Matt Ryder argues that many founders misunderstand leverage, equating it with outsourcing tasks they dislike (notably sales). He warns that founders should not parachute out of vital roles—especially sales—because founders often perform those roles best initially; instead, they should gradually reduce involvement (e.g., incrementally increasing delegate share of calls) and hire carefully.
Most founders confuse leverage with like outsourcing things that you just don't like doing because you can't be fuck doing them. Like, I used to run a sales agency and people would try and outsource their sales simply because they hated it. Now like one of the last things you should outsource is your sales because it's one, it's vital to the business, but two, no one is going to do it better than the founder for a good chunk of time. Work more, it's fine, and then slowly over time replace yourself in that role, but like titrate it for fuck's sake. The amount of people that I've seen hire two sort of 18 year old idiots who have never sold anything and they go, oh, finally I've got a sales team. And then you just kind of hand this giant responsibility off and then you're shocked when it totally shits to bed in like a month's time. It's like, yeah mate, like maybe put them on 20% of the sales calls and then 30 and then like do it in a way that's not retarded and it'll probably be okay, but it's just not that difficult. So they're just trying to like, they've watched too many like four hour work week things and when in reality they should just like do the jobs that they hate and then like slowly remove themselves from it instead of just like parachuting out like a fucking hero.
