Delegate vs abdicate

Which is best?

Nick Avaria
August 21, 2026

“Hire good people and get out of their way” sounds wise.

But I’ve found this advice to be pretty damaging to sub-$5M agencies.

The problem is, this advice is used as a blanket statement.

When someone running a $30M or $50M agency tells you to hire good people and get out of their way, what they mean is that they hire senior operators at $400K base plus a bonus that doubles it, people who are already running the equivalent of your entire business inside somebody else's business, and those people you can absolutely leave alone. Nine times out of ten it works out.

That's what "hire good people and get out of the way" looks like from where they're sitting.

But this advice does not translate.

At $1M or $2M, you cannot afford that hire.

You're hiring someone at $80K or $100K a year, and expecting to get out of their way and have everything work is essentially rolling dice.

You might get lucky one time in five if you have an unusually strong culture and a personal brand that attracts above-market talent.

The other four times, things fall apart, and you look up eighteen months later wondering what happened.

So the advice was true for the person who gave it and mostly false for the person who received it.

I’ve found the antidote to this is the distinction between delegating something and abdicating it.

The two look somewhat identical. In both cases, you handed a piece of the business to someone else. In both cases, you're no longer doing the work yourself. In both cases, you can say to your peers over dinner that you've built a team and stepped back. But underneath, they're different operations.

Delegating means you give someone the work, and they own it - but you understand what the work is, what good looks like when it's done well, and what medium and bad look like too. You've done the work yourself at some point, or at least closely enough that you can judge it. You've defined the metrics that tell you whether it's working. You've set the OKRs, the KPIs, the standards - whatever version of "what winning looks like" is appropriate for that seat. And you've built the reporting cadence that surfaces whether it's working, without you needing to be in the daily execution.

Abdicating looks the same on the org chart… but there's no definition of good, medium, or bad. There are no metrics or OKRs. Just: here, go do this thing, don't report back, I'm not going to check in, figure it out.

The outcomes of the two are almost inverse of each other over time.

A properly delegated function tends to improve (because the person owning it has clear standards to hit, feedback loops, and a manager who can coach them when things drift).

An abdicated function tends to decay for a number of months until something falls apart. When this inevitably happens, founders usually blame the person rather than the mechanism, which means the next hire in that seat abdicates in exactly the same way and the pattern repeats.

Which brings us back to the "hire good people and get out of the way" advice.

The reason it works at $30M and doesn't work at $1M is not really about the calibre of the hire, though that's part of it.

The deeper reason is that at $30M the founder has usually been running the business long enough to know what good looks like in every role - so when they step back, they're delegating, even if they don't call it that.

At $1M, the founder often hasn't. So when they step back, they're abdicating.

You fix this by making sure that before you step back from any function in your business, you've done the work of defining what good looks like in that function, clearly enough that someone else can be measured against it, and clearly enough that you can tell whether it's working.

Do that, and getting out of the way starts producing the results the advice promised.

Skip it, and no amount of expensive hires will save you.

Nick

P.S.

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