🔀 Delegating your fear

This week in The Pivot: founders using delegation to avoid the things they fear, like hiring a sales rep before you know what sells.

Hey friends 👋

Every Monday in The Pivot, we share one anti-pattern we’re seeing from founders in the Traction Lab ecosystem, and the quick redirect that makes all the difference—in just 250 words.

Here’s this week’s:

The anti-pattern: hiring your way out of discomfort.

Instead of building conviction through direct experience, you hire an employee to the dirty work.

We’re seeing founders say “sales isn’t my strength” and immediately hire a head of sales, or “I’m not technical” so they bring on engineers to handle all product decisions while they “focus on strategy and fundraising”…whatever that means.

The pattern is the same every time: something feels scary or outside their comfort zone, they delegate it to someone else before they’ve done it themselves enough times to know what “good” looks like, and it burns up like the Hindenburg.

They’ve confused “not naturally good at” with “shouldn’t learn.”

The fix: founder-only → founder-led → founder-less.

Do the scary thing yourself until you have a repeatable, documented process—then and only then can you delegate it.

Close your first 20-40 sales yourself. Build your first MVP or sit next to your developer for every decision. Handle customer support until you can write the playbook.

You’re not hiring a salesperson to take sales off your plate—you’re hiring them to scale a motion you’ve already proven works.

If you can’t describe exactly what success looks like and how to get there, you’re not ready to delegate it.

Start doing everything yourselves (founder only), and then move to light delegation (founder-led), and then to full delegation (founder-less).

The Tool: the 40-Before-Delegation rule.

Don’t hire someone to own a critical function (sales, product, customer success) until you’ve personally executed it successfully at least 40 times and can document the exact process.

If you can’t write the job description with specific success metrics and a playbook, you’re too early.

Never delegate what you can’t repeat.

Until next week,

—jdm

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