This is my last article of the year before we go on break. Not because I’m tired of writing, but because even operators need to step back and recharge. If not, you just keep burning.
As you’re reflecting on the year—your wins, what didn’t go well—there’s something you might not realize. If your company is growing the right way, your mindset needs to change with it.
The shift is from “I’m the founder doing everything, I’m in all the conversations” to “Am I building my people? Am I leveraging them to do their best work? Am I the blocker? Am I the problem?”
I see this with founders across all kinds of businesses. As companies scale, the CEO or founder’s role stays static because they’re holding on to it. They don’t want to lose the value they add, or they think the value has to look a certain way.
People: Succession Starts With You
As your company grows, you need someone who can step into your current responsibilities. Not your CEO role—your current responsibilities. The ones consuming your calendar today.
Without that, you can’t level up to what the business needs next. You stay stuck executing while strategic problems go unsolved.
Here’s what founders tell themselves:
- “If I’m not in the weeds, I’m not adding value.”
- “Nobody can do this as well as I can” (often true, but irrelevant)
- “My team needs me to make decisions quickly.”
- “I’ll delegate when things are more stable” (they never are)
The reality: you can’t scale yourself. Every responsibility that requires your personal involvement is a ceiling on your business. The mindset shift is recognizing that your value isn’t in doing everything—it’s in building the people and systems that do everything without you.
The psychologically hardest part? Watching someone do your job 80% as well as you did it, and choosing not to intervene. That 20% gap feels massive. But 80% done by someone else scales infinitely. 100% done by only you caps your growth.
Your direct reports need the same thing. If your Head of Sales doesn’t have someone ready to run day-to-day team operations, they can’t focus on enterprise strategy. If your engineering lead can’t step away from code reviews, they can’t architect the platform. If your operations person is stuck in daily execution, they can’t design systems for 2x scale.
Succession planning isn’t optional at any level. It’s how your entire organization stays ahead of growth instead of drowning in it.
Are you giving your team stretch goals? Creating opportunities to fail and learn? Investing in coaching? Giving them visibility to top leadership so executives know who’s ready for promotion?
This is how you retain people and build capacity for what’s next.
Try This Week: Identify one decision you made three times this week. Document your decision framework. Next time that decision comes up, give it to someone else with the framework. Resist the urge to take it back.
Process: Replace Yourself Systematically
Are you finding ways to let go? Give people more decision-making power? Are your processes making you the blocker?
Most founders document the wrong things. They write SOPs for tasks nobody does twice. They create elaborate playbooks nobody reads. They build processes that require their input at every step.
What actually works: building decision frameworks so others can move without you.
Find Your Bottlenecks First
Before you can replace yourself, you need to know where you’re stuck. Two diagnostics reveal this fast:
The Replacement Test – For every role you currently fill—yes, you fill multiple roles—ask: Could someone step into this with 2 weeks’ notice? What would they need to know? What decisions would they struggle with?
The Travel Audit – Walk through what broke during your last absence. What decisions got stuck waiting for you? What processes assumed your availability? What conversations couldn’t happen without you?
The gaps in your answers show you exactly where to build frameworks.
Decision Frameworks Over Decision-Making
Don’t make every decision. Build frameworks so others can make them.
Example from my work:
Bad: “Run every client pricing decision by me.”
Good: “For deals under $50K, use standard pricing. For $50K-$100K, offer up to 15% discount based on deal size and strategic value. For $100K+, involve me.”
The framework lets your team move fast. You’re still involved in what matters. You’re not in every conversation.
Build escalation paths into your frameworks. Your team needs to know: at what point do they decide, and at what point do they bring it to you? Decision trees make this explicit—if X, then Y; if Z, then escalate.
This creates clarity AND trains your team to assess situations independently instead of defaulting to you every time.
Try This Week: Pick one recurring decision you make. Document the framework: which factors matter, which thresholds trigger different actions, which edge cases require escalation. Give it to someone else and watch what happens.
Data: Your Calendar Tells the Truth
Your calendar is the single source of truth for where your time actually goes. Not where you think it goes. Not where you wish it went. Where it actually goes.
Most founders lie to themselves about this. They say they’re focused on strategy, but their calendar shows 30 hours of execution work. They say they’ve delegated, but every meeting still requires their input.
Here’s the mindset shift: if you’re irreplaceable in day-to-day operations, you’ve built a job, not a business. Your calendar should prove you’re becoming less necessary to execution, not more embedded in it.
Audit your last two weeks:
Decision velocity when you’re absent – Block out a full day. Don’t check Slack. Don’t answer emails. What slowed down? What stopped entirely? If critical workflows can’t run without you for eight hours, you haven’t built systems; you’ve made yourself the system.
Time allocation by stage – Where did your time actually go? At pre-seed, you’re deep in execution because you have to be. At seed, you should be building frameworks and enabling others. At Series A and beyond, most of your time should be vision, key relationships, and existential decisions.
If you’re at Series A and your calendar looks like a pre-seed founder’s, you’re operating below your role.
Team capability without you – How many meetings happened without you in the room? How many decisions got made without your input? How many problems got solved before they reached you?
If the answer is “not many,” your team isn’t growing. They’re waiting.
Try This Week: Review your calendar from the last two weeks. Identify one recurring meeting or task that’s pure execution work. Delegate it to someone on your team this week, even if they’ll do it at 80% of your quality.
Tonio’s Corner: The Continuous Shift
As leaders, we’re responsible for ensuring our people evolve with the business. But here’s what most founders miss: we have to evolve, too.
The founder who’s in every customer conversation can’t see market trends. The founder who approves every expense can’t think about capital strategy. The founder who writes every line of code can’t architect the platform.
Letting go creates the space you need to see what’s coming next.
Here’s what I’ve watched founders struggle with: they conflate their value with their activity. Being in every meeting. Reviewing every deck. Approving every hire.
But your value isn’t in doing everything. It’s in setting the vision. Making the final call on existential decisions. Representing the company to investors and key partners. Building the culture that attracts and retains the best people.
Everything else? Someone else should be doing it. Not because you can’t, but because you’re too expensive to.
The shift is from proving your value through execution to proving your value through the execution of others. It’s uncomfortable. It feels like losing your identity. But it’s the only way to build something bigger than yourself.
The question isn’t whether you’re still valuable when you’re not doing everything. The question is: are you brave enough to prove your value differently?
Not by doing more. By enabling others to do what they do best.
That’s not stepping back. That’s scaling up.