The 2IC you need in three years has to be built now. How to find them, what to hand over first, and why most founders leave it until the handover is already forced.
When Tom bought into Dilate in 2018, the first real thing we did wasn’t a growth plan. We split the hats.
I gave him everything I wasn’t innately built to do. The structure, the finances, the process, the discipline. And here’s the thing that still makes me laugh: everything I hated doing was everything he loved doing. That one division of labour did more for the business than any campaign we ever ran.
Not everyone finds a Tom. But the leadership layer he became is something you can build deliberately, and the founders who wait until they need one always pay more for it.
The trap: “I’ll just do it myself”
Every founder I’ve ever sat with has the same reflex, and I had it worse than most. Nobody can do this like I can. It’ll be quicker to do it myself. There’ll be fewer headaches.
All true, and all a trap. When someone takes on a role you’ve done for years, they’ll do it at about 80 per cent of your standard at first. You have to let them. Your job isn’t to prevent every mistake. It’s to shorten the learning curve. Those headaches are that person compressing your thirty years of lessons into a couple of hard quarters, and that’s the single highest-return investment in your business, because it’s the one that buys your time back.
The founders who can’t pay it stay the ceiling of their own company forever.
Start with hats, not hires
The mistake most people make is going looking for a person. Start with the functions instead.
List everything your business actually does: sales, delivery, quoting, money, people, marketing. Every function has to live with someone, and right now most of them live with you. That list is your real job description, and it’s usually horrifying.
Then hand over whole accountabilities, not tasks. Delegating tasks makes you a bottleneck with assistants. Delegating a function, owned end to end, builds a leader.
And don’t search for a clone. When we replaced the roles Tom and I did at Dilate, it took a small village: different people for different functions, each better than us at their piece. Nobody is coming to do your whole job. Several people will do parts of it better than you ever did.
Delegation compounds
I’ll be honest about what happens next, because it surprised me. Delegation is addictive. The first handover is terrifying. Then you feel the time come back, and you start looking around going, I can delegate this, and this, and this. You double down where the gains are, the old Pareto principle, and the business speeds up.
Something subtler happens too. People relate to different leaders differently. At Dilate, the people who went to Tom with a problem were not the people who came to me, and both groups were better served for having a choice. A leadership layer doesn’t just take weight off you. It gives your team more doors to knock on.
Make them owners, in mind if not on paper
A leadership layer holds when the people in it think like owners. There are lots of ways to get there: an employee share program, minority equity for the ones who step up, or simply a bonus structure where the reward is honestly attached to the outcome.
We used all of them at different times. The pattern underneath is the same: when people share in the win, the accountability stops being something you enforce and starts being something they carry home. That’s when you know it’s working. They’re thinking about the business when they’re not in it, and you, finally, are allowed not to.
The rhythm that holds it together
None of this survives on goodwill. It survives on structure, and the structure is boring.
Values first, because they’re the compass every leader steers by when you’re not in the room. Then functions and accountabilities, written down. Then a one-page plan: the long-range picture, the year, and the handful of things that matter this quarter. Then a monthly check-in at board level to make sure the structural work isn’t losing to the day-to-day, because the day-to-day always pulls harder.
I still have laminated one-page plans from 2016. That’s not nostalgia. That’s how long this rhythm has been doing the heavy lifting.
Why before, not when
Trust between you and a leadership layer is built in years, and every future you might want depends on it existing. Selling well depends on it. A management buyout is impossible without it. Stepping back while keeping your equity only works if it holds. Even just taking a proper holiday needs it.
And if you already have that hungry 2IC, the one who could step up but lacks capital, structure or backing, know that this is a solvable gap. It’s most of what we do.
Your job was never doing the work. It’s building the thing that does the work. Start while it’s still a choice, because eventually it gets made for you.