When you’ve spent most of your time as the sole employee in your start-up, building a team and giving up the daily work to manage things can be very difficult.
Over the years, I have grown to learn a number of skills that enabled me to do things by myself. When I first wanted to build Flex Urban as an urban/pop culture blog in 2015, I asked a neighbour that I had known for most of my life to do it for me and he agreed to do it for R3500.
I paid the R2000 deposit and left him to do the work, a couple of months later the website was nowhere close to what I wanted and he just couldn’t build a simple blog. Anyways, he refused to finish or refund my money and that was that.
Disappointed and feeling down, I decided to learn this HTML5 & CSS3 he was claiming is the latest tech and is the backbone of building a website(Actually there’s way more than that like JavaScript, PHP… that’s another post). Since then I started building websites and earlier this year web hosting and development became our full service area.
Since that R2000 life lesson, with everything that I wanted to build or implement I would learn the skill and do it myself, whether it was building an app or video editing.
But now that I’m building a start-up that requires building a team of 100’s to 1000’s of people once product production begins, giving away that way of doing things is not easy.
When it’s only you then it’s easy to become CEO and product man but once you start growing you need to learn to give responsibilities to others and let them flourish unencumbered but I still find myself trying to do the designs, the coding, and the engineering instead of focus on my new job title.
I’m learning now that as a CEO your job is to drive the vision, hire and manage people, raise funds, make the big deals and make sure that everyone lacks nothing that they need in order to perform at their most optimum level.
Your job as a leader is to step back and let the people who are smarter than you and more knowledgeable in their field to do their job without interruptions.