For most of last year, I was still running HR at Denamico.
We're not a huge team. HR activity is manageable. I knew what needed to happen, I handled it, and it got done. It wasn't a problem.
Until it was.
When Minnesota's paid family leave act took effect this year, and several people on our team were having babies and going out on parental leave, I knew I was in over my head. So we hired a fractional HR leader.
She's been worth every dollar.
Not just because she freed up my time, which she did. But because she knows things I didn't even know I didn't know. HR law. Benchmarks from dozens of other companies she works with. How to structure policies that actually protect the business and the people in it. I was handling HR competently. She handles it with a depth I couldn't replicate without years of experience I'll never have.
I think about what would have happened if we'd kept waiting. It would have looked practical. And it would have cost us far more than we saved.
Same patterns. Different industries.
We work with leaders across franchise brands and multi-location businesses who are running functions they're capable of running. Sales leaders who are also managing the CRM. Founders who are also doing the strategic planning for their field operations teams. COOs who are also the de facto IT decision makers.
They're not wrong that they can do it. They're just wrong that they haven’t yet delegated it to someone even more competent.
And the thing that keeps them stuck isn't arrogance. It's the transition cost. If I hire someone, they won't be as good as me right away. They'll need time to ramp. They'll make mistakes I wouldn't make. That's true. The dip is real.
But here's what we don't account for: the cost of inaction is also real. It's just invisible.
Every month you keep doing something that someone else should own is a month you're not doing the thing only you can do. That cost doesn't show up on a P&L. It shows up in growth that stalls, decisions that slow down, and opportunities that quietly pass.
On a recent episode of RevOps Champions with Michael Iannuzzi, Partner and Franchise Practice Leader at Citrin Cooperman, he shared another version of this. Michael works with franchise brands at every stage of growth, from emerging systems to brands well past a hundred units.
He shared a story from a conference he'd attended. A founder was speaking at a lunch session and said something that stuck: "I needed to figure out when to fire myself."
She was the founder. Not the president. And at some point, she realized those weren't the same job anymore. So she hired a brand president and stepped back from running the operations she'd built.
Michael's observation: the hundred-unit mark keeps coming up. Not as an exact science, but close. Something about that number is that the people and systems that got you there stop being enough to get you further. The ones who make it through aren't the ones who grind harder. They're the ones who asked the question sooner: who does this need to be, and is it still me?
The transition cost is real. The dip is real. But delaying the move doesn't eliminate the cost. It adds to the cost of inaction that's been accumulating the whole time.
At Denamico, this is one of the things we help leaders see. Not the obvious gaps, but the ones hiding behind competence. The functions that are getting done well enough that nobody's asking whether they should be done differently, by someone else, at a different level.
We partner with franchise brands across hundreds of locations, and the inflection points look the same whether you're at thirty units or three hundred. Growth exposes what's been invisible. The question is whether you see it before or after it slows you down.
If you're wondering whether there's a version of this in your own organization, I'd love to have that conversation. There's a link below to grab some time.
Cheers to knowing when to fire yourself,
Kristin
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Kristin Dennewill
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