“Penny for your thoughts?” asked my mentor. I should have sold them all because I would have ended up with $104.52 in my pocket.
As a founder, you don’t have a single thought, or even five or ten. It’s more like 1,435 swirling in your mind at any given moment.
Wearing multiple hats means you are processing multiple tasks, resolving multiple issues and mapping multiple strategies. It is, quite literally, a fulltime job just to keep it all straight.
I attended the ITP’s Women Entrepreneurs Festival 2013 a couple weeks back. Julia Pimsleur, CEO and Founder of Little Pim was asked who her first strategic hires were. She said, without flinching, a coordinator.
In my head I thought, seriously? You spend precious capital on that? Dang!
Now, I totally get it.
You need a right hand, a Jane (or Jack) -of-all-trades, someone who can ghost write an email for you, get you on the calendar of that Seed investor you have been hounding for weeks, help walk your engineer off the ledge because everyone has been up for 18 hours, remind you that have a radio interview and would have actually delivered the brief on time… you need someone to simply reduce the number of thoughts down from 1,435 to something manageable in the low 800s.
But I’ve learned that the most important result that hire can produce is quiet. Everyone needs some quiet time to reflect and recharge. Everyone. I believe it was Albert Einstein who said, “The monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulates the creative mind.”
Amen, brother.