How to Scale Yourself as a Founder

The last article covered the five areas where your time as a founder pays off most: you go deep into the details on what matters, create clarity on strategy and priorities, win over the people who matter, set high standards, and personally lead the attack on the bottleneck.

Because of your role and history as the founder, you are by far the best-suited person in the company for these areas. The more time you invest there, the faster your company moves forward.

But your day only has 24 hours, and with every new employee, every customer and every project, everything else grows too. Meetings, alignment, approvals and emails pile up until they fill your week and you become the bottleneck yourself. Scaling yourself as a CEO therefore means doing more of the five levers and less of everything else.

Classic delegation only helps to a point. If you hand off entire areas and only steer through your direct reports, you end up in manager mode and lose exactly the closeness to the details that makes you strong. What you need is leverage: people who extend your presence without watering down your standards.

The answer is a small team that works directly for you and makes you bigger, without adding another layer of hierarchy. The people in it work to your standards, on your priorities and with your context. They push your topics forward and carry your judgment to places where you can't be right now. That way you stay close to the details, even though you can't be everywhere at once. Virgílio Bento calls this the "CEO team".

For a brute-force attack on the company's biggest bottleneck, you need to increase the capacity of the team at the bottleneck. The CEO team can step in as a flexible resource exactly there and reinforce that team, without you having to drain another area. When the bottleneck breaks, it moves on to the next one. In the same way, it fills the gap when a leader is missing after someone leaves. That also makes it easier for you to part ways with a weak leader.

Roles in the CEO team are a springboard into the company. The people in it work closely with you and get intensive feedback and coaching all the time. They see the company's hardest problems and learn more in a short time than anywhere else. After a few years, the best move into operational leadership roles, and you bring in new talent. That makes the CEO team your most important talent pipeline.

The founder associate is a generalist early in their career, often with a few years in consulting or at a fast-growing startup. They work directly with you on the topics that matter right now: fundraising, sales, product prioritization, recruiting and special projects.

Their value is throughput. The FA is your Swiss army knife: you throw them at new problems, and they solve them for you. They push forward projects that would otherwise fall between departments, build analyses and prepare your decisions. That way, the groundwork no longer lands on your desk. A good FA duplicates you to some extent. Because they aren't tied to any one area, the FA is the resource in the CEO team you can use to reinforce bottlenecks fastest and best.

The FA is especially valuable for anything new in the company. When you build a new department, a new process, a new location or a new product line, or start a new partnership, there's no clear ownership in the teams yet. Topics like these land almost automatically with you as the CEO, and you immediately become the bottleneck. The FA drives these projects forward until they have a clear home in the company.

You need an FA when you become the bottleneck for operational work, especially for new projects, and your time isn't enough to get it all done. Plan the role for one to two years. After that, a good FA moves into an operational leadership role, and you hire the next one.

Dan Ciampa made the chief of staff known in the business world with his article "The Case for a Chief of Staff". The core task: making sure your time is used well, information reaches you in time, and things get followed up without you having to check yourself.

The difference from the FA is where they work. The FA works operationally for you; the CoS works through your leadership team. They hold the priorities across all areas, organize the leadership rhythm, follow up and act on your behalf. That way, they carry your judgment to places where you can't be yourself right now. It lets you delegate better, because you know the CoS stays on it.

You need a CoS when decisions slow down because information doesn't flow, when you spend too much time on back-and-forth and follow-ups, or when your leadership team no longer works on the same priorities without you. In my view, the role makes sense as a hybrid from around 20 employees, for example a CoS who also takes on FA tasks. As a standalone role, it tends to pay off from 50 to 100 employees.

I have mixed feelings about the executive assistant. In many companies, I see EAs who mainly increase the entrepreneur's comfort but hardly increase the company's productivity. In my view, that's simply a waste of resources.

In the classic picture, the EA sits in many meetings, takes notes and writes up minutes. That makes no sense at all. With a bit of routine, everyone in a meeting can take their own notes and still focus fully on the meeting. With today's AI tools, note-taking is obsolete anyway. The same goes for scheduling: in the time it takes you to write the message to your EA, you could have scheduled the meeting yourself with today's tools. Pre-sorting the inbox brings hardly any ROI either: how long does it really take to archive 20 obviously irrelevant emails?

The role is changing radically anyway. AI tools already handle large parts of calendar coordination, email triage and research today. An EA who only writes minutes and works through simple tasks is simply redundant.

In my view, an EA is worth it in three situations:

1. You have many external appointments, several days a week, that need to be coordinated personally and can't easily be planned with internal tools, and you travel a lot. Then hotels, flights and dinners need to be organized.
2. Processes run through you that an EA can take over completely on their own, without you having to review every result, for example stakeholder management.
3. Your EA also has the qualities of an FA, and you can deploy them flexibly on whatever problem or bottleneck is current.

Because classic EA tasks are being replaced by AI, the crucial point is that your EA can truly work on their own. That only works with a real high performer.