Don't expect to hire experts who you don't respect

People from a product or marketing background are well-known for thinking that they can ‘just find a techie to build it’. This is already a well-known meme among anyone with software development skills.

But many technical people don’t realise that they are guilty of the reverse. They think they can build a product and then just hire some marketing people to run some ads or whatever it is that they do.

In general, there are two models of getting paid help for your business.

1. Figure out how to do something, realise it takes up too much of your time, so hire someone and teach them how to do it instead.
2. Realise that you need something and don’t know how to do it. Hire an expert to do it for you.

Successful entrepreneurs do a lot more of 1) than 2), especially at the beginning.

It’s very easy to think that your role is the most important and difficult one, but if you want to run your own business instead of work for someone else, you’ll need to gain a pretty deep understanding of all the different roles you need over time.

At some point, you can pay experts to teach you so that you can then turn their knowledge into processes that are relevant to your business, and then delegate these functions to someone else. But in most cases, you’ll need to understand them and do them youself first.

As a business owner, it’s unlikely that you will ever get away from operations and sales, so be especially wary if your plan is to focus on building tech and you hope to outsource functions in sales, finance, and HR.