Stop trying to do it all yourself

Why are you doing the work yourself?
But darling, I save on fuel.
Yes, but it takes us ten times as long to get there.

The formative stages of your new business venture are hard. You need to be doing a little bit of everything – marketing, legals, accounting, design, IT, HR and more.  You very rapidly learn to be a generalist.

If you can get across the fundamentals then you can help the company grow rapidly with a minimum of indecision. This works for a while, but sooner or later the company gets too big for one individual to be the decision maker – there are just not enough hours in the day.

I have seen many examples of fast growing companies topping out at about 20 employees and having trouble growing beyond that. I have no studies to back this up for you, but the maximum size of a company under a central decision maker seems to be in the 20-30 employee mark.

The issue here is the founder. Once they worked out how to do everything they then try to keep doing it. Sooner or later you need to start trusting your people and managers to do their job.

You can use part-timers to help out. Hire an accountant one day a week. Hire an experienced HR person on a 2-3 days a month basis. Put on salespeople on a commission basis. Have IT support on a retainer.

Give yourself a break and help your company live up to its potential and stop trying to do it all yourself.