Founders, focus on what you do best!
Dear Early-Stage Founders,
If you say “YES” to any of these questions, you’re likely spending too much time as firefighter-in-chief—and not enough time as CEO and visionary:
Do you review resumes, schedule interviews, or screen candidates for non-executive roles?
Are you writing marketing assets (one-pagers, social posts, case studies) yourself?
Are you involved in vendor selection or negotiating contracts for accounting software, health insurance, or CRM platforms?
Here’s the hard truth: Startup founders spend 30–40% of their week on admin, ops, or HR tasks that don’t drive revenue.
One survey found 36% of an entrepreneur’s time is spent on these activities (Startup Magazine, Aura Startup Partners).
Another study says founders spend 40% of their working hours on non-revenue roles like HR and payroll (Embroker).
And finally, First Round Review shared a piece by Levels founder, Sam Corcos, who tracked 18,000 hours of his time over five years and found that only 5% went to strategic thinking.
Founders, it’s not lost on me that you lean into the work because you care! However, as many serial entrepreneurs know it leads to unintended errors:
You burn time and capital learning things like QuickBooks or employee benefits from scratch, in order to complete tasks that are foreign to you.
You’re so deep in the minutia that you miss signals, ignore red flags and resist pivoting.
You scramble through hiring without thinking about org design, titles or stage-appropriate talent that can scale with the business for the next 18-ish months.
You micromanage decisions, inadvertently creating bottlenecks that slow the business down.
Checking boxes on a 10-page to-do list might feel productive, but these silent mistakes stall revenue, sabotage velocity, and drain your bandwidth. Now consider how you’d feel if you tanked your company because you over-indexed on administrative, operational and unfamiliar tasks, sacrificing time for product strategy, keynote speeches and woo-ing pro VP’s of Sales?
Perhaps this is a better way to frame it: Disciplines like Marketing, HR, and Finance are university degrees and careers for a reason—subject matter expertise matters. If you wouldn’t ask an Account Executive to handle a messy employee relations issue or a Product Marketer to chase down an overdue bill for an office move, why on earth are you taking on those responsibilities in your own startups when your personal livelihood is on the line?
The fix? Focus on what you and only you can do like owning and evangelizing company vision, founder-led sales and raising funds, and let experts do the work that falls in their wheelhouse, the right way, the first time.
If you’re concerned about handing over the reins, I’d recommend “throwing money” at one large-scale issue (that is not in your toolbox from an experience perspective) purely as an experiment. This means trusting those who have been there/done that and letting go of the feeling that you’ll eventually have to clean up all of their work.
Once you see a subject matter expert (and operator) solve a meaty Marketing, HR or Finance problem (assuming your experience is in a discipline like Product or Engineering), you’ll be able to quantify just how much time you’ve been spending on, well, the wrong things. Two words: Opportunity Cost.
To preserve time and capital in the early days, resist the urge to run a full recruiting process for a full time hire, instead lean on plug-n-play resources like expert operators-turned-startup consultants and fractional employees who bring:
Fresh, objective diagnosis—They see patterns you can’t see from the inside.
Operational discipline — They deploy processes, KPIs, and structure fast.
Strategic delegation — They free you up to do what only a CEO can: lead vision, close critical deals, and engage investors.
TL;DR: If you’re sinking time into email chains, GTM handoffs or junior employee hiring decisions instead of steering the ship, let me be the first to say (and many serial entrepreneurs will echo this) you’re doing it wrong!
Smart founders don’t attempt to do it all on their own, they bring in experts so they can reclaim precious CEO time.
To wrap this up, I’d ask you: What is your biggest struggle as a startup founder when it comes to wearing all of the hats? What can you delegate and what can you (and only you) execute on as Founder and CEO?
Are you still pulling double duty six months later?
Maybe it’s time to bring in a fresh perspective.
