Less than ten percent of founders feel confident their company could run for a month without them, which means most of us have built organizations that depend on our constant presence.
Still, if you can’t step away, do you really own a business?
A sustainable business, like a sound building, is only as strong as the structure underneath it. We celebrate things like “sleeping on the factory floor for five years,” as Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya once did. But without realizing it, we bake fragility into the very core of our business.
Imagine a parent who never teaches their child to do anything alone; that child will never realize their potential. When our presence is a key ingredient of our business’s success, we have done the same thing.
Sustainability has nothing to do with endurance. Endurance is what keeps you running, but architecture is what keeps you standing. A parent cannot always be there for their child, as a founder cannot always be there for their business. It requires planning, trust, collaboration, and a lot of communication. Eventually, every founder burns out and needs a break.
So how can we break the cycle in advance so that when the day comes, we can feel good about taking our well deserved break?
This is something my co-founder and I have spent a lot of time thinking about. When my co-founder Casey began to phase out of her role as President late last year, I felt equal parts admiration and panic. She still sits on our board but she is no longer in our stand-ups, debating our OKRs, or handling performance reviews. This was a big change for every member of our small team, and a transition that can easily destabilize a small team if not handled well. It also gave us a very good chance to examine exactly how we wanted things to work.
We’d been fighting back to back like Jedi for 11 years at that point. We each had very full plates and very full calendars. I was also only a few months into our move to Spain. Absorbing her responsibilities was impossible. I needed to subtract, not add.
To see what truly mattered, we each built a simple spreadsheet. In it, we listed each responsibility and its duty within broad categories (e.g., board and investors, finance, product, etc.). From there, we marked each item with one of the following:
This is an exercise I’ve recommended countless times. It’s simple and you walk away with a clear plan for who will own what across your organization. It’s worth having everyone in your business do this once a year.
You may be relieved by how much simply isn’t necessary. You’re also likely to be impressed with how many things you can delegate. Normal delegation means tasks that most people on your team could own. Specialized delegation means what it sounds like. There may be only one or two people who could own the task, it may require a decent amount of training, or confidential information. It often feels risky to hand off what’s most personal, yet that is where real sustainability begins.
This was the blueprint that strengthened our structure. When we shared the news and our plans with the team, we encouraged others to make the same list. It helped us find peace in a change that was still scary for all of us.
The transition was hard, and still is. I still really miss having Casey in the day-to-day with me. But I also know it was the right thing for her. I’m confident we handled it well.
The power of a simple spreadsheet is that it allows for:
Each of these qualities is less about efficiency and more about trust. They are the quiet infrastructure of any business built to last and what allows you to shift from doing to designing how things get done. This is what allows you to build a business you own rather than one that owns you.
The moment you start designing how work gets done instead of doing it all yourself, you begin to own your business in a new way.
This is the sort of design that allowed my family to move to Spain and it’s what allowed my co-founder to make an important personal shift. And, most importantly, what allows our team the transparency and clarity to feel true ownership of their role in our success. It also allows them the comfort of taking time off without feeling that deep panic that everything will fall apart in their absence.
Yes, the spreadsheet is simple. Here’s a blank version if you’d like to make your own.
The surprise, every time, is how much can be removed from our plates once we stop assuming we have to carry it all ourselves.