Masterclass: How to go from founder to CEO (without imploding)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, today we're talking about something that is the brutal truth about startups, which is that your business' success is completely dependent on your growth as a CEO. And so we're talking about from starting a company to getting to that first one to three million in revenue, what you need to be doing as a CEO. And then Sam was sharing, you know, basically examples of after three million and scaling up from three to the tens of millions to get to 100 million in revenue, how you have to make this brain shift and what do you got to do as a CEO. Mistakes we've made, stuff that works for us, tactics, techniques, specific frameworks we're using. It's all in here.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:43)
I was writing like journaling this morning. Can I tell you what I was writing about and tell me if you've ever experienced this way?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:48)
Yeah, but you have to start with Dear Diary.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:50)
So I was realizing, and tell me if you ever had this realization, that my company's growth is limited by my personal growth. My company can only grow as fast as I can grow as a leader. Have you ever experienced that?

**SPEAKER_1** (1:02)
Yeah, I have a similar belief, which is like the bottleneck of any business is the psychology of the founder. That's kind of the way I've always said it. So it's not necessarily my growth, but like my psychology is the limiting factor.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:14)
Yeah, your business is basically a mirror of your strengths and weaknesses. And here's what happens is a lot of people, they don't realize that. I haven't realized it until recently because the early stages of a business, and I don't know where that would be. Some number between the huge number of one and 20 million in revenue. Honestly, it probably starts at three million in revenue where you're out of the brute force stage. And it depends on your business, but something like a million a year in profit maybe, where you're out of the brute force stage. And what happens next is actually the hard part. The hard part is like, how do you scale as a leader? Because your job then becomes leading people, not actually doing. And so I was thinking of like, what, where that shift is. And the big shift or like not the shift, but what like tactics or strategy needs to change. And I was trying to list out what those were. And let me explain if you agree with each of these. So the first one is abdicating versus delegating. So let me walk you through a scenario. Tell me if you've done this exact same thing. I hire someone or I get a freelancer and I sit down, I go, so, and they sit next to me on a chair and I'm looking at them and I go, all right, so here's what I do. I do this, this, this, and this. All right, great. There you go. Talk to me later and let me know how you've made this better. Have you done that?

**SPEAKER_1** (2:28)
Yeah, yeah. You got this, right? Yeah, yeah, I got this. Cool. Your problem, not mine. I'm mentally relieved of duties.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:36)
And you say, all right, next week, how did you improve it? Why aren't the numbers going up? It's been a month, man. Why aren't the numbers going up? What the hell? I showed you how to do this. Like that conversation, I have had so many times in my life and I'm having to break it. I cannot do that anymore. And so the difference between the bottleneck that I'm having to grow is abdicating versus delegating. That's the huge thing. And the second one is having hard conversations.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:01)
By the way, can you just play it back of what is the good version of it? So the abdicating is basically you take the ball, you put it in somebody else's plate, you mentally relieve yourself of duty and then the sort of like in your mind, what, the blame of potential failure or issues lies with them. What is the, give me the definition of abdicate there. What's the problem with abdicate?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:28)
Well, let me tell you the other way around. Let me tell you what the solution is, which is proper delegation. And so how do you properly delegate? You do, I actually have it written down there right here, this framework that I've been trying to learn, which is what, how, when and motivation. And so what that basically means is training. So you explain what you expect of someone, you show them how to do it by training them, and then you give them very specific deadlines, and then you have scheduled follow ups, and sometimes it takes months to properly train people. So for a really easy example is with salespeople. So how do you train a salesperson? You watch their sales calls, and you sit down with them for two hours every single week, and you say, instead of saying this, try this next time, and let's see what happens. Or you said this, oftentimes that doesn't get the solution or the answer you want because of X, Y, and Z, do this instead. And here's a script I want you to follow. And then after you do that for three or four months, and then you're going to start, they're going to start learning to be better than you. And they're like, hey, by the way, you didn't think about this. I actually went this way this time, and here's the better result that I got. So the opposite of abdicating is properly delegating, which includes training and communicating with clarity, which expectations.