by Filip Pesek, founder and CEO of DonnaPro
For seven years, I thought I was a great founder. In reality, I was just a successful bottleneck.
I was the founder of a marketing agency, and from the outside, we were growing. But internally, I was the bottleneck for everything. I suffered from “superhero syndrome” – the toxic belief that I had to handle every client email, schedule every meeting, and put out every fire myself.
I told myself I was just being a “good founder.” In reality, I was scared.
I was scared of losing control. I was scared of someone else talking to my clients. And I was scared that if I hired help, they would do it wrong, and I’d just have to fix it anyway.
This is the “Delegation Gap,” and it’s the single biggest reason why most smart founders stay small. It’s the gap between what you can do and what you should do.
The Lie We Tell Ourselves
As new entrepreneurs, we all tell ourselves one simple lie: “It’s just faster if I do it myself.“
This is true exactly once.
The first time you book your own travel, it’s faster. The 50th time you do it, you’ve spent 50 hours on a $20/hour task, all to save 20 minutes of training.
This isn’t efficiency; it’s ego. The real reason we don’t delegate isn’t time. It’s because we’ve tied our identity to being the doer, not the leader. We’re addicted to the chaos because it makes us feel important.
But as a founder, you are not paid to be busy. You are paid to make high-value decisions. Every hour you spend managing your inbox is an hour you are not spending on sales, strategy, or product.
The “Assistant” Stigma
For “aspiring entrepreneurs,” the idea of hiring an assistant feels almost embarrassing. We think it’s a corporate luxury, a sign of a bloated budget, or something reserved for “corporate CEOs” in high-rise buildings.
This mindset is what keeps founders poor.
We look at an assistant as an expense. We see a cost of $3,000 a month and think, “I can’t afford that.“
We are calculating it wrong. You have to calculate the opportunity cost.
If your time is worth $100/hour (a modest rate for a founder), and you spend 20 hours a week on $20/hour admin tasks, you are not “saving” money. You are actively lighting $1,600 a week on fire. Your business is losing $80/hour for every single hour you “save” by doing it yourself.
An assistant isn’t an expense. It’s an investment in your own focus.
The Modern Solution (That Isn’t AI)
Today, we have a new version of the “I’ll do it myself” lie: “AI will handle it.“
This is another trap. AI tools are brilliant at data processing, but they are terrible at nuance, judgment, and human relationships. An AI can schedule a meeting, but it can’t know that you’re secretly dreading that meeting and should probably “reschedule” it. An AI can draft an email, but it can’t read the political subtext from an unhappy client.
The solution isn’t to hire a 1990s-style full-time employee, and it isn’t to buy another AI subscription.
The modern solution is the “Human-AI Hybrid” model.
It works like this:
- AI handles the data: You use AI tools for 80% of the mechanical work (transcribing meetings, sorting data, drafting first versions).
- A Human handles the judgment: You have a part-time, remote Executive Assistant (EA) who manages the AI. This person acts as the “human API” – they take the AI’s output and apply the 20% of nuance, context, and judgment that actually matters.
This model gives founders executive-level support on a startup budget. It allows you to delegate the outcome (e.g., “Make sure this client is happy“) instead of just the task (e.g., “Send this email“).
I had to learn this the hard way. I stalled my agency’s growth because I refused to let go. As the founder of my current company, DonnaPro, I now see this pattern in hundreds of other founders.
The goal is not to do all the work. The goal is to ensure all the work gets done. Stop being the superhero. Start being the architect.
Filip Pesek is the founder and CEO of DonnaPro, an executive assistant agency that provides founders with top-tier European talent. A serial entrepreneur with a background in marketing and operations, Filip specializes in helping founders transition from “bottlenecks” to “strategic builders” by eliminating operational debt.
