The Superpower Series, Week 2 of 8: The Technical Expert

Last week was the Relationship Whisperer, the founder the customers trust. This week is the founder the team trusts.

Usually it’s the same person.

The Technical Expert

In some companies, the founder is still the smartest technical person in the room. Maybe it’s product or engineering. Maybe it’s manufacturing, finance, design, or some deep industry knowledge nobody else has fully developed.

Whenever something gets thorny, unusual, or high stakes, everyone knows where to go.

Your office.

That habit makes sense, because going to you is usually useful. You can solve it faster. You can save the team hours, maybe days, of flailing.

Then the company grows, and the line outside your office gets longer.

The engineer who could figure it out in a day lets you figure it out in ten minutes. Your head of operations brings you a problem with three options and waits to see which one you pick. Projects stall in the gap between “almost done” and “the boss hasn’t looked at it yet.”

Nobody decided this. It just became the fastest route, and smart people take the fastest route.

But every time you become the answer, you reinforce the same lesson: the hardest problems still belong to the founder.

Do that for a few years and good people stop reaching for the hard ones. They’ve learned where those go.

Then you wonder why nobody takes initiative.

Not information. Judgment.

The obvious fix is to get what you know out of your head. Write it down. Build the wiki. Record the walkthrough. All worth doing.

None of it is the real transfer.

The real transfer isn’t information. It’s judgment.

When someone brings you a problem, you hand back a conclusion. What they need is everything that happened before you reached it. How you think about the problem. Which variables matter and which are noise. What pattern you’re seeing. What you ruled out before anyone else had even thought to look.

That’s the part that transfers. The answer doesn’t.

So the next time someone walks in, try not answering. Ask what they’d do. Ask which variables they think matter. Ask what they’ve already ruled out. If you still see it differently, think out loud, the long way, so they can watch how you got there instead of only where you landed.

It will be slower. That’s the point.

A company doesn’t scale because more people know what the founder knows. It scales when more people learn how to think.

The Part That Lights You Up

Here’s what I see over and over. The founder agrees with all of this. Then someone walks in with a genuinely interesting problem, the founder lights up, and the answer is out before the question is finished.

That light is worth looking at. I have told clients to literallly bite their tongue when they feel that urge.

For a lot of technical founders, having the answer was never just a job. It’s where they feel most competent, most useful, most themselves. Solving the hard thing is the best part of the day. Handing it off doesn’t feel inefficient. It feels like giving away the evidence that you matter.

So when you catch yourself answering first, ask what you’re actually protecting. It’s rarely the quality of the work. It’s usually more about why you’re needed.

The expertise is real. It isn’t going anywhere. The question is whether it lives in one office or in the whole company.

Once you see what the answering was doing for you, letting someone else work the problem gets a lot lighter.

A Question for This Week

What’s the last hard problem someone brought you that they could have worked through themselves?

What would it have cost to let them? And what would it have cost you?

There are six other roles founders often end up having to let go of. To see them all, check out my post on Substack.

Next week: The Chief Decider. “What do you think?” is the most-asked question in your company, and it’s almost always being asked of you.

— Jeff

The Superpower Series, Week One

There is a moment in the life of a growing company when the thing that made it successful starts getting in the way.

Usually, that thing is the founder.

You can sell. You can solve. You can see around corners. You can feel when something is off before anyone else has noticed. That’s how the company got to $10 or $15 million. Nobody handed it to you.

And then, almost imperceptibly, those same strengths start creating dependence. The phone rings and it’s for you. The deal stalls until you get on the call. Your best customer asks, politely, whether you’ll be in the meeting.

The founder becomes the ceiling.

Most founders I work with eventually arrive at the same insight: I need to get out of the way.

It’s a real insight. It’s also only the beginning. Seeing that you are the bottleneck is very different from building a company that no longer needs you to be one.

The work is getting what makes you special out of your head and into the people and systems that will take the company to the next level. And day to day, that work shows up as temptation. To make the call. To provide the answer. To put out the fire.

Each time you give in, someone on your team loses the chance to learn how to do it themselves.

When I start with a founder, we spend two days together before anything else. By the end, the insight is usually sharp. Not just that they’re the bottleneck, but how, and why. That part can happen fast. The implementation takes months. Sometimes years.

Over the next eight weeks I’m going to walk through seven ways it shows up. Seven roles founders play so well that nobody else ever gets to play them. You’ll probably recognize yourself in more than one.

We’ll start with the one closest to the money.

