Someone once told me that a startup founder should try to make themselves redundant in order to allow their company to scale.

This sounds like really bad advice at first, but it could actually guide you to build a resilient and scalable company with greater chances of success.

In this context, ‘redundant’ means allowing the company to grow on its own strength and to grow bigger than it’s founders. It also means that the company can become more resilient and scalable because it no longer has a single failure point. You do this by finding ways in which you are no longer critical and necessary for the company to function on a day to day basis.

It does not mean that you no longer have a role at the company. On the contrary, making yourself redundant aims to give you the time and space to do what you do best for the company. It allows you to innovate, be creative, do research, create new products and build the best roadmap possible.

The Importance of Co-Founders

People rarely mention that you should make sure that you have co-founders when you begin your startup.

We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. You may have experience running a business, but do not have any technical experience. You may know how to sell and market a product, but never led a large team. You may be a great manager, but struggle to come up with good product ideas.

When you are getting started, be very honest with yourself about your weaknesses. Pay close attention to your anxieties — and you’ll notice what is keeping you up at night when you think about how you will build this company.

Once you identify the areas where you will need help, then actively look for a co-founder who will bring these missing skills to the table. Finding the right partner(s) is not easy — but if you manage then your chances at success will improve greatly.

Generalists vs Specialists

In the early days of a startup, the founders wear multiple hats and need to learn as they go. Successful founders need to be generalists as they develop code, design products and do tech support before they can start to hire. As the company grows so does its needs and you must introduce specialists in each area:

Need a large development team, then you need someone with experience scaling an engineering team.

Scaling to tens of thousands of users, then you better hire someone with experience in cloud infrastructure.

The same goes for marketing, tech support, testing etc.

The above is obvious, what is less obvious to a founder, is that as soon as you hire that specialist in that particular area — you have just made yourself slightly less required.

Hire people that are better than you

If you are interviewing a candidate and this person has more experience and skills than you — then make them a job offer. Just because you founded the company does not mean that you are the best person for every task.

It is not easy to recognise that a person will be better than you — after all you will tell yourself that no one knows the product / customers / problems as well as you do. Training them will be hard work and distracting. In fact you will often try to convince yourself that you might as well do the work yourself.

If each person that you hire is better than you and your co-founders then you will build a strong team. If these hires can do your job better than you, then the company will be stronger as a result. By doing this you will start to allow the company to scale.

Don’t forget that your objective is to grow the company in the best possible way. Remember this if you ever find yourself putting your interests before a potentially great new hire.

Delegate or become the bottleneck

If you are honest with yourself, hiring a team of people that are better than you is the easy part. Now comes the hard part — you need to learn how to delegate properly.

If you do not delegate then you are not allowing your new super team to do what they do best. If you do not delegate then you will demotivate your highly skilled team mates and they will move on.

By delegating you can start to scale the company. All of a sudden you can have multiple product development streams, or perhaps you can offer 24 hour support. Most probably you can also build better products, because the new dev leads and developers are specialists in their areas and therefore better than you at this stage of the company.

To delegate you must allow your colleagues to own their problems and forget about them until it is time to follow up. Keep too many problems for yourself and you will be bogged down and unable to take decisions and move forward. You will become the bottleneck which prevents the company from scaling properly. This bottleneck will lead to an inefficient organisation where everyone is waiting for you to solve their problems.

Free Up as Much Time as Possible

You should aim to free up as much time from the day to day obligations as possible.

  • Do you need to join each daily standup meeting?
  • Do you need to join the end of sprint retrospectives?
  • Do you need to review all code commits each day?
  • Do you need to be informed of every single bug report?

If you have built the right team and they have earned your trust then the answer is probably not. Maintain scheduled follow up meetings and let your team do what you hired them to do.

You have now pivoted from a fire-fighting role, to a new fun strategic one!

The company will now benefit as you use your new free time to:

  • Research new technology and product ideas
  • Focus on product design
  • Speak to customers / partners / users
  • Dedicate time to product strategy and roadmap
  • Reach out to potential new team members
  • Be creative again

You will now notice that you are able to take a high level view of your products and roadmap as you are no longer burdened with endless details and meetings.

By giving yourself space to innovate again — you have created new opportunities for the company.

Pay Yourself a Market Value Salary

As soon as the company can afford to pay you a salary, then you should ensure that you and your co-founders are paid a market value salary.

This means that should the company have to hire someone to replace you then it would have budgeted for the required salary.

Failing to do this will create a liability for the company in a scenario such as an exit, if you are unwell, or if the company scales to a size where you are no longer the best person to lead it.

This may seem counterintuitive, but it is also an important step to building a resilient company. The reason for this is that if the company hasn’t budgeted to pay its CEO / CTO / CPO etc. a good salary — then it cannot hire a new one when necessary.

Automate when Possible

In the beginning certain tasks can be done manually. You have less code to manage, less users to communicate with and less employees to manage. There might not be need to automate things such as payroll, email campaigns, following up support tickets or doing code analysis.

When the company scales though you might find yourself dedicating more and more of your time to these repetitive tasks.

In some cases hiring new team members is not the answer if you see that the work you are doing can be automated. There is no one size fits all answer here, but it is important to research automation tools and services as your company scales. In the least develop good processes and document them so that team members can take ownership of them.

Avoid Burnout

Starting a company and building it slowly for a number of years can take a toll on it’s founders. Having good co-founders, building a good team and delegating properly is the best way to avoid burnout. If this is not done properly then the risk of burnout is real — and if you wait until it happens, then you might not have the energy and focus to hire, train and delegate to your team at that stage. Once again, doing this properly increases the resiliency of your company by removing it’s dependency on its founders.

Exits or Change in Leadership

The time might come for a founder to exit due to an acquisition or change in leadership. By ensuring that you have built a startup that is not dependent on you, then your company might be more valuable and attractive to potential buyers. You have created a more resilient company that can scale and is not dependent on its founders.

There is also another reason why delegating and freeing up your time is critical during an exit / merger or other major change to the company. Such a process is very time consuming and the founders would normally need to dedicate a large percentage of their time and attention to this process for months on end. You need to make sure that your absence from the day to day for a prolonged period of time would not negatively affect the company.

Finally, an added bonus is that you can allow the company to take on special projects which were not planned for. In these cases you will be able to take on the temporary additional work load without impacting the rest of the team and your roadmap.