This blog post continues thoughts from my newsletter, Beyond the Founder (Sept. 1st, 2026 – No. 7), where I explore the need to move marketing and sales functions to hired professionals, and NOT the founder.
To be clear, the objective isn’t to remove the founder from growth, marketing, and sales functions. Quite the opposite.
The founder may still provide the ideas, strategy, relationship knowledge, expertise, credibility and vision that make the company distinctive. What changes is who turns those assets into a repeatable growth process. In The Founder’s Treadmill, I describe a growth engine as something very different from occasional advertising, bursts of networking or founder heroics whenever sales get slow. It is a repeatable way to earn new revenue without requiring the founder to personally make it happen every week. That’s the goal. Let’s talk about how to achieve it.
Start With One Engine.
A small business doesn’t need twelve marketing strategies. It needs one that works. Depending on the business, that primary engine might be:
- Referrals
- Educational content
- Strategic partnerships
- Local search and reputation
- Disciplined outbound activity
- Paid advertising, or
- Deeper relationships and additional work with existing clients
Pick one. Work it consistently. Measure it. Improve it. Watch how and what your competition does, and then do it better. Then—and only then—consider adding another growth engine.
Your scoreboard (explained in Upgrade No. 8 in The Founder’s Treadmill and excerpted in the related Newsletter to this blog post) should tell you whether your growth engine is actually working in terms of the number of opportunities created, the conversion rate, average sale, pipeline value, retention and gross margin. Notice what is happening here. Marketing and sales are slowly, professionally, becoming business functions, rather than a founder-dependent activity. And that is a huge distinction!
Let Marketers Market.
One of the principles I learned over the years was simple, but important:
- Let leaders lead
- Let marketers market
- Let salespeople sell
- Let professionals practice their professions
In a professional service business, we routinely hire extraordinarily talented and well-trained people—a lawyer, accountant, dentist, advisor, engineer or physician, for example—and then tell them that in addition to practicing their chosen skill, they need to become accomplished marketers and salespeople as well.
Some can. Some can’t. But I’ve never understood why marketing and sales should be the determining factor as to whether such a professional should be retained, even promoted, as if their education, degree and training were secondary. In truth, most professionals, and non-professional small business owners, have absolutely no training in marketing and selling at all! I have eleven years of college, but exactly one undergraduate, semester-length class in marketing, and none in sales. I think that is the norm for most small business owners.
As I wrote in Building With the End in Mind, a larger and stronger business actually has a distinct advantage in terms of strong, consistent top-line growth because it has the resources to invest in people who possess real education, skills and experience in marketing and sales rather than depending on each professional to generate his or her own clientele in their spare time. But size and strength will come in time, once you get started in the right direction.
And Now There’s AI.
Artificial intelligence changes the economics of this transition from founder-led marketing to hiring professionals to do the job. This isn’t because AI can replace a good Marketing or Sales Director. It can’t replace judgment, positioning, relationships, accountability or an understanding of the people your business serves. But AI can give a capable marketing person—or even a small outsourced or fractional marketing team—considerably more leverage than that person had just a few years ago. Consider a founder who has twenty years of expertise but no time or skills to turn it into an organized marketing campaign.
Today, a member of the team can interview that founder for thirty minutes about a subject clients frequently ask about. With appropriate human supervision, AI tools can help turn that source material into:
- A first draft of an article
- Several shorter social-media posts
- An email to existing clients
- Talking points for a video
- Frequently asked questions for the website
- Variations of headlines or subject lines
- An outline for a seminar or webinar, and
- Follow-up material for prospects
The important word in that paragraph is help. The professional’s expertise remains the raw material.
The marketing leader remains responsible for the delivery strategy, accuracy, voice and final product. AI simply makes the production process faster, and that has enormous implications for a small business.
AI Should Reduce Founder Dependence—not Create More of It.
There is a trap here, however. A founder can discover AI and simply add another job to the treadmill: “Now I can write the prompts, produce the articles, make the videos, run the email campaign, analyze the results and manage the website myself, and in much less time!” That’s not progress. You’ve merely embraced a faster and steeper setting on your treadmill.
The better use of AI is to put it inside a delegated and professionally designed marketing system, and then to track the results, learn, and adapt. The founder might contribute an hour each month to ideas, expertise or a short interview, and review the progress and outcomes, but someone else owns the process, maintains the calendar, produces the material, and distributes it. And that same person comes back at the end of the month and says: “Here’s what we tried. Here’s what worked. Here’s what didn’t. Here’s what we’re changing next month.”
Now you’re building a business.
Don’t Delegate Marketing. Delegate Responsibility for Growth.
This distinction is important. Giving an employee responsibility for posting on LinkedIn isn’t building a growth engine. Hiring somebody to redesign your website isn’t building a growth engine, and paying an agency to run advertisements isn’t necessarily building a growth engine either. Those are activities.
Someone needs to own the outcome.
In The Founder’s Treadmill, I distinguish between delegation and authority transfer this way: delegation temporarily removes work from your hands; authority transfer permanently removes work from your desk.
Marketing and sales should eventually work the same way. Give a capable person—or team—a clearly defined objective, necessary resources, decision-making authority, and a scoreboard to track progress, learn from, and make the needed changes. Perhaps something like this: “Generate enough qualified opportunities each month to support 10% annual profitable growth while maintaining our target gross margin.”
Now they have something to own and clear instructions as to what “done right” looks like. The founder can review results, approve major strategic decisions, adjust the budget, and remain visible where his or her presence creates unusual value. In such a system, the founder no longer has to manufacture every opportunity personally.
The Real Test
Here is a question worth contemplating: If you stopped networking, prospecting and personally bringing in new clients for the next six months, what would happen to your company’s growth rate?
Would new business continue arriving? Would referrals still be cultivated? Would prospects be followed up with? Would useful content continue being published? Would your personal and business reputation continue growing and improving? Would someone know whether the pipeline was ahead of plan or behind it? If the answers are mostly “No,” you haven’t really built a growth engine yet. You are the growth engine. That may be perfectly acceptable at at an early stage of your career. It becomes much less acceptable, and sooner, if your goal is to build something durable, valuable and eventually capable of operating beyond you. Growth should not stop when you slow down, go on vacation, or just get older.
In fact, one of the most satisfying things I experienced as an owner was watching talented people become better than I was at work I once believed only I could do. And that definitely included marketing and sales! The lesson it took me years to learn is this: Hiring well doesn’t diminish the founder. It multiplies the business. And in the age of AI, a small team has more tools than ever to make that multiplication possible.
The objective isn’t to take the founder out of the story. It’s to make sure the business has a story—and a future—even when the founder is no longer standing in the middle of every page.
Blog call to action
If you are reading this on my blog and would like to receive the first half of essays like this one in your inbox, please subscribe to my Newsletter, Beyond the Founder, at: https://davidgrausr.com/
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