Stop Being the Smartest Person in the Room. Start Building the Room.

I saw a post the other day that stopped my scroll: "Leadership isn't mastery. It's multiplication."

And I haven't been able to stop thinking about it because it's exactly what I see killing businesses every single day.

You know the type. The founder who's still in every meeting. The CEO who approves every email. The partner who can't help but rewrite everyone's work. They wear their indispensability like a badge of honor, completely unaware they're suffocating their own growth.

Here's the thing nobody wants to hear: if your business can't run without you, you don't have a business. You have an expensive hobby with a staff.

Control Is Not a Strategy

Most firms get stuck at the same ceiling, and it's not because they lack talent or opportunity. It's because the person at the top can't get out of their own way. Every decision funnels through them. Every client fire needs their extinguisher. Every approval requires their signature.

They call it "maintaining quality." I call it what it is, control wearing a leadership costume.

And here's what that control actually costs you: your best people leave, your capacity flatlines, and you stay trapped on the hamster wheel wondering why nothing scales.

You can't do everything yourself and expect to grow. Physics doesn't work that way. Business doesn't either.

The Multiplication Effect

Real leadership is about creating more leaders, not more dependents. It's about finding people who are better than you at specific things and then, here's the hard part, actually letting them lead.

When roles are clear and ownership is real, something almost magical happens. People rise. And when they rise, your capacity doesn't just add up. It compounds.

One great leader creates two more. Those two create four. Suddenly you're not scaling by addition anymore. You're scaling by multiplication. And that's when businesses stop being bottlenecked by their founders and start becoming something bigger than any one person.

Your Firm Doesn't Need More of You

Let me be blunt: Your business doesn't need more effort from you. It needs more leaders around you.

It needs you to stop being the person who knows everything and start being the person who builds people who know everything. To stop jumping into every fire and start trusting your team to bring the extinguisher. To stop micromanaging the work and start managing the outcome.

Great leaders don't try to be the best at everything. They build teams where someone is the best at each thing.

The Graduate, Don't Renew Philosophy

At one of our companies, IGTMS, we have a tagline: "Our clients don't renew, they graduate." The whole point is to make ourselves obsolete by building their capacity to succeed without us.

The same principle applies to your team. Your job isn't to create people who need you. It's to create people who outgrow you. Who take things off your plate not because you delegated tasks, but because they own outcomes.

If your team can't make decisions without you, you haven't built leaders. You've built permission-seekers. And permission-seekers don't scale.

The Real Question

So here's what you need to ask yourself: Are you building a business that depends on you being the smartest person in the room? Or are you building a business where the room is full of people smarter than you at the things that matter?

Because one of those creates a job you can never leave. The other creates a business that grows beyond you.

Stop trying to master everything. Start multiplying leaders.

That's how you scale.