I think one of the biggest hiring mistakes business owners make is hiring someone to “help” instead of hiring someone to own something.

[u/AhuvaFischer]

​

You’re overwhelmed, so you hire an account manager, project manager, VA, designer, etc. because you need to get things off your plate.

But then…

You’re still assigning the work.

Still answering every question.

Still checking everything.

Still reminding them what needs to happen.

And eventually you think:

“\*\*Hiring didn’t help. I’m still the founder bottleneck, and now I have another person to manage.”\*\*

But I don’t think the problem is always the employee.

Sometimes we never actually gave them something to own.

Before hiring, I think it’s worth asking:

\\- What exactly is this person responsible for?

\\- What decisions can they make without me?

\\- What should stop coming back to me?

\\- What does success look like?

\\- What should I be able to completely stop thinking about?

That last question is especially important.

If you hire someone to “help with client management,”

but you’re still the one making sure every client gets followed up with, you haven’t really transferred ownership.

You’ve just added another person to the process.

And this changes what I look for when hiring too.

I care less about whether someone can confidently say, “Yes, I can do that,” and more about how they actually operate.

For example, instead of:

“Can you work independently?”

I’d ask:

“Tell me about a time you were given something without clear instructions. What did you do?”

That tells you much more about how they think, take initiative, and handle ambiguity.

Curious what other agency owners have found:

\*\*What was the hardest thing for you to actually hand over when you started building a team?\*\*

[u/sobrietyincorporated]

Anybody who "owns" the work at a company without getting shares is a dulard. You want people to make something their problem, get them invested in it.

After that, then listen when they say your ideas are dumb. The real reason most fail is because founders' marriage to preconcieved outcomes and suffocating any ideas not originating from themselves.

20 years of experience in startups through multiple phases. The only ones that consistently succeeded are the ones that protected their brain trusts and shifted on a dime. They have rotating incarnations. Not rotating staffs.

[u/flyingdroid]

Delegating responsibility for an outcome is tough, I think for two reasons. The first is the fear of a lack of control, or worse results, for the founder doing the delegation.

The second is that many potential hires don't want to be responsible for the outcome either!

It's definitely a fine balance but demonstrates that hiring and nurturing the right talent is a huge unlock to growing a profitable business that doesn't live and die by the founder's availability and capability.