The Relationship Whisperer

Your biggest, longest-term customers trust you. Not the company. You.

You know how to read the room. When to push and when to back off. What the customer isn’t saying. The one question that unlocks the whole conversation. You spent years developing that, and you’ve probably never named what you’re doing.

To you, it just feels natural.

That’s the problem.

If the magic stays in your head, nobody else can reproduce it. And it doesn’t hand off, because you can’t see it. You can’t teach what you don’t know you’re doing.

Even founders who see this don’t tend to actually teach. They bring a salesperson to a meeting and say, “Just watch how I handle it.” The salesperson watches and sees… a pleasant conversation. Then the deal closes and nobody can say why. They saw the output. What they needed was the reading underneath it.

The work is to slow down and get curious about your own instincts.

What are you noticing?

What tells you a prospect is serious?

How do you know when a customer needs reassurance and when they need challenge?

What makes you trust someone? What makes them trust you?

When do you push, and when do you walk away?

Most founders have never asked themselves these questions, because they never had to. The answers always arrived faster than the questions could form.

The job is to turn something intuitive into something teachable.

They’ll be clumsier at first. They’ll push when you would have waited. They’ll miss the thing the customer didn’t say. And every instinct you have will tell you to step in, because you can see it going sideways and you know you could save it.

Sometimes you’ll be right. It will still cost more to save it than to let them learn.

When you feel that pull, notice what it’s actually about. Usually it isn’t the account. Somewhere along the way, being the one the customer trusts became part of who you are. The relationship belongs to the business. The trust started feeling like yours.

That’s worth seeing. Because once you see it, handing it over gets a lot lighter.

Remember, the goal isn’t for them to do it your way. It’s for them to develop the instincts necessary to do it theirs.

A Question for This Week

Which customer would be most surprised if you weren’t in the next meeting? And what, specifically, do you know about them that nobody else on your team does?

Write the answers down. It’s the beginning of the transfer.

There are six other roles founders often end up having to let go of. To see them all, check out my post on Substack.

Next week: The Technical Expert. When you’re still the smartest person in the room, and everyone knows exactly where your office is.

The company is gone.

But the machinery that built it probably isn’t.

For years, maybe decades, your system knew what to do.

Solve the problem. Push through. Win. Protect what you built. Prove you could do it. Repeat.

Then the exit happens.

For some founders, everything goes strangely quiet.

No obvious next move. No big idea. No mountain to climb.

For others, the next chapter appears almost immediately.

A book. Speaking. Coaching. Investing. Another company.

Those look like opposite problems.

I’m not sure they are.

Because after an exit, the real question may not be:

What do I want to create next?

It may be:

What is creating it?

There’s a huge difference between creating because something genuinely wants to be created…

And creating because the old identity needs another place to prove itself.

That distinction is hard to see while the nervous system is still running the old program.

Stillness can be frightening.

The absence of pressure can feel like the absence of purpose.

So another mountain can look very attractive, very quickly.

And that’s the part I’m interested in.

I don’t help founders invent a new identity after “founder.”

I let them get quiet enough to see that they were never limited to that identity in the first place.

Because when the need to prove yourself starts to fall away, something else becomes available:

Pure creation.

Not the next thing you have to do.

The thing you actually want to do.

That’s what I wrote about this week in Substack. Take a deeper look here—

https://jeffmunn.substack.com/p/the-first-thing-you-need-when-you

This post is inspired by a recent LinkedIn post by B. Lane Carrick.

That post starts—

We told him his business would sell for about $4 million. He said he would not take less than $12 million.

His post was talking about the ethics of advisors.

Mine is something different.

The founder always has a price in mind, and that price has nothing to do with market value.

That price is the answer to “Was it worth it?”

Three decades of work. A hundred employees.

And the offer price feels like a gut punch.

The vacations not taken. The birthdays and anniversaries missed. The canceled date nights.

The undying belief that all those sacrifices would, in the end, pay off.

You thought you were creating freedom when actually, year after year, you were just building a bigger cage.

A cage that was intended to make you feel better, but somehow never did. Because as you are now finding out, your asking price has nothing to do with market value. And market value may be way less than what you “need” it to be.

What Else Does it Mean?

My Substack this week goes into at least four things that an offer price can mean to a founder.

None of them have anything to do with market value.

When you see that, you can actually work on the things that do increase market value. And, ironically, those very things build the freedom you were always looking for.

Take a look here—

https://jeffmunn.substack.com/p/what-your-asking-price-really-means