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Most agency owners think they’re doing their team a favor when they quietly absorb the painful, tedious, or time-consuming work. They’re likely not. In this episode, Chip Griffin and Gini Dietrich look at the sacrifices owners make on behalf of their teams and why those sacrifices often create more problems than they solve.
This isn’t about the occasional tactical sacrifice, it’s about the systemic ones: the conscious decisions to absorb entire categories of work because you’ve decided your team would find them too difficult, too unpleasant, or too much of a burden. Gini admits she’s guilty of it herself, sharing that a new COO sat her down with a list of tasks she’d been handling and told her she shouldn’t be doing any of them. The jobs weren’t glamorous, but they weren’t the owner’s job either.
Chip extends this into two areas where owner sacrifice tends to do the most damage: new business development, where owners keep proposals and pitches entirely to themselves thinking they’re protecting team time, and org chart design, where flat structures are usually not a deliberate choice but the result of owners absorbing management responsibilities no one else wanted. Both patterns block team growth and overload the owner at the same time.
Gini describes a practice she returns to every quarter, sorting her task list into three buckets — things only she can do, things she enjoys but probably doesn’t need to do, and things she absolutely should not be doing. The third list gets delegated immediately. Chip puts it like this: for everything on your plate, ask yourself why you are the one doing it. If there isn’t a good answer, stop doing it.
Key takeaways
- Chip Griffin: “The number of sacrifices that many owners make is extreme and poorly thought out. They solve problems for today, but create problems for the future.”
- Gini Dietrich: “On a new business front, if you bring team members in, even though you might feel guilty about it not being non-billable work, they have the ability to become engaged with the prospect early on, understand the work that you’re doing, and give a different perspective.”
- Chip Griffin: “If most people are reporting into the owner, it’s usually because either they’re a control freak or because they feel like they don’t want to burden people with management.”
- Gini Dietrich: “I sit down with my task list and I split it into three groups. Things that are on my list that only I can do. Things that are on my list that I enjoy doing, but I probably don’t need to do. And things that are on my list that I absolutely should not be doing. The last list needs to be delegated immediately.”
