You need help, but what do you need help with?
Preparing the business for subcontracting or hiring
As the founder of a young business, the thing I should be focusing on, above everything else, is getting and retaining clients. But what happens if I personally can’t take on any more work, but the business still needs more clients? Naturally, the solution is to hire someone or subcontract some of the work. But what work do I outsource, and how do I explain to the other person what to do and how to do it? I know how to do everything, but do I know how to teach it?
You might be thinking, why not just outsource the work of getting the new clients (i.e. sales). It turns out—as every technical founder is mortified to discover—sales is the single thing you shouldn’t outsource in the early stages. The founder is the best person to sell the product (or service) in those stages because no one knows their vision and product (or service) as deeply as they do. Salespeople can’t replicate the passion, vision, and insights the founder offers. This is critical to getting the first customers or clients.
Furthermore, the process of trying to get customers or clients, and then trying to retain them, is an incredible learning opportunity on the path towards product-market-fit. The founder needs to be deeply involved in that for the business to be able to learn from that effectively.
Getting and retaining clients is certainly something I spend a lot of my time on, but I'm not as intensive about trying to get new ones as I could be. The reason is that I don't really have much capacity to take on many more. Not because I have too many already, but because I am too few.
So I’ve started to think about how it would look to try to bring someone in to help. Perhaps to help with some of the external work I do for clients or perhaps with some of the internal business operations work. In the initial stages, I lean toward the latter. But in either case, even if I had someone ready to start working now, I wouldn't be able to tell them what to do. I know how to do all of the things that I'm doing, but I don't yet know how to explain them.
This is something that Michael E. Gerber warns about in his book The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It. In the scenario he describes, what most people do, especially when they're already overwhelmed, is to just hand stuff off without really thinking it through. They hire someone and tell them to do a thing without first making sure they know exactly what that thing is, why it’s important, how it fits into the bigger picture, and what it means to do that thing well.
When the founder does that, one of two things happen:
Either the founder blindly trusts that the employee will be able to figure it out. If the employee does, this works well for a while, until the lack of attention from the founder leads to some tragic runaway scenarios described in the book (e.g. page 61 here). On the other hand, if the employee doesn't figure it out, the founder has to deal with the fallout of that too.
Or the founder doesn't trust that the employee will be able to figure it out, so they hover and micromanage. That's not fun for the employee and it doesn't fix the original problem of the founder having too much to do.
The trick is to figure out how to delegate without abdicating.
Preparing for delegation
Beyond just documenting the tasks, it's important to put the tasks into the context of the bigger picture. That's where the book recommends to create an org chart (different to the one I had in an earlier post) that contains all of the positions and their areas of accountability.
Then you need to figure out and document all of the processes within each role, and then the processes for how these connect between the roles. Once that is done, it makes sense to hire people for the roles.
Even though at the start, the founder will be responsible for each of those positions, as the business grows, new employees can take over any of those positions (likely starting from the bottom and working up the org chart). It's then clear to the employee what they are accountable for and who they are accountable to.
That's what I want to start fleshing out in this post, starting with the org chart.
Quantum Salon Org Chart
Let's start at the right of the org chart.
Finance
I really can't imagine a scenario where I would need more than one person to deal will all the finance things in my company, so there doesn't really need to be a VP of Finance. I think a position like Finance Manager makes sense there, but, whatever, I'll keep the VP title for now for symmetry. This position would be responsible for:
Managing the books
Preparing monthly and annual financial reports (Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet), keeping an eye on cash flow and budget and reporting to the founder
Making sure annual tax obligations are taken care of
Managing invoices for clients
Paying subcontractors (and managing payroll if it gets to that stage)
Purchasing software & services needed by the company
Booking travel
Approving spending by subcontractors/employees
Operations
This will be all the work that gets done for the clients. I will leave operations for a later post.
Marketing (& Sales)
This is already a busy part of Quantum Salon, so I definitely think a VP role for this part of the org chart makes sense. Underneath the VP, I see three distinct roles already:
Sales Manager
Branding & Product Manager
Content Marketing Manager
Sales Manager
As I mentioned in the intro, in the early days, sales should be founder led. But it’s worth teasing this out to see how much of it really needs to rely on the founder.
So far these have been the channels to getting (or almost getting) clients for Quantum Salon:
Someone in my network needs a thing. They think I would be good at that thing. They reach out to me.
I’m chatting with someone in my network who works for a startup (not a pitch). They volunteer to help and recommend me to their founder or marketing team.
I’m chatting with a founder in my network (not a pitch). They express interest in Quantum Salon's services.
I contact a founder in my network about whether they would be interested in Quantum Salon's services (a pitch). They respond with interest.
A founder sees a thing I did for a client. They want that thing as well. They reach out to me.
From a curated list, I contact a founder outside my network about whether they would be interested in Quantum Salon's services (a pitch). They respond with interest.
After each of these sequences, there are additional steps: we discuss the client’s needs, I make a proposal, we perhaps negotiate, a contract is prepared and signed, and then the work starts.
Note that the first four channels rely on my network as a founder. It's possible a business development person could bring their network and replicate some of those channels, but that's not likely someone I'm in a position to be hiring.
As the company matures, the 6th channel should become more dominant (that's the hope anyway).
So how do we separate what is the founder's responsibility and what is the Sales Manager's responsibility? It might go something like this:
Founder is responsible for 1-4
In 5, the founder might receive the request, but then hands it off to the Sales Manager
In 6, the Sales Manager curates the list (which is actually a big task), the founder does the cold outreach. If there is interest, it gets handed off to the Sales Manager
The additional step of discussing the needs of the client can be done by the founder or the Sales Manager
Making the proposal, negotiation, contracts are done by the Sales Manager
I mentioned above that the Sales Manager curates a list of potential clients. This is part of what is known as Customer Relationships Management (CRM). This also includes tracking the progression of the clients through the sales pipeline, to see what is working and what isn't, and what can be tweaked.
The Sales Manager is also responsible for coming up with pricing frameworks (e.g. subscription or one-off packages).
They should also make sure that the client is introduced to the operations team, and that the operations team has what they need to take over the relationship with the client.
Branding & Product Manager
One the branding side, the B&P Manager is responsible for everything to do with the website.
They are also responsible for preparing, maintaining, and communicating the brand guidelines and brand asset library, to make sure the brand stays consistent on different platforms (for an example, see how the colour scheme and images of the Quantum Salon newsletter matches the website) and across different assets (like slides for a presentation).
They are responsible for how the product is defined (for example, as a monthly subscription service package plus optional add-ons). And also how it is communicated to clients: on the website, on social media (e.g. via product carousels) and with potential clients (e.g. via product documents for the Sales Manager to use).
They maintain the portfolio of Quantum Salon’s prior work. And prepare client case studies.
They also support events, by preparing bios and headshots (and swag?).
Content Marketing Manager
The CM Manager is responsible for all the social accounts (right now, Substack and LinkedIn, and soon YouTube), including managing the content calendar, scheduling posts, keeping an eye on comments, tracking metrics.
They coordinate with the B&P manager on preparing product material for social media (like product carousels).
Most of the content marketing at Quantum Salon focuses on the Quantum Salon newsletter on Substack. The purpose of the newsletter is to develop brand recognition and demonstrate to clients the kind of technical and thought leadership content we are capable of. But it also serves another purpose: to develop our unique point of view on various topics relevant to our clients (thought leadership). The newsletter is a way to explore and formalize thoughts on those topics.
The though leadership content should be the responsibility of the founder. The other aspects could be the CM manager’s responsibility. But they would also need to seek feedback on and final approval from the founder.
They are also responsible for repurposing one type of content (e.g. newsletter article) into another kind (a carousel or video), if it makes sense.
And they coordinate guest and partnership content.
(Where does the Aggie Inc. Substack fit in? It sits outside of the Quantum Salon org chart, since it's the founder's side project!)
So far this looks as follows.
Next steps
The next thing will be to flesh out the operations part of the org chart. This would give a complete picture of how the business looks right now.
It would be an interesting exercise to imagine how the company might look in 5 years or 10 years time. Some positions will have extra responsibilities. For example, I would like to create a Quantum Salon podcast where we interview people on topics related to the nuances of deep tech communication. This will also be the responsibility of the CM Manager. New positions will also be added.
But coming back to the company as it is now, which of the positions in the current org chart would I subcontract/hire for first? Going through this exercise makes me realize I might not even need to outsource yet. There is definitely opportunity for some automation to reduce work. Under finance, there are aspects of the bookkeeping and invoicing that can be automated. On the sales side, the most labour intensive work that isn’t the founder’s responsibility is curating the list of potential clients to reach out to. This is definitely something that could benefit from automation.
After that, I would like to think about bringing in help for the role of the Brand & Product Manager. I could imagine splitting up the Content Marketing Manager role into a person responsible for writing content for the Quantum Salon newsletter and another person responsible for everything else. In this case, I would keep the newsletter as the founder's responsibility for now and let someone else take care of everything else.
This exercise has been useful because it made me realize an opportunity to automate some of the processes. This will free up time to focus more on the founder-led part of sales and refining Quantum Salon's expert point of view. Even if I don’t end up subcontracting/hiring any time soon, it also make me less anxious about getting more clients, because I feel like I’ll be in a better position to bring someone in for some of this internal B&P and CM work if the client work increases beyond my capacity. I have a lot more clarity on how it all looks and it shouldn’t be so difficult to define each position more clearly when needed.
Incidentally, as I write all of this out, it's kind of remarkable how much work goes into running even a tiny one-person agency. I haven't even talked about doing the actual work for clients yet, which will sit under the VP of Operations. We'll get to that in another post. Also, we probably should define some more responsibilities for the founder!
Update (21/08/25): This org structure has made it so much easier to know how to organize the files and folders on my computer. I was lumping things together that seemed similar but are the responsibility of completely different parts of the organization (e.g. making carousels for clients and making carousels for our own marketing).
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Seems to me you need to look at AI tools. AI is already embedded end-to-end: from brand creation and governance, to social listening and retail execution, and into product discovery, prioritization, analytics, and testing. And brand control.