Don't. Learn the necessary skills yourself. It's not terribly difficult and the idea that you need management is false (and perpetuated by managers). You will waste far less time and money putting aside an hour a night to read up before bed (or during a workout).
What most people overlook: doing a lot of the grunt work yourself gives you insight into where you can take advantage of the system, get a better deal for yourself, do away with some "must have" entirely, etc (i.e., people with "skin in the game" are likely to make more advantageous decisions than a hire).
"Do I really need to delegate this" is just as important a question as "what can I delegate?"
Effective delegation and management also requires you have a decent grasp of how to do the thing you are delegating.
Some examples -
Lack of knowledge means you have no idea how hard something is, or where it’s ‘hard but necessary’ or ‘hard because you’re doing it wrong’. It means you won’t know how to evaluate if someone is doing a good job or not, is competent or not, or being honest or not.
It’s particularly challenging if you hire a ‘business guy’ (or sales people!) because they are almost all very adept at getting away with things, making people like them, looking good, and convincing people they should be paid more than they really need to be.
Which is great if you are benefiting from it, know how to manage someone like that, and aren’t getting taken advantage of.
If you don’t know how that type of world or person works however, and how to maintain boundaries and expectations appropriately? yikes.
This is a great point. Frequently there is a lot of inefficiency in delegation. Much as trying to do everything yourself can be ineffective, sometimes just learning about something and doing it yourself will be far more effective. This effect is similar to the concept of the mythical-man-month [1].
Tasks that are good to delegate are those that are reasonably self-contained, are big enough to justify the overhead involved, and are easy to evaluate the results of.
That perspective emphasizes the short term over the long term. A big chunk of the value of delegation is building the capability in your team to tackle bigger and less defined work in the future.
Came here to say the same. The guy with white teeth and a suit who can do the "business stuff" is a myth. Instead treat all business problems as engineering problems, then proceed to solve.
How will your customer use your product to solve their problem?
What hypotheses do you have? How are you going to test those hypotheses? What is the link from "solving this problem is important to me" to "solving this problem saves me money"? Structured thinking is helpful here!
Some people will be better than me at sales or raising money and my training won't match a seasoned professional.
Managing people is similarly not easy and the negative effects of a bad leader are going to be visible after a long period of time: you mistreat your employees and they all leave after a year.
That said, I agree some people will be able to get good results by themselves and yes, them being invested in the company will make for better decisions.
It's generally great to have a co-founder manager / business.
Not only can you do a "good enough" version of things yourself but once you NEED to hire someone, you will hire better if you already know the basics of the job.
What most people overlook: doing a lot of the grunt work yourself gives you insight into where you can take advantage of the system, get a better deal for yourself, do away with some "must have" entirely, etc (i.e., people with "skin in the game" are likely to make more advantageous decisions than a hire).
"Do I really need to delegate this" is just as important a question as "what can I delegate?"