Tip for all founders with employees from someone who's worked for start-ups for decades: fucking delegate!
And I don't just mean the work, that's the easy part. Delegate parts of the decision-making process you don't have the time for to get into properly. Yes, even if it involves spending money.
If I have to report to, talk you through things on multiple occasions, have to keep reminding you of them, and all the while my team is waiting for a decision, that process does not only cost you a lot of time you should be spending doing other things, it actually often costs the whole company more money than we're actually talking about spending!
If you don't trust the people you've hired, you're doing it wrong.
A good advice I got when delegating, was to accept the result of the task given if it was >80% of how you would have done it yourself and acceptable, without picking at the differences. That way the delegatee would feel ownership and responsibility to the result and gain confidence for future tasks.
Couldn't agree more. Even in small startups (2-4 co-founders) you have to start trusting your co-workers and let everyone be independent in their decisions. Not everything needs to be a committee decision and a meeting or brainstorm to decide. Startups can save huge amounts of time by going to single-person decisionmaking and choosing roles between co-founders.
I recommend David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. I use it with OmniFocus, but there are a number of other tools available.
The process is straightforward (collect, process, organize, do, and review) but what I found most helpful was getting everything out of my head so I could stop worrying about forgetting anything.
And I don't just mean the work, that's the easy part. Delegate parts of the decision-making process you don't have the time for to get into properly. Yes, even if it involves spending money.
If I have to report to, talk you through things on multiple occasions, have to keep reminding you of them, and all the while my team is waiting for a decision, that process does not only cost you a lot of time you should be spending doing other things, it actually often costs the whole company more money than we're actually talking about spending!
If you don't trust the people you've hired, you're doing it wrong.