or even 10 years?” How much do you want to make, and what tasks do you see yourself doing?
• If you’re building to sell, you definitely need to delegate as much as possible, as soon as possible.
• … but if you’re building a family business and you see yourself working in it for years to come, you don’t have to delegate absolutely every task imaginable.
• A startup needs to have repeatable processes that look the same day after day, yet quickly grow your revenue.
• If your startup is in a dormant stage because you’re still feeling out your product-market fit, you don’t have to delegate as much.
• But in a growth stage, the more you delegate, the more you can think about growth.
• As a CEO, you become the bottleneck at some point. You don’t have infinite energy, and you physically cannot be directly involved in every single task.
• You can oversee every task but not perform them.