Doing it all on your own takes a lot of time and energy. You need to be wise and make time to keep educating yourself. You MUST make time to stay on top of all of those audiobook summaries and Twitter and LinkedIn posts out there!
Let’s discuss your hire list. First things first. You need a PA. A CEO without a personal assistant has no respect for themselves. You might need to work on your self-confidence and realize your self-worth first, but sooner or later you will realize, you really, REALLY need one.
You need to find a highly-skilled, discrete, trustworthy, proactive, flexible, detailed-focused, caring and adaptive individual with mind-reading powers, who REALLY needs a job.
You got yourself a PA, good. Let’s move further.
Now is the time to evaluate if you need a co-founder. How is your budget looking like? How much is left after paying your own salary and the one of your PA?
In any startup, there is a lot to be done. Do you have a budget large enough to hire the people to take care of, stuff like:
- Analyze the market and identify market opportunities
- Manage product development
- Develop a go-to market strategy
- Work of financial estimates
- Come up with a business plan
Not much? → Get yourself a co-founder! Ah, and to prove themselves worthy of being part of your vision, make them bring some cash with them.
The beauty of getting a co-founder is that -unlike your personal assistant- you don’t really need to pay them a salary. A co-founder may work just for equity as your company gets off the ground and may only receive a salary once the business is established… and this might take years.
Getting a co-founder might take a while… in the meantime, your PA can take care of all of that stuff. If she/he is about to get burnout, get her/him an intern, it costs you nothing, or little to nothing.
Remember, you REALLY don't want your PA to go on sick leave as a consequence of burnout. At least not before you got yourself a co-founder. There is shit loads of work to do...
Feeling more confident? Happy to guide you in this journey to becoming the most effective CEO you can be!
Next time, we will discuss how you can wisely spend your precious CEO time.
