Delegation is the advice every founder gets too early. Let go, hire fast, get out of the weeds, they say, as if operational detail is a maturity test you’re supposed to fail on purpose. I’ve never bought that sequence, and running three companies at once has only confirmed why.
I recently spoke with USA News about the actual order operations should happen in, and why understanding has to come before you hand anything off.
The core idea is simple, but is constantly skipped. I don’t need to be the best engineer or the best marketer on any of my teams. What I need is to understand the logic behind the systems well enough to connect the dots across all of them. That’s what lets me lead from ground truth rather than guess.
One habit I won’t give up: I personally review and send every payroll payment across my companies every Monday. It’s a small ritual, but it keeps me connected to the people and the cash flow at the same time, and it’s the kind of unglamorous task that keeps a founder honest about what’s actually happening in the business. I’ve written before about why weekly payroll is one of the most underrated retention tools in tech, and this is the other half of that same habit. Understanding never scales itself. You have to keep touching the parts that matter, even after you’ve hired people to run them.
The cost of skipping this shows up later, and it’s expensive. A founder who can’t evaluate the work can only evaluate the worker’s confidence, and confidence is a terrible proxy for competence. That gap is where vendor relationships quietly go bad, and where hiring decisions are made on hope rather than knowledge.
That last part matters more than people think. When you actually understand how a function works, you can tell the difference between a hire who ships outcomes and one who just ships vocabulary. That’s the whole philosophy behind how we build teams at Pabs Marketing: custom, lean, and matched to the business model, not copied from someone else’s org chart.
Before any of this, I read greens for a living as a competitive golfer. A caddie can hand you the line, the wind, and the number, and a good player listens to all of it. But the player still owns the read, because the player answers for the shot. It’s the same discipline advantage I’ve talked about before, just applied off the course rather than on it. That’s the arrangement I’ve tried to build into every company I run.
Read the full breakdown on USA News.
Founders can delegate almost everything except the responsibility to understand.
