10 Lessons From Overcoming Major Startup Setbacks
Startup founders often hold on too tightly to control, but the most resilient companies are built by leaders who know when to let go. This article draws on insights from seasoned entrepreneurs and business experts who turned their biggest setbacks into lessons on delegation and trust. The ten strategies that follow reveal how distributing responsibility can transform a fragile venture into a sustainable operation.
Codify Workflows, Then Train or Hire
Delegation can become challenging for an entrepreneur. As a frontfoot, you've built your business on your own, and handing any amount of that business to another person can be difficult. So what I did was modify my strategy based on these four primary concerns. These made me decide what I should do and what not.
These were as follows:
Have I recruited someone I trust o perform the task as I desire?
Are these documented processes really worth an off-site link?
Is there any way to ensure accountability?
Can I completely handover this task to someone else?
After analysing all of these, I focused on creating well-structured, time-tested processes and procedures. This process provides a baseline for me and employees to communicate. Prepare to-dos in writing, provide references and manage your time this way.
But for specialised tasks, training is required, so before delegating them, I opted for these two choices.
Training an employee to do it
Hiring someone with similar expertise.
It all worked withproper accountability, trust and the right approach.
Set the Playbook, Step Back
One thing that helped me was treating delegation like coaching in football--give your team a clear game plan, then let them call some of their own plays. Early on, I'd have new team members walk through a deal alongside me, learning the ropes, but pretty quickly I'd step back and let them make decisions, with the understanding that it's okay to fumble as long as we learn from it. When people know you've got their back and trust them to contribute, they rise to the occasion and ownership just follows naturally.
Let the Crew Self‑Assign
Don't be afraid to leave delegation up to your team if possible. Instead of assigning everyone individual tasks all on your own, what you can try is meeting with your team, outlining what tasks need to be done, and then allowing them to choose who should do what. This gives them more control and thus more ownership over what they do, and it allows you to learn who prefers which kinds of tasks, which is helpful to know for future delegating.
Begin with Low‑Risk Handovers
Start with small, low-stakes tasks first--I learned this the hard way in my renovation projects. When I began delegating property walkthroughs to a newer team member, I joined them on the first two, shared what I looked for, then sent them solo on the third with a simple debrief afterward. That gradual release built their confidence and my trust simultaneously, and now they spot issues I might have missed because they've truly made the role their own.
Lead with Outcomes, Grant Authority
One piece of advice I give every founder who is drowning in work is to stop looking for clones of themselves and start looking for outcomes. The biggest mistake I made early on at Co-Wear LLC was delegating the how instead of the why. When you tell someone exactly how to do a task, you are just managing a pair of hands. When you tell them the result you need and why it matters to the business, you are actually leading a person.
To build trust, you have to accept that your team will do things differently than you. They might even fail the first few times. Empowering them means giving them a safe space to make those mistakes without you jumping in to grab the wheel the second things look messy. I started by giving my team full authority over small budgets and customer service decisions. I told them they did not need to ask me for permission as long as the solution served our core purpose.
Over time, this shifted the culture from waiting for my orders to taking real ownership. You build trust by being a safety net, not a bottleneck. Once your team realizes you actually trust their judgment, they will work harder to protect the business than you ever thought possible. It is the only way to scale without losing your mind.
Match Strengths, Define Standards, Allow Style
I learned to delegate by treating it like choosing the right agent for a client--you need to match the person's strengths to the task, then get out of their way. When I started letting team members handle initial buyer consultations, I'd share my approach once, observe them in action, then trust them to develop their own style that still achieved our goals. The key is being upfront about your standards while giving them permission to find their own path there--some of my best client relationships now come from approaches my team developed that I never would have thought of.
Entrust Relationships through Clear Principles
Our business is built on helping people through difficult situations, so I had to learn to delegate the relationship, not just the paperwork. I built trust by first ensuring my team deeply understood our core principles of honesty and clarity. Now, I can confidently let them handle a sensitive case from start to finish, knowing they're empowered not just to follow a process, but to provide a genuine, ethical solution for that family.
Share the Struggle, Invite Real Input
From our early renovation days, I learned that empowering your team starts with sharing the journey--not just the tasks. When I delegate, I openly discuss the challenges we're facing and ask for their input, like when we were knee-deep in a rehab project and I handed off contractor management to a team member while admitting my own frustrations. That honesty created mutual ownership, and they ended up improving our entire scheduling system because they felt invested in solving the problem together.
Rotate Duty, Fortify the Runbook
Most founders delegate tasks, but I suggest delegating systems.
I kept hovering over releases and peak-day monitoring because handing it to one person felt risky. So instead I decided to delegate it to the whole team via rotation. Each week a different "release captain" shipped the mobile app. On peak days, we rotated who watched dashboards and coordinated responses.
Ownership shifted because everyone got a turn behind the wheel. My peace of mind came from documentation such as a runbook, a pre-release checklist, a rollback plan, and one clear escalation rule. I stayed available but didn't take over. Within weeks, two engineers had independently improved the deployment scripts.
Another thing that unlocked trust was that I started presenting my work to the team, not just listening to their reports. Showing what I was struggling with (roadmap tradeoffs, stakeholder conversations, tech debt decisions) helped everyone understand the company's trajectory.
A rotation will surface mistakes, and the initial instinct would be to take the responsibility back, but it's the wrong path. Failure here is a process problem, so run a short postmortem:
What outcome were we optimizing for?
What was unclear?
What signal should have triggered escalation sooner?
Then update the runbook, automate some checks, and put one improvement into the next sprint. Because everyone cycles through, the learning spreads and the process improves without the manager. As a result, you get shared context, shared ownership, and a founder who is no longer the single point of failure.
Transfer Judgment, Not Just Steps
As someone who transitioned from pizza delivery to real estate entrepreneurship, I've learned that effective delegation starts with a 'show, don't tell' approach. When I first needed to hand off client relationships, I invited team members to shadow me through initial consultations, openly discussing my reasoning afterward, then gradually reversed roles until they led completely. This created a natural knowledge transfer where they absorbed not just the process but the problem-solving mindset behind it. True delegation isn't about assigning tasks--it's about transferring your decision-making framework so your team can confidently create solutions that align with your vision but might be even better than what you'd come up with yourself.
