Where to Invest Your Time

Advice for CEOs almost always says the same things: work on the business, not in the business. Hire good people and let them do their job. Your company has to work without you. Focus on vision, talent and cash, and delegate the rest.

That advice is for managers running an established company. If you're building a company, or leading your existing company through a major transformation or rapid growth, it doesn't apply. Then there are several areas where your time makes the difference, and you have to use that leverage.

When you're building a company, you hear the same advice again and again: let your people do their job and don't get so deep into the details.

Your team finds it uncomfortable when you're breathing down their necks and expecting the highest standards. Friends and family want less stress for you and mean well. The advice is confirmed by business students who learn about delegation at university, by lecturers, and by textbooks from "experts" who have never done it themselves.

Don't let that unsettle you. How successful your company becomes depends on the standards you set and the decisions you make, especially in difficult situations. For both, the details are decisive.

If you read the biographies of the great entrepreneurs, revolutionaries and leaders in history, one thing becomes unmistakably clear: they were deep in the details, practically obsessed with them.

In 2024, Paul Graham gave this tension a name with his essay "Founder Mode", describing what many founders had long felt from their own experience.

Being deep in the details on what matters is the foundation for the four tasks that follow. If you don't know the details, you can't weigh priorities properly, you make the wrong decisions, you can't contribute at the front line, you don't notice where standards are being undermined, and you can't truly convince anyone.

In my first years as a founder, I kept bringing chaos into our organization with new ideas and projects. On their own, the ideas were good, but in the context of our company they mostly meant a loss of focus. I see this mistake in startups again and again: new products before the first product works, new markets before the first market has really been won.

Your drive to grow and get bigger is important, and it pushes you forward. But it also makes you spread yourself too thin, want too much and achieve less in the end. This takes iron discipline, including with yourself. Your first task is clarity: where does your company want to go, and which few priorities will get it there?

Competing forces are at work everywhere. Whoever concentrates more resources on a goal than the competition will usually be more successful there and win. If your resources are spread across too many goals, you don't pursue any of them with real force, and you're either too slow or fail altogether. That's why your organization has to be as focused as possible, on a few goals, priorities and bottlenecks, and push through them with total consistency.

People follow people. If strategy and priorities come from just anyone in the company, there's little chance that everyone will follow them as one and consistently put everything else aside. Only when the direction comes from you, crystal clear, do priorities, resources, time and money truly align with it, and the whole company works with full focus in the same direction.

Your third task is to convince. At the critical points, the success of your company depends on you winning people over to your path.

The decisive moments come in difficult situations. The investor is interested but wants to see the next numbers first. The big customer is undecided, because the competition has been established for longer. The candidate you really want is happy in their job and has no reason to switch. Your team thinks the new goal is out of reach, and your shareholders shy away from the risk of the new strategy.

This is exactly where maximum persuasiveness is needed, and only you have it. Your head of sales can manage accounts and your HR team can run hiring processes, but these decisive conversations are best led by you as the founder.

Steve Jobs's colleagues called it his reality distortion field: the ability to convince others of a vision so strongly that the seemingly impossible starts to look plausible. As a founder, you have this field. You brought the idea into the world and you have the most to lose, and the people across the table feel exactly that. No hired manager can convey that conviction in the same way.

In every team, many requirements, standards and interests pull against each other. The timeline is tight, money is short, and at the same time the goals and the expectations for quality are high. Sooner or later, the team ends up with a compromise. Everyone only sees their own area, their own deadlines and their own pressure, and from that perspective the compromise seems reasonable.

The same applies here as with company culture: you get what you tolerate. If you tolerate lower standards, your team reconciles conflicting requirements the easiest way, by lowering the requirements. Over time, these compromises add up and make your team, your products, your sales and ultimately your entire company worse, and therefore less successful.

Meeting conflicting requirements anyway is maddening. It feels like an impossible, unfair task. That's exactly why you have to get the best out of your team, and you can only do that if you're uncompromising and accept nothing less than these high standards. Uncompromising also means: anyone who works against the standards has to leave the team.

Enforcing standards doesn't require raising your voice. When a proposal falls below your standard, hand it back with one clear sentence: "This isn't at the level we need yet. The analysis of the alternatives is missing. Send me a new version by Thursday." What matters is that you do this every time. If you only do it sometimes, your team learns that the standard is negotiable.

Only you can do this, because everyone else on the team has good reasons for the compromise: their own deadline, the tight budget, harmony with colleagues. You're the only one who sees the whole picture, carries the final responsibility and ultimately has to live with the consequences of every compromise. And only you have the authority to say no to every area at once and to follow through with consequences. Your team takes its cue from what you accept. That's why only you can set this standard and hold it.

In the 1970s, Wolfgang Mewes defined the bottleneck-focused strategy (Engpasskonzentrierte Strategie, EKS): a company moves forward fastest when you direct your energy at the factor that currently limits it most.

In every phase, there are only a few topics that the success of the company currently depends on, such as a product that doesn't yet carry the business, or a funding round. You throw everything you have at these topics: your time, your best people, your money and your attention down to the smallest detail. You hit them with full force, day after day, until the bottleneck breaks. Brute force is the uncompromising version of this. As soon as one bottleneck breaks, the next one appears, and what is the product today may be recruiting six months from now.

In practice, this means: always be clear about which topic is your bottleneck right now. Align all priorities with it. Give this bottleneck as much of your time as you can. Tell your team exactly what this means for how you work together: "Until the new product version ships, it takes priority over everything else for me. Here, I want to see every decision before it's made. For everything else, you decide and inform me afterwards."

In small teams, you're operationally in the middle of it, and together you push the topic forward as effectively as possible. In larger teams, you have to put your finger on the sore spot: have everyone involved in the bottleneck report to you every day on what has moved forward since yesterday. On the company's biggest bottleneck, every person involved has to show substantial progress every 24 hours. If that's not the case, something is going badly wrong, and you have to step in immediately: remove blockers, add resources or replace people.