You Aren’t Great At Everything Growth often stalls not because you’re missing talent, but because you’re reluctant to borrow someone else’s By Michele Schwartz, CAS IF YOU’RE AN ENTREPRENEUR, admitting you need help can feel a little like admitting defeat. You built the company. You landed the first clients. You figured out accounting through YouTube, designed your own website, learned just enough Excel to be dangerous and somehow became the IT department, the HR department and the janitorial staff. That’s entrepreneurship. It’s also a terrible long-term business strategy. One of the biggest differences between businesses that plateau and businesses that continue growing isn’t intelligence, effort or even revenue. It’s humility. Growing companies understand a simple truth: They don’t have to own every capability. They just have to own the customer relationship. For years, many of us have measured success by how much we could do ourselves. We took pride in being indispensable. We answered emails at midnight. We became experts in tasks we never intended to master simply because hiring someone felt expensive or outsourcing felt risky. But every hour you spend wrestling with bookkeeping, cybersecurity, digital marketing or freight negotiations is an hour you’re not spending where your business creates the most value. Every business has a core competency, and everything else is overhead. That doesn’t mean those functions aren’t important. In many cases, they’re absolutely critical. It just means they don’t necessarily have to belong to you, and your time could be better spent elsewhere. Large companies figured this out long ago. In most cases, it’s part of how they become large companies. eamesBot / Shutterstock.com 10 • AUGUST 2026 • Voices | Your Business
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzU4OQ==