The majority of founders I’ve talked to who have hired EAs have had a bad experience, and almost all of these mistakes were preventable.Īnd when folks do get over these three common hurdles and bring onboard an EA, there are two oft-repeated mistakes to avoid.Ĭreating more work. But the biggest reason in my experience that most founders shy away from adding support staff is simply because they’ve never done it successfully before. It also adds cognitive load, along with the cost of context switching - which is way more than five minutes. But what most people fail to realize is that it might only take five minutes - but that’s five minutes every day (or every week). It can be hard to justify spending the time to hand a task off to someone (especially if that task only takes a few minutes to complete). I’ve seen leaders that have a mentality of, “Who am I to give this task to someone else who’s probably smarter than me?” It’s important to recognize this as a source of inner conflict that prevents people from delegating effectively. I’ve seen a few primary reasons that cause folks to avoid delegating to an EA: Delegating mishaps to avoidĪs a multi-time founder, I’ve helped many leaders develop better delegation skills. I’ll also unpack the process for expanding the EA pool across the entire team at Levels, and why I think it’s a practice more early-stage startups should adopt.īut before we jump into the tactics, let’s do a little more to set the stage. Along the way, I’ll share tons of specific examples, documents and templates that illustrate exactly how we do this at Levels. In this article, I’ll outline specific tips for working with EAs - whether it’s your first time bringing one on board, or you’re looking to better leverage the EAs you already work with.
Learning how to delegate effectively is perhaps the single most important skill that folks need to develop in order to transition into a leadership role, and yet, many are reluctant to embrace it.
Any time your highest-leverage people are spending time on routine tasks that could be performed by someone else, it’s not only a loss for the company, but it’s limiting that person’s ability to reach their full potential. Fundamentally, you want your best people working on the highest value projects for your company. I think support staff is one of the most under-utilized resources available to every startup. Notably, our EA pool is available to everyone on the team, regardless of seniority - and we encourage everyone to make use of them. Currently, Levels is a team of 47 people, and we have 12 outsourced EAs. When it came to adding EAs to Levels, we took a different approach. I’m also obsessive about tracking my time and optimizing how I’m spending each day as an early-stage startup CEO. But there isn’t all that much tactical information out there on how to specifically work with EAs - often, it’s just something leaders are expected to know how to do.Īs a four-time founder and now CEO at Levels, I’ve worked with all sorts of EAs in the past and I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way. When leveraged correctly, an EA can be one of the most important tools in a startup team’s arsenal - freeing up space to focus on the thorniest challenges facing the business. Another common pitfall I see is early-stage, scrappy founding teams that think it’s too premature to bring on board someone with this skill set. I know dozens of founders who have worked with an Executive Assistant (EA) and stopped after a few months because they couldn’t figure out how to make effective use of the resource - often writing off EAs altogether. He is a four-time founder.ĭelegation is a superpower. Users of Charity Embodiment are particularly effective against the user.Sam Corcos is the co-founder and CEO of Levels, a biowearable company that shows you how food affects your health using real-time biological data.Without obsession the user is weakened.The user if refrained from the obsession goes berserk and attacks everything in sight. The more the user obsesses the stronger they become: the user takes in the urge and causes them to become hyper-focused.
Users become the living embodiment of obsession and become stronger with a strong urge for a certain thing or becomes filled with an overwhelming sense of urgency. Compulsion Embodiment/Incarnate/Personification.