How I leveraged my time to 4:1 with entrepreneurial assistants
In startups the unexpected is probably the only constant. There are always problems to be solved. And when you’ve solved the last problem — trust me — the next one will be just around the corner.
The limit to your company’s growth is: you
What limits your company is always either your skills or your mindset. In the beginning you solve the problems alone and learn along the way to obtain new skills to solve further problems. Then, at some point, you hire the first employees and start building an organisation. Usually employees are hired in specific functions. You need someone to manage the books and hire a bookkeeper. You want to grow so you hire a marketing person. Those people will work in their functions and usually solve the easy problems that you as an entrepreneur don’t have to solve yourself.
2 kinds of problems
That means that you as an entrepreneur are left with 2 kinds of problems:
1) The hard ones within the functions that your employees can’t solve by themselves (for example conversion rates of an important marketing campaign go down and your employee can’t figure it out for weeks).
2) New ones outside the functions in which you already have people (for example you need a new office but don’t have an office manager yet, so you have to deal with it yourself).
The firefighting begins
When you scale the organisation both kinds of problems will happen exponentially and require lots of attention. You will feel like a firefighter. There will be new fires to put out every day and the fires tend to get bigger. You hear clever advice like “an entrepreneur should work on the company, not in the company” and wonder how the hell this could be possible with all the fires to fight each day.
This mode can go on forever, limit the growth of the company and kill the entire fun/excitement of a startup. It will test your resistant to stress and can be pretty harmful on founding teams, especially when the stress-resistance is different among the founders.
One solution: Hire entrepreneurial assistants
But there is hope. One solution I have found and can recommend to anyone is to hire entrepreneurial assistants. They could be interns, working students or full time employees that don’t work within a specific function. They report directly to the founders and can be used to solve problems within the organisation. I see them as hired firefighters that can put out burning buildings, rescue the kitty from the tree or build a wall to prevent future fires.
Using leverage
What those people do is give you leverage. As an entrepreneur you have something like 50–80h per week to work on stuff. When you hire assistants you basically increase your bandwidth. For example when you need to move offices and manage the process yourself it would maybe take 50h (research, visits, selection, negotiations, contracting etc.). When an assistant takes care of the legwork you can reduce the time you put in personally to maybe 10h (selection & negotiations) and the assitant will put in the other 40h. This means you work with a leverage of 1:4 meaning for each hour you put in someone else will put in 4h and the result will roughly be the same.
The most productive times I had as an entrepreneur where the times where I either had a very good management team in place that could handle 95% of the problems autonomously (for me this happened when we crossed 250 people on the company) or when I had assistants to leverage me. Back then I didn’t think very strategically about the assistants and the leverage. We just happened to hire some clever people that didn’t work within specific functions (btw. some of them went on and founded their own companies later). But when I reflect about the times the assistant structure was one of the biggest drivers of value because it freed up my time to actually work on the company and (at least partially) got me out of firefighting.
What to look for in am entrepreneurial assistant
I think there are several traits that such assistants should have.
- Extreme curiosity and the urge to learn and grow (because they will work on new, unexplored things constantly)
- Strong willpower (because they will work against all sorts of setbacks)
- Strong communication skills (most of the problems they will solve are about internal and external communication)
- Strong analytical skills (to solve a problem they first will have to quickly understand new contexts and cause-effect-correlations)
A good profile to hire are young, bright people out of (business) school who want to become entrepreneurs one day and are motivated by learning and growth. They see the value of working closely with a founder and understand the inner workings of a company.
Where to find them?
In the past I’ve hired business students or young aspiring entrepreneurs through my personal network. What also worked was to put out job ads for “entrepreneurial assistants” or “entrepreneurs in residence” on our website and social media. Another successful action were speeches I gave at universities (they always like entrepreneurial stories) and personally reaching out to multipliers such as professors.
Good luck with finding your personal entrepreneurial assistant and starting to use leverage!
