I laughed a little when I got to the “Me Incorporated” idea in How to Hire A-Players because I can absolutely see myself doing this. If I started Mindful Money tomorrow, there are a lot of things I would probably try to handle myself. Finance, forecasting, budgeting, reporting, some content, administration, strategy, and probably whatever random issue came up that day. At the very beginning, that might actually be the right approach. There is no reason to hire ten people before the business has enough work or revenue to support them.
The problem is when doing everything yourself stops being a temporary startup reality and becomes the way the company operates. At that point, the founder becomes the bottleneck. I have seen smaller versions of this in the corporate world. Someone is really good at their job, gets promoted into management, and continues doing a huge amount of the work themselves. Sometimes it is faster. Sometimes they do not trust someone else to do it correctly. Sometimes they simply enjoy doing the work more than managing it.
Eventually they have a team, but the team still depends on them for almost everything. That is what I would want to avoid with Mindful Money. My original organizational chart has 25 positions, but I obviously would not start there. I would add people gradually as there was enough work to justify them. More importantly, when I did hire someone, I would need to actually give that person ownership of something. Hiring a Financial Coach and then insisting on controlling every customer interaction would not accomplish much. Hiring someone to lead marketing and then rewriting everything they produce would defeat the purpose of hiring someone who knows marketing better than I do.
I think that would probably be one of the harder adjustments for me personally. I like understanding the details and knowing why something works. But there is a point where being involved in every detail stops being a strength. A business that can only function when the founder touches everything is not really a scalable business. It is one very busy person surrounded by employees.
Reference
Herrenkohl, E. (2010). How to Hire A-Players: Finding the Top People for Your Team—Even If You Don’t Have a Recruiting Department. John Wiley & Sons.