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When Natalie called me, she wasn’t burnt out. She was furious. Her startup had grown from a tight-knit team of 3 to a team of 8 in just six months. They finally had revenue, product-market fit, a growing customer base, and real traction. But somehow, everything was harder. Messier. Slower. What her scrappy original team…
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As a founder of a successfully growing business, you’ve already done something incredible. You built something out of nothing. You found product–market fit. You figured out how to sell. Maybe you even brought on a few contractors or early employees who you really value and depend on. But that growth exposes the cracks in your…
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“I finally hired someone to help. I spent three hours training them, and still rewrote every single report myself.” Many founders struggle to hand off work to others. And when they hire someone and can’t make that handoff work, they assume that they hired the wrong person. That might be true once or twice, but…
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By the time I came in, the founder had almost given up. He’d tried every kind of hire and process trick he could think of. He’d even hired a few “sales gurus” to straighten him out. But nothing worked, nor would it. Those people and gimmicks weren’t right for his early-stage business. They didn’t get…
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When you’re the founder, hiring someone to take sales off your plate feels like a milestone. A sign that things are working. That you’ve earned your way out of the part of the business you never meant to stay in forever. But one founder I worked with, every hire failed. He tried everything: None of…
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When founders talk about being overwhelmed, they rarely start with sales. Usually, it sounds more like: What they’re really saying is: “I’m stuck doing the things I can’t seem to delegate, and it’s consuming me.” In most early-stage startups, the biggest of those things is sales. We call it the Founder-Led Sales Trap. He Was…
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You think hiring the right person will solve everything. And sometimes, for a little while, it feels like it does. When I hired a new team member to take over one of the most critical roles in our ed-tech startup, I thought I was doing everything right. The role was essential to the company’s operations…
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If you’re managing by faith instead of a system, you’re not building a business – you’re just hiring assistants. It’s the end of the day (whenever that happens for you). You’re tired, your own to-do list is only half-finished, and something nags at the back of your mind: you don’t really know what your team…
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You thought hiring help would lighten your load. Instead, it made everything harder. You’re fixing sloppy work. Re-explaining things. Spending all day hand holding and wondering if it’s just faster to do it yourself. If your team can’t scale your impact, you don’t have a team, you have overhead. And it’s an expensive way to…
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You didn’t start a business to babysit adults. But now, every question, deadline, and dropped ball lands back on your plate. You’re spending more time managing than building, and every new client feels like a risk instead of a win. The problem isn’t your team. It’s that you’re trying to grow without structure. I spoke…