Can’t Or Won’t Delegate? Use Multiple Personalities!

When starting a business, you often have to juggle between tasks and roles. One day you’re the project manager and the next you’re the billing department guy. Of course that’s totally fine – and you should be proud of taking care of so many different things. If you’re a one man show – enjoy it while it lasts and promote yourself as such.

But as time goes by and your company grows stronger, you’ll want to focus on what you do best and enjoy the most while delegating the other tasks to people who are a better fit for them.

For entrepreneurs and business starters, it’s often very difficult to ‘let go’ and train other people to take care of these aspects of the business. You feel like nobody will ever be able to do it the right way. Also you’re afraid that the training process is going to be an additional burden on your already overly busy schedule.

It was particularly hard for me to let go. And I found myself using different names for different positions at my own company! Here is how it all started: in the beginning I used to spend a lot of time meeting with clients or talking on the phone (doing sales). And many people had trouble understanding my name and pronouncing it. For some reason, I felt that it interfered in the conversations, especially when I was dealing with bigger companies. So I started telling people to call me ‘Mike’. This strategy worked great! People started asking me about the company I worked for rather than my own company. And as I signed bigger and bigger clients, it seemed like people felt much more comfortable dealing with me that way.

So there I was – Mike and Noam. Later on, when the company grew to more than 15 employees, many concurrent projects, beautiful offices in midtown Manhattan, and a top ranking on Google, I found myself dealing with project management as “Dave”, client relation as “Mike”, company management as “Noam”, and billing and accounting as “Anna” (via email only). It was hilarious! And it was an ongoing joke in the office.

Whatever the excuse may be, it was hard for me to delegate. So for years I took on the jobs of 4 or 5 people. Sure I’ve learned a great deal along the way on how to produce tons of work and be very efficient but it was not a sustainable method of work.

Today, Noam Design is a very different company. We’re not taking on custom clients anymore as we’re focusing on our products. Our team has evolved to be a small group of “managers of one”, and given everything we achieve and the products we launch, I’m proud of doing what I do under a single name – Noam.

Thank you for reading! If you have any thoughts on delegating or on using multiple personalities please share them in the comments below!

